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Connected TV (CTV) advertising is the practice of buying and serving video ads on televisions connected to the internet, including smart TVs, streaming devices, and gaming consoles that run streaming apps. For agency and brand media teams, CTV pairs the reach of television with the targeting and measurement of digital, and it keeps growing as viewers trade cable for streaming.
Connected TV’s reach and influence are clear enough. Its terminology, on the other hand? That’s another matter. Marketers use “CTV,” “OTT,” and “streaming” as if they were interchangeable, and they aren’t—each describes a different part of how a video ad reaches a viewer. This guide walks through the fundamentals: what connected TV is, how it differs from OTT and linear TV, how a CTV ad actually reaches the screen, how inventory and targeting work, and how you measure and protect what you’re buying.
Connected TV advertising is video advertising delivered to a television that is connected to the internet. Instead of running on a fixed broadcast schedule, the ads are served through streaming apps and internet-connected devices, alongside on-demand and live content. The ads themselves look a lot like traditional TV commercials: full-screen video that typically plays before, during, or after what someone is streaming.
The defining feature is the delivery method. A traditional TV ad reaches a viewer because a broadcaster transmits it at a set time over cable, satellite, or antenna. A CTV ad reaches a viewer because content is streamed to an internet-connected television, and an ad is served into that stream.
A connected TV is any television made capable of streaming internet content. There are three common ways a television falls under the “CTV” label:
What unites all three is the outcome: a television screen displaying internet-delivered video. The path to that screen varies, but the result is the same category of inventory.
Over-the-top (OTT) describes video content delivered over the internet, rather than via traditional cable, satellite, or broadcast. It is a delivery method, and it is device-agnostic: OTT content can play on a television, a laptop, a tablet, or a phone.
Though sometimes used interchangeably, there is a difference between OTT and CTV. OTT describes how the content is delivered, over the internet, bypassing legacy distribution. CTV describes the type of screen it plays on, a television specifically. An OTT stream watched on a smart TV is CTV. The same OTT stream watched on a phone is still OTT, but it is not CTV, because the screen isn’t a television.
The cleanest way to hold the relationship in your head is that CTV is a subset of OTT. Think of squares and rectangles. Every square is a rectangle, but not every rectangle is a square. In the same way, every CTV impression is an OTT impression (it’s internet-delivered video) but not every OTT impression is CTV, because OTT also includes video served to phones, tablets, and computers.
“Streaming” is the everyday word for watching internet-delivered video either on demand or live. Streaming is what the viewer is doing. OTT is the delivery method that makes it possible. CTV is streaming that happens to be on a television. The three overlap heavily, which is why they get used interchangeably—but they aren’t synonyms, and scoping a campaign correctly depends on knowing which one you mean.
Linear TV is television delivered on a fixed schedule through cable, satellite, or over-the-air broadcast. You watch what’s airing when it airs, the same feed goes out to everyone in a market at once, and ads are inserted into that broadcast stream.
The dividing line between CTV and linear is the delivery method rather than the screen. Linear is schedule-delivered: A programmer decides what airs and when. CTV is internet-delivered: Content is streamed to an individual device on demand or as a live stream, and ads are served into that individual stream. Both can appear on the same television set. What separates them is whether the content arrives on a broadcaster’s schedule or over an internet connection. That difference is also why CTV campaigns can be targeted, optimized, and measured in ways linear generally can’t match.
| Term | Delivery Method | Device | Example Placement |
| CTV | Internet-delivered | Internet-connected television | A video ad in a streaming app on a smart TV |
| OTT | Internet-delivered | Any internet-connected device (TV, phone, tablet, computer) | A video ad in a streaming app on a phone, tablet, or TV |
| Linear | Schedule-delivered (cable, satellite, broadcast) | Traditional television | A commercial in a scheduled broadcast break |
| Streaming | Internet-delivered | Any internet-connected device | On-demand or live video watched over the internet |
A CTV ad travels from a content stream to a viewer’s screen in a handful of steps, most of them happening in real time as the person watches:
Those three placement positions are the basic slots a CTV ad can occupy. Pre-roll runs before the content begins, mid-roll runs during the content at a break in the stream, and post-roll runs after the content ends. Pause ads are a newer type of ad that can be placed when viewers pause whatever content they are streaming.
CTV ads run inside the streaming environments a viewer opens on a connected television. Typically that includes:
Together, these are the places CTV inventory lives. How much of it any given platform can reach—and the quality of that inventory—is a separate question, and one worth weighing when you evaluate how to choose a CTV advertising platform.
CTV inventory is accessed two broad ways: programmatically, through automated buying, or through direct deals with a publisher. Programmatic CTV ads are bought and served automatically, rather than through insertion orders negotiated deal by deal. Most programmatic buying falls into three models, which trade scale for control differently:
| Buying Model | What It Is | Best Suited For | Tradeoffs |
| Open Exchange | Inventory open to any advertiser across a wide pool of publishers and apps | Scale and cost efficiency | Less control over exactly where ads run |
| Private Marketplace (PMP) | Invitation-only inventory that select publishers offer | Curated, premium environments and tighter quality control | Can be more expensive than the open exchange |
| Programmatic Guaranteed | Reserved inventory at a set price and volume, bought programmatically | Guaranteed delivery in specific premium content | Less flexibility than auction buying, with commitment up front |
Most teams end up using a mix, leaning on the open exchange for reach and PMPs or programmatic guaranteed when a client needs premium or brand-safe placements. Because private marketplaces also give you control over which publishers you run with, they double as a quality lever as well as an access one.
That said, programmatic isn’t the only route. Agencies can also buy CTV ads directly from a publisher, negotiating terms with the streaming service or network and running the campaign through an insertion order, much the way traditional TV has always been bought. Direct deals offer maximum control and can open access to premium or exclusive inventory, though they take more manual setup and allow less in-flight flexibility than programmatic.
CTV targeting is typically built around a household rather than one individual user. Since a connected TV is usually a shared screen, campaigns tend to target and measure at the household level, using the devices that share a network as the unit.
Frequency capping is where household logic is especially important. Because several people may watch the same screen, caps set at the household level help keep a campaign from overexposing that household to the same spot, something device-only caps tend to miss.
Advertisers reach the right households a few different ways. Contextual targeting places ads based on what viewers are watching on-screen, including content type, content category (ex. news, sports, or entertainment), app, and broadcast type. First-party data lets advertisers activate their own audiences. And cross-device connections extend a CTV impression into follow-up messaging on phones, tablets, and desktops, which is what turns CTV from a standalone awareness play into part of a coordinated strategy.
AI has made contextual targeting far more precise on CTV. Rather than matching ads to broad category labels, AI-powered targeting can read what’s actually happening in the content and place ads against the right moments—for instance, running a lighthearted spot during an ad break in a comedy…rather than in the middle of a crime drama.
Frame-by-frame analysis uses computer vision to identify scenes, objects, and themes in the video itself. Metadata and language analysis reads captions, transcripts, and program information to infer subject and tone. Frame analysis catches visual cues that text alone would miss, while language analysis is lighter to run and often enough for category-level decisions. Used together, they help advertisers find relevant, brand-safe placements even where individual identity signals are limited.
CTV measurement focuses on two different things. Attribution connects an ad exposure to a later action, such as a site visit or a purchase, usually across devices in the same household. Incrementality goes a step further and asks whether the ad caused the outcome at all, typically by holding out a comparable group and measuring the difference.
Both depend on good data. Log-level data—impression-by-impression records rather than aggregated summaries—is what lets you connect a CTV exposure to a conversion that happens later on another screen. This is also why household and IP-based matching matters: Without it, a view on the living-room TV and a purchase on a laptop can look unrelated.
CTV budgets need protection from two things in particular: invalid traffic, meaning bots posing as viewers, and made-for-advertising (MFA) apps, which are low-quality apps built mainly to collect ad revenue rather than serve real audiences. Both quietly drain spend without delivering results.
Fraud protection for connected TV works in layers. Pre-bid filtering blocks known bad or low-quality inventory before a bid is ever placed. Post-bid verification then checks delivered impressions after the fact, flagging anything suspicious for exclusion in the future. Allowlists and blocklists give you standing control over where ads can and can’t run, and private marketplaces add another layer by limiting inventory to vetted publishers.
CTV creative is almost always video (save pause ads, a newer offering), and a few constraints shape it. Spots typically run :15, :30, or :60 seconds, and because the TV environment isn’t built for clicks, direct response usually relies on QR codes or a second-screen prompt rather than a clickable button. Front-loading the message helps, since these are full-screen formats where the first few seconds carry the most weight. It’s also worth confirming that creative meets each publisher’s format and quality requirements before launch, since specs vary across the ecosystem.
A shared vocabulary makes CTV reporting easier to compare across campaigns and platforms. These are some of the common measurement metrics used for CTV advertising:
CTV is one channel and works best as part of a holistic, omnichannel strategy. Viewers move across screens and formats throughout the day, and CTV is most effective as one coordinated component alongside search, social, display, and direct media, rather than as an isolated buy. That coordination is where the harder questions begin: which inventory to access, how to target, how to measure, and how CTV performance fits with everything else you’re running.
Those questions get easier to answer when CTV lives inside a single operating system rather than a separate tool. With Basis, for example, teams plan, activate, measure, and reconcile CTV alongside programmatic, search, social, and direct media in one place—every channel and every workflow connected, so growing CTV investment doesn’t mean adding another tool or another late night of manual reporting.
What is the difference between CTV and OTT advertising?
OTT describes how video is delivered: over the internet rather than through cable, broadcast, or satellite. CTV describes the device: a television connected to the internet. All CTV advertising is OTT, but OTT also includes ads on phones, tablets, and desktops, so not all OTT is CTV.
Is Netflix CTV or OTT? Is YouTube CTV or OTT?
Both are OTT services, meaning internet-delivered video content. Whether a given impression counts as CTV depends on the device. Watched through a streaming app on an internet-connected television, an OTT service is being accessed via a CTV device. Watched on a phone, the same service is still OTT but not CTV. The delivery is OTT; the screen decides whether “CTV” applies.
Is connected TV advertising the same as programmatic advertising?
No, though the two overlap. Programmatic is an automated way of buying ads, and most CTV inventory is bought programmatically through a DSP. But CTV can also be purchased through direct deals with publishers, so programmatic is a common method for CTV rather than a definition of it.
What’s the difference between a CTV platform and a DSP?
A DSP (demand-side platform) is buy-side software: the tool advertisers use to buy ad inventory programmatically. A CTV platform is the broader environment and tooling for operating in the channel, which may include buying but also spans the surrounding workflow. For how to weigh the two, see the guide to evaluating a CTV advertising platform.
How is CTV advertising different from linear TV advertising?
Linear TV airs on a fixed schedule and is bought against broad audience estimates. CTV is streamed on demand, addressable at the household level, and measurable impression by impression. That means CTV campaigns can be targeted, optimized, and measured in ways linear generally can’t match.
How is CTV advertising measured?
CTV is measured with completion and delivery metrics like VCR, CPCV, reach, and frequency, then connected to outcomes through attribution and incrementality. Because viewers often convert on a different device than the one they watched on, household-level and log-level data are what tie a CTV exposure to a later action.
Is CTV advertising fraud a real risk?
Yes. Like other digital channels, CTV carries fraud risk, including bots and spoofed apps that misrepresent inventory. It’s a channel characteristic worth understanding rather than a reason to avoid CTV. For how platforms should guard against it and what to look for, see the guide to choosing a CTV advertising platform.
What does connected TV advertising with Basis look like?
With Basis, CTV is one channel inside a single omnichannel advertising platform—an operating system for advertising that connects every channel and workflow. Teams plan, activate, measure, and reconcile CTV alongside programmatic, search, social, and direct media in one place. That connected setup lets agencies grow CTV investment without adding tools or piling on manual reporting.