I’ve read a lot of posts lately about how crowded the CTV marketplace has become.

‍

They’re right.

‍

CTV is being sold today by TV stations, radio groups, cable companies, digital agencies, direct-mail companies and countless others.

For many of them, CTV is one product among many.

‍

There’s nothing wrong with that model. But I do think there’s an important distinction between selling CTV and specializing in CTV.

‍

At many large organizations, the salesperson closes the deal and then hands the campaign off to a centralized ad operations team often in another city, managing campaigns across multiple markets and multiple campaigns. The person managing your campaign likely is not the person you spoke with. I know this personally I was a General Sales Manager / Director of Sales at a large market TV station for 17 years. Believe it or not, my internal CTV team would not even give me basic information. One of the reasons I left the business.

‍

A simple ZIP code change can take 24 to 72 hours to work its way through the system. And the person you’re working with may not know what the underlying media actually costs.

‍

That’s a very different model from mine.

For me, CTV isn’t part of a broader product portfolio.

‍

CTV is what I do. The only thing I do.

‍

The platforms. The publishers. The data. The targeting. The inventory. The costs. The optimization. The measurement. The reporting.

And, most importantly, understanding how all of those pieces work together from the initial strategy through the final results.

‍

There’s a meaningful difference between taking an order for CTV and actually knowing how to plan it, execute it, optimize it, troubleshoot it and explain exactly what happened.

‍

If you needed heart surgery, you wouldn’t simply look for someone in medicine. You’d look for someone who specializes in hearts.

Marketing isn’t heart surgery, but the principle of specialization still applies.

‍

Focus matters. Expertise matters. And access to the people actually managing your campaign matters.

‍

So yes, the CTV marketplace is crowded.

‍

But I think advertisers should look beyond whether someone sells CTV and ask a few more important questions:

‍

Who is actually managing my campaign once the contract is signed?

‍

How well do they understand what they’re buying?

‍

And when something needs to change, can they actually change it?

‍