With CTV Midterm Spending Set to Top $2.9 Billion, Transparency Becomes Non-Negotiable

Tony Robbins, famed businessman and motivational speaker, recently declared the information economy dead. “People are drowning in information,” he said on The School of Hard Knocks TikTok channel. “They’re starving for wisdom.” In a recent conversation with C&E, Chauncey Southworth, CEO of Cross Screen Media, underscored that this is a reality political marketers know all too well.

But it’s not that political and public affairs agencies are drowning in information, he concluded. It’s that they’re not getting the right information at the right time — a particularly crucial point for agencies guiding campaigns’ CTV-heavy media budgets in what’s sure to be a highly competitive midterm cycle.

Under Southworth’s leadership, Cross Screen Media has been building out the industry’s most comprehensive in-platform reporting suite designed to give clients the clearest picture possible of their media spend. 

The interface shows advertisers how their ads are breaking through with voters who can tip an election, tracking delivery across CTV apps, showing which audiences were reached where and, just as important, which audiences were missed. It’s all designed to ensure clients can make the most effective strategic decisions at the speed in which political campaigns operate.

C&E: Was this reporting suite designed to set a new industry standard?

Chauncey Southworth: Absolutely. CTV reporting generally comes in two varieties: high-level and nondescript or uncleaned and possibly inaccurate. For example, inventory reports can show an ad running on Fox, or on Fox.TV, or simply show an ID number for the placement. When reporting is so unstandardized it becomes impossible for advertisers to use.

And on top of that, there’s no good way to tie CTV advertising back to linear TV so campaigns are stuck looking at different reports. Campaigns are making an $11-plus billion dollar investment in video advertising in the 2026 cycle. They need reporting that is clear, actionable, and holistic that can show which voters have been reached across all advertising — not piecemeal reporting that obscures true performance.

C&E: So you’re saying there’s not enough transparency in the market as it stands. 

Southworth: There’s very little transparency. The reason why a lot of people don’t report this level of detail is because they buy crappy inventory and they don’t want to show you. DSP reporting is messy, and that’s a problem, but agencies use that as an excuse to not report back simple things like app delivery and dayparting. These are things that are common on the linear side. 

It’s time that we have one suite that shows where your CTV ads are running, which voters they are reaching, and how that relates to your linear TV advertising. Our suite breaks down the silos so there’s not streaming over here and linear over here — that just doesn’t match the voter’s viewing experience. We wanted our clients placing CTV with us to see their holistic performance with TV. That level of reporting just wasn’t available in the current political market. 

C&E: Will this reduce ad fraud for your clients?

Southworth: Fraud rates in CTV are as high as 19 percent. That is a byproduct of the fragmented marketplace that we are trying to solve. People are buying on 40-to-50 supply side partners. Many of them are just reselling inventory. And then you’re told that you can’t report reach because that’s too hard. You’re told that you can’t actually get the full site list of where you’re running because the names don’t make sense or it’s just not available. 

But all of these are solvable problems. You should expect to have a granular level of reporting where you can be confident that your ads were served to human beings in your audience, that they were high quality, that they actually moved the needle, and were complementary to what you are buying on linear. The bottom line: You should expect to know where your ads are running.

C&E: What’s the strategic value here? 

Southworth: One is just limiting waste. Campaigns have limited budgets. Fundraising is hard. You have a very short amount of time to move the needle. You deserve to know your ads are going to real people in your audience that will impact elections. That is priority No. 1. 

The second thing is reaching voters. We are in an extremely fragmented media market that just didn’t exist even a few years ago. This fragmentation means people are switching between apps while watching TV — maybe they’re jumping back and forth between linear and CTV.

You need to be able to find your audience where they are consuming media and not just break out the budgets the way you’ve done it for the last 10 or 20 years, which is, unfortunately, often how some of these campaigns work. This allows you to actually look at the reach and frequency, the performance of your streaming ads, of your TV ads, and move budget in real time so that you can actually have a leg up on your competition.

Let’s put the egos aside, break down the silos, and actually optimize our budgets based on how folks are consuming media.

C&E: What about addressing the ad saturation issue that often comes up at the end of a cycle? 

Southworth: This is a problem for both streaming and linear TV. Our in-depth reporting is designed to show you the combined, deduplicated reach and frequency of your message across broadcast, cable, streaming, mobile and desktop. That allows you to determine which ads have hit that saturation level so that you can switch out creative or respond to breaking news in real time.

C&E: Will this help buyers determine which ads are successful?

Southworth: The question with any campaign ad is did you actually move the needle? How do you go about answering that? There’s the bare minimum of are your ads fraudulent?  Are your ads going to apps that nobody watches or are your ads going to TVs when the TV is off? Then you have harder questions like did you serve ads that actually hit your target voters? Did those ads actually impact your polling, and change your voters’ opinions? Then what is your strategy to reach the people that either got a lower frequency or weren’t reached at all? Once you get past that, which our reporting does, you can really get into the strategies to move the needle and ultimately win elections. Even if your candidate isn’t as well funded as your opponent, you can actually deliver more impressions to the audience because of these optimizations and efficiencies.

C&E: Some companies that also work in the commercial space say their platforms can match these capabilities — how do you respond to that? 

Southworth: Many platforms built for the general market are built for bigger teams. They’re built for teams that have a lot of time to prepare for ad campaigns and get them up and optimize over long periods of time. Politics doesn’t have that luxury. We are built for political and public affairs campaigns, and that’s what we’ll continue to build for.

C&E: What comes next after this multimillion-dollar investment? 

Southworth: It’s taken years to get to this point but we’re not done building on top of this.