5 Questions to ask your CTV vendor

Jul 22, 2026 ●7 min read

The fastest way to judge a CTV vendor has nothing to do with the pitch deck. It's how long it takes them to answer a direct question. A vendor who knows their own supply chain answers in seconds. A vendor who needs to get back to you or steers the conversation toward a different slide is usually telling you something too, just not the thing you asked.

CTV spend in India has grown faster than the infrastructure needed to hold vendors accountable for it. Budgets have moved from linear TV and digital video into connected TV at a pace most procurement teams have not had time to build proper diligence around. That gap gets filled by trust advertisers taking vendor decks at face value because there is not yet a standard set of questions everyone knows to ask, the way there is for search or programmatic display.

That trust gets exploited quietly, and rarely through outright fraud. It is usually through vagueness: numbers that are technically true but framed in a way that hides the part that actually matters. A vendor can report impressive reach, strong completion rates, and healthy attribution numbers, all while sitting on a supply chain that would look very different if you asked to see the underlying data. So instead of another list of red flags, here are the five questions worth asking on every vendor call, why each one matters, and what a good answer should actually sound like.

1. What percentage of my spend is actually working media?

When you hand a vendor a budget, that money does not go straight to buying impressions. A portion of it gets absorbed by platform fees, ad serving costs, data licensing, and agency margins before a single ad plays. What is actually left over, the part that buys inventory, is called working media, and it is the only number that reflects what your campaign is genuinely spending on reach.

This matters because the gap between gross spend and working media can be substantial, and it's rarely disclosed unless asked for directly. A vendor with nothing to hide will give you this percentage without hesitation, because they have already calculated it internally. Somewhere in the 60-70% range is common depending on the technology stack involved, though it can vary based on how many platforms are stacked between your budget and the final impression. Anything meaningfully lower than that deserves a follow-up question about exactly where the rest of the money is going, and whether each fee attached to it is actually earning its place.

2. Can I see log-level impression data?

Dashboards are built to tell a story. They roll thousands or millions of individual impressions into a handful of charts and summary metrics, almost all of which are designed to trend in a reassuring direction. That is not necessarily dishonest, but it is a curated version of the truth.

A log file does not have that luxury. It lists every single impression individually, which app it ran in, what time of day it served, what device it reached, and what it cost. There is nowhere for a weak campaign to hide inside a log file the way it can inside a rounded-up summary chart. If a vendor can hand over that raw data without pushback, it is usually a sign they are confident in what it shows. If they can only offer a polished report, it's worth asking directly why the underlying data is not available. Sometimes that is a genuine platform limitation tied to how the ad server was built. Sometimes it is because the summary is doing a lot of quiet work that the raw logs would not support.

3. What percentage of my impressions ran on true CTV/OTT inventory?

Streaming inventory has become one of the most elastic terms in Indian digital advertising right now, and that elasticity benefits the seller far more than the buyer. It can mean a premium show running on a Samsung Smart TV in someone's living room, or it can mean a mobile browser playing a video ad that technically qualifies as OTT because the same publisher also happens to run a streaming app. Both of those impressions can get billed at CTV rates, even though the experience, the attention level, and the actual value to the advertiser are nowhere close to the same.

This distinction matters more in India specifically because the connected TV base is still growing and the definition of streaming has not been standardized the way it has in more mature markets. Ask specifically what share of your impressions ran on actual connected TV devices, as opposed to mobile, tablet, or desktop screens counted under the same streaming umbrella. And do not settle for a verbal percentage ask to see the device-level breakdown, because a number without the underlying split is just another version of the same vague reassurance.

4. Are you buying direct or through resellers?

Every intermediary that sits between an advertiser's budget and the publisher's inventory supply-side platforms, resellers, sub-resellers takes a cut before the impression ever reaches its destination. None of that is inherently a problem. Some intermediaries add real value: better targeting technology, verification tools, access to inventory that would not otherwise be available. Others exist purely as arbitrage, adding a markup without adding anything the advertiser can point to.

The issue is not the existence of resellers, it is the lack of visibility into how many of them are involved and what each one is charging for. A vendor who genuinely controls their supply chain should be able to map the path your budget takes, from your account to the final publisher, in a few sentences. A vendor who cannot, or who gets noticeably vague when asked, likely does not have full visibility into their own inventory sourcing either, which means neither do you.

5. What is your attribution methodology: 30, 60, or 90 days?

When a vendor reports that a campaign drove a sale, that claim rests entirely on the attribution window they used to measure it, and that window quietly shapes how impressive the results look. A 30-day window is a relatively tight claim: if someone saw an ad and purchased a month later, there is a reasonable case the ad played some role. A 90-day window is a much looser one. A lot happens in a consumer's decision-making over three months that has nothing to do with an ad they scrolled past once.

Longer windows produce bigger, more impressive-looking conversion numbers almost by mathematical default, simply because more purchases fall inside a wider net. That is precisely why some vendors default to longer windows without being asked, and why the question needs to be asked directly rather than assumed. Ask not just what the window is, but why that specific window was chosen for your category and purchase cycle. A genuinely considered methodology should have a real answer to that.

None of these five questions are hard to answer for a vendor who actually controls their supply chain and stands behind their numbers. That is really the test running underneath all of them, not whether the answer sounds good, but whether it comes easily, with data attached rather than just reassurance. Vagueness on a straightforward, specific question is rarely an accident. It is usually the answer, just not the one that got said out loud.

Category:Expert Tips

Tags:

#BrandGrowth #Connected TV #CTV Scale

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