Predictive CTV is Transforming CTV Advertising: Here’s How

All eyes are on CTV these days—and we don’t just mean figuratively. The average American pays for four streaming services and spends 2 hours and 15 minutes a day on CTV. Moreover, brands are closely watching the shift in viewing habits to this channel and are investing accordingly, with CTV ad spend projected to surpass $33 billion this year alone.   

While the opportunity within CTV is expansive, fragmentation is a challenge that cannot be ignored. Multiple buying paths, disparate channels, and a plethora of devices on which to reach audiences contribute to this challenge, which is only further complicated by a lack of transparency and data standardization, as well as an industry focus on top-of-funnel metrics. Despite all this, CTV can still deliver exceptional results with the right technologies and solutions behind it.  

Cadent is on a mission to eliminate fragmentation across linear and digital channels, enabling brands to reach their audiences wherever they’re most engaged and measure performance holistically to truly understand the full impact of their campaigns. Cadent developed Predictive CTV to achieve exactly that, igniting the intersection of video and performance to drive measurable business outcomes.  

Predictive CTV: How it works

Predictive CTV accesses 99% of non-walled garden inventory through 100% direct publisher connections, enabling streamlined activation and frequency controls for precise reach at scale. On every impression opportunity, Predictive Intelligence analyzes all available data, including over 200 first-party device data points, 1,000 consumer data attributes, and natural language processing (NLP) derived signals to assign a predictive score. The predictive score is used to determine whether or not to serve an ad based on a campaign’s KPI. This is how Cadent moves CTV beyond the view to optimize towards real-world outcomes, both online and offline. 

A critical component to placing a bid on an impression that cannot be overlooked is an impression’s metadata. These signals provide brands with information about impressions, such as genre, channel, and rating. However, a lack of industry regulation regarding what data publishers must share and how has resulted in inconsistent and messy signals. When non-standardized data is passed back, Cadent normalizes the signals, creating consistency across fragmented sources. For example, one CTV app may list inventory sourced from a network called Generic TV as “GTV network,” where another may list it as “GTV-ntwk.” Cadent normalizes these to “Generic TV Network.” 

By standardizing this data, Cadent delivers smarter targeting that diversifies delivery and maximizes every media dollar. This data is used in decisioning within predictive models on CPA campaigns. It also enhances predictive audiences while powering inventory curation and transparent reporting.  

Key advantages: Premium access, connections, and outcomes

With Cadent and Predictive CTV, brands can tap into the open web from a single, centralized source, ensuring data standardization and consistency. This enables transparent buying in an ecosystem with multiple buying paths, bringing clarity to often opaque practices and packages. 

By augmenting audience signals with consumer data attributes and NLPs and assigning predictive scores to audiences, impressions, and KPI performance, brands can shift away from generic demographic targeting and toward outcomes-based targeting. Predictive scoring enables this shift by allowing brands to buy media based on the likelihood of driving a desired result among a desired audience, thereby enabling outcome-based measurement and sophisticated reporting. 

Measurable impact has not traditionally been associated with CTV, a channel viewed primarily as an awareness play. However, as viewing habits shift and interactive formats become more popular, CTV is proving to be an engagement driver—even at the bottom of the funnel. This transformation makes outcomes-based measurement essential for understanding CTV’s performance and its impact on the broader media mix. 

With Predictive CTV, brands can deliver full-funnel engagement with formats like QR codes and pause ads to drive brand lift, visitation, and sales, whether in-store or online. And while CTV is impactful as a standalone channel, it is a force multiplier when incorporated into an omnichannel strategy, making measurement indispensable for uncovering the full picture of campaign effectiveness. To achieve this, advertisers need tools that connect the dots across fragmented channels and devices.   

Measuring what matters, everywhere 

CTV does not have to sit in a silo. Full-funnel, cross-channel measurement is possible with Predictive CTV and the Cadent Viewer Graph, which enables brands to unify disparate data signals—both offline and online—and connect them to an individual or household in a process called identity resolution. With the Cadent Viewer Graph, advertisers can see how CTV exposure leads to real-world and online actions. Moreover, with data normalization, brands gain transparent reporting that reveals channel, network, and genre performance, alongside outcomes-based campaign metrics. These insights enable advertisers to optimize campaigns in real-time, maximize media budgets, and, most importantly, demonstrate measurable business impact.

The future of CTV is predictive and connected 

Don’t let fragmentation limit CTV’s full potential. With Cadent and Predictive CTV, brands can connect CTV to the entirety of their media strategy to reach consumers at every stage of their journey across channels and screens—driving efficiency, stronger outcomes, and measurable business growth. Discover how Cadent can help you ignite the intersection of video and performance with Predictive CTV today.