The Interactive Advertising Bureau today released the second half of its 2026 Digital Video Ad Spend and Strategy Report, and the headline finding is an uncomfortable one for an industry that has spent years pitching connected television as the accountable alternative to linear: even inside the buying methods that IAB itself labels most trustworthy, fewer than six in ten buyers say they have high confidence in where their ads actually appeared.

The report, developed jointly by IAB, Advertiser Perceptions, and Guideline, surveyed 360 verified digital video ad spend decision-makers between February 20 and March 13, 2026. It builds on Part One of the same study, which IAB published in May 2026 and established that U.S. digital video ad spend would exceed $80 billion this year. Today's release adds the strategic layer: how buyers judge whether the money is working, and whether they trust what the systems report back to them.

David Cohen, CEO of IAB, framed the tension at the center of the report. "Sellers have heard loud and clear that video buyers want outcomes, and they have been acting on it," Cohen said. "But delivering outcomes is only half the equation - understanding more about how those outcomes were achieved is critical in today's insight-driven environment." That distinction, between an outcome and an explanation of the outcome, runs through nearly every section of the 54-page document.

A market that has already doubled once

Before addressing trust, the report restates the scale of what is at stake. U.S. digital video ad spend, which IAB defines as the combination of connected TV, social video, and online video, is projected to exceed $80 billion in 2026, having doubled in volume over just five years. Growth for 2026 is estimated at 11 percent year over year, roughly 20 percent faster than the overall advertising market, though that pace is less than half the sector's 2022 peak as the post-pandemic surge continues to normalize.

Within that total, social video has pulled ahead of CTV in raw dollars. Social video ad spend notably overtook CTV in 2025 and is likely to extend that lead through 2026, with social video projected to reach $31.9 billion against CTV's $29.3 billion, according to the report. Online video, the smallest of the three categories, is projected to reach $20.7 billion. The gap did not open because CTV stalled; both formats are still growing at double-digit rates. It opened because social video's creator economy, personalization stack, and native commerce features have made it easier for buyers, particularly smaller ones, to draw a straight line from spend to sale.

That distinction between buyer types recurs throughout the report and is one of its most consistent structural findings. Enterprise and small-to-midsize buyers, defined in the survey as spending above or below $50 million annually, do not just spend differently. They evaluate the same channels differently, adopt new technology at different speeds, and want different reassurance before trusting an automated system with their budget.

Why outcomes stopped being enough

The report's first major finding is that outcome delivery alone no longer explains why buyers stay with, or leave, a streaming partner. Targeting capabilities have overtaken content quality as the single most important criterion buyers use to decide where to spend TV and video dollars, rising to 49 percent in 2026 from 39 percent a year earlier, a ten-point jump IAB attributes to eroding identity signals and a growing share of non-human traffic complicating audience classification.

Chris Bruderle, VP of Industry Insights and Content Strategy at IAB, described the shift in blunt terms. "Buyer trust is being eroded on two fronts: by bad actors introducing invalid inventory into the marketplace and by uncertainty around the origin and placement of otherwise legitimate inventory," Bruderle said. "Buyers are wondering 'where is my ad actually running, where does the inventory come from, and how much of it is invalid traffic.'" In a separate section of the report, Bruderle added: "Outcomes make getting on a media plan easier, but knowing what audiences drove the outcomes is what keeps you on the plan."

The same reordering shows up in why buyers cut spend, not just where they add it. Cost and audience delivery each surged to 47 percent among the top reasons buyers reduce or eliminate spend with a streaming partner, up from 41 percent in 2025, joining targeting capabilities (46 percent) and business outcome delivery (45 percent) near the top of the list. For small and midsize buyers specifically, targeting was cited by 60 percent as the single dominant reason for pulling spend, a figure the report links to their disproportionate exposure to open-market buying, where identity signals are weakest.

The confidence gap inside CTV's own hierarchy

The report's most striking finding concerns transparency within connected television specifically, and it complicates a narrative the industry has repeated for years: that direct, negotiated deals are inherently safer than open auctions.

Even the most trusted CTV buying methods, namely publisher-direct insertion orders, programmatic guaranteed deals, and publisher-direct self-service, earn high confidence in inventory transparency, meaning buyers know the legitimacy, source, and placement of where their ads ran, from only 57 percent of buyers. Confidence falls further down the deal-type hierarchy: 47 percent for preferred deals, 45 percent for private marketplaces, 41 percent for commerce and retail media networks, and just 33 percent for open exchange and real-time bidding.

The report singles out private marketplaces for specific criticism, noting that PMPs, despite their private label, often route through multiple intermediaries, exposing buyers to many of the same verification gaps as the open market. Taken together, these findings reveal an industry-wide trust problem across the entire streaming programmatic ecosystem, one that spans every activation method rather than concentrating in the open exchange alone.

Among buyers who reported low confidence in open exchange purchasing, fraud or invalid traffic was cited by 56 percent as the leading driver of that mistrust, followed by an inability to verify the publisher or content source at 48 percent, and uncertainty about program or genre-level placement at 44 percent. Yet the report also documents a gap between what erodes trust and what buyers will pay to fix. Fraud detection ranked as a service worth paying additional fees for by only 31 percent of buyers, tied with viewability verification, well behind brand safety and suitability verification at 41 percent and advanced measurement and attribution at 39 percent. Buyers expect fraud protection to already be built into the cost of doing business, and will pay a premium only for tools that demonstrably improve campaign performance and accountability, not simply for the absence of fraud.

CTV's own trust problem sits inside a broader pattern trade coverage has documented through 2026. DoubleVerify's 2026 Global Insights report, published May 7, 2026, found CTV fraud schemes had risen 140 percent in the first quarter compared with the same period in 2025, alongside a tenfold increase in fraudulent CTV apps detected. A separate July 2026 survey from Jamloop, covered in PPC Land's reporting on CTV trust, found only 33 percent of marketers fully trust platform-reported performance claims, even as half reported year-over-year budget increases. IAB Europe's own technical guide to programmatic CTV, published in April 2026, had already flagged that CPM alone functions poorly as a value proxy where server-side ad insertion limits the client-side signals verification depends on.

Where CTV wins, and where it still struggles to close the loop

Large spenders, those with more than $50 million in annual ad budgets, now rate CTV as competitive with social video across most of the consumer journey, a reversal from smaller buyers who continue to favor social video decisively at every stage. At the beginning of the shopper journey, large spenders rate CTV effective 52 percent of the time versus 36 percent for social video, and by the middle and end of the journey the two channels become statistically comparable for large spenders, at roughly 40 percent each. Small spenders, defined as those under $10 million in annual spend, favor social video overwhelmingly throughout, rating it effective 77 percent of the time at the end of the journey against just 17 percent for CTV. The report attributes large spenders' relative confidence in CTV to an outcome mix weighted toward brand awareness rather than direct sales, while smaller spenders chasing lower-funnel conversions gravitate toward social video's targeting precision and native commerce integration.

Where CTV struggles most is at the point of actual conversion. Among buyers who rated CTV as middling or lagging for lower-funnel outcomes, 39 percent cited a lack of direct click-through capability as the top obstacle, followed by the need for a second device to complete an action at 38 percent, limited scale of shoppable formats at 35 percent, high cost per acquisition at 34 percent, and fragmented reach across platforms at 33 percent. Small and midsize buyers reported high CPA concerns at nearly twice the rate of large spenders, 44 percent versus 28 percent, and CPG, retail, fashion, and consumer electronics advertisers were most likely, at 45 percent, to cite limited shoppable format scale as a barrier, a pattern the report links to those categories' shorter, lower-consideration purchase paths.

That mismatch between CTV's lean-back viewing experience and the multi-step process needed to convert has been an active area of product development across the industry through 2026. Samsung Ads, for instance, introduced remote-based commerce into Samsung TV Plus ads in June 2026, letting viewers add items to an Amazon cart without switching devices, while YouTube pushed a similar concept at its May 2026 Brandcast event, introducing two-click checkout via Google Pay on connected televisions. IAB's own recommendations frame the opportunity in the same terms: enabling native, on-screen actions through remote and voice control as the unmet need standing between CTV's attention advantage and its conversion shortfall.

Live content commands near-universal buyer confidence, with one persistent skeptical bloc

If trust in programmatic CTV is the report's weak spot, live content is its strongest. Ninety-three percent of buyers say content they classify as truly live is more valuable than any other type of digital video content. Viewer attention level was the top-cited reason, at 45 percent, followed by the format's ability to drive business outcomes at 38 percent and its capacity to let a brand own a cultural moment against competitors at 36 percent.

Buyers draw a consistent line around what counts as truly live. Breaking news tops the list at 69 percent, followed by sporting events at 65 percent and awards shows at 64 percent. Creator-hosted live streams on social platforms follow closely at 58 percent, evidence, per the report, that personality-driven live content now carries appointment-viewing energy comparable to traditional broadcast events. Content that merely mimics live's scheduling cadence, such as fixed-time episode drops or default FAST channel streams, scores markedly lower, between 29 and 38 percent, because it lacks live's defining trait: watching something unscripted as it unfolds.

Even so, a third of buyers who value live content say its pricing premium is not justified relative to the return, citing gaps in driving business outcomes, at 51 percent, real-time measurement availability, at 39 percent, and interactive capabilities, at 38 percent. Auto and financial services buyers are twice as likely as CPG, retail, and consumer electronics buyers to say live's premium exceeds its return, 50 percent versus 25 percent, a gap the report attributes to the longer, more deliberative purchase cycles typical of those categories.

The premium value of live inventory, and the parallel difficulty of proving that value with hard measurement, has become a recurring theme across live sports and CTV coverage through mid-2026. Fox Corporation's $22 billion agreement to acquire Roku, announced June 15, 2026, was explicitly framed by Fox executives around combining premium live sports and news inventory with Roku's distribution scale. DeepIntent's June 2026 launch of a live sports CTV product for pharmaceutical advertisers cited data showing that 82 percent of programmatic buyers planned to increase live CTV investment over the following twelve months, even as verified, show-level targeting within live streams remained a persistent gap.

Agentic AI: near-total buy-in, zero consensus on the details

Ninety-six percent of buyers say agentic AI, meaning AI systems capable of planning, bidding, or optimizing campaigns with limited human intervention, has some role to play in programmatic and real-time bidding. What that role becomes is where agreement collapses. Sixty-three percent envision agentic AI as an optimization layer improving bidding and execution within existing auction systems, while 51 percent separately see it as a potential new model that could eventually replace auction-based buying altogether, and these two views are held simultaneously by a large share of respondents rather than representing a clean split.

Buyers were also asked what would most increase their trust in agentic AI workflows for digital video planning and activation. The top answer, at 42 percent, was the ability to monitor what an agent is doing in real time, followed by requiring human approval before an agent acts, at 40 percent, and measurable proof that the agent brings new value, at 39 percent. Notably, buyers ranked understanding why an agent made a given decision, at 36 percent, above setting hard guardrails that limit agent behavior, at 31 percent, and above maintaining a full audit trail of agent actions, at 29 percent, evidence, the report suggests, that buyers care less about restricting agents than about understanding how their decisions lead to outcomes.

Smaller buyers want considerably more oversight before ceding control. Fifty percent of small and midsize spenders say requiring human approval before an agent acts would most increase their trust, compared with 38 percent of large spenders, and 43 percent want behavioral guardrails, compared with 27 percent of large spenders, a gap the report attributes to smaller organizations having less operational infrastructure to fall back on.

That caution sits somewhat at odds with the pace of infrastructure being built around agentic buying elsewhere in the industry through 2026. PubMatic, Magnite, DoubleVerify, and other platforms have all launched agent-to-agent buying and verification tools this year, and PPC Land's coverage of the agentic buying layer in June 2026 documented DoubleVerify's own cognitive AI engine enabling autonomous campaign execution without a human clicking at any stage. A separate DataBeat analysis, also covered by PPC Land in June 2026, found conventional programmatic buyers were still commanding a 13.4 percent higher average CPM than agentic buyers on the same inventory as of May 2026, suggesting the market has not yet fully priced agentic transactions as equivalent to traditional ones.

Generative AI moves from experimentation to default practice

Adoption of generative AI for digital video creative has accelerated sharply. Nearly two in three buyers, 62 percent, now use GenAI for digital video creative production, up from 51 percent in 2025. Among adopters, GenAI-produced or GenAI-adjusted assets are expected to account for 33 percent of all digital video ad creative in 2026, up from 24 percent in 2025, with that share projected to climb to 43 percent by 2027.

Large spenders have pulled ahead of smaller buyers on this measure. Seventy percent of large spenders now use GenAI for creative enhancements, compared with 54 percent of small and midsize buyers, and large spenders apply GenAI across a bigger share of total ad output, 34 percent in 2026 versus 30 percent for smaller buyers, a gap the report attributes to the more established creative workflows larger organizations already have in place.

Despite the growth in usage, satisfaction has not kept pace among smaller buyers. Ninety-six percent of small and midsize buyers say they are not satisfied with their current level of GenAI use for creative ad production. Asked what would most help, 46 percent cited proof of performance and return on investment, and 42 percent cited easier integration with existing platforms and demand-side platforms, well ahead of tools designed specifically for smaller teams and budgets, at 27 percent.

The report's own footnote lists the specific tools buyers use under the GenAI umbrella, including Quickads.ai, InVideo AI, Jogg AI, Topview, Veo, Sora, Runway, ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Midjourney. That list reflects a rapid product buildout across the sector over the past year. Last year's edition of the same IAB study, covered by PPC Land in July 2025, had already projected that 86 percent of buyers would use or plan to use generative AI for video ad creation by 2026, a forecast this year's actual adoption figures track closely against. Google's own May 2026 rollout of Veo-powered video generation inside Asset Studio, detailed in earlier PPC Land coverage, was framed around closing a similar gap for image-only advertisers.

Why this matters for the marketing community

The report's findings land at a moment when digital video has become too large a budget line for its measurement gaps to be treated as a rounding error. At roughly $82 billion in annual U.S. spend, even a small percentage of unverifiable inventory represents a meaningful dollar figure, and the report's own data suggests that percentage is not small: 43 percent of buyers report only somewhat to no confidence in the most trusted CTV formats, a figure that climbs above 60 percent once private marketplaces and open exchanges enter the picture.

For agencies and brand-side buyers, the practical implication is that channel selection increasingly needs to reflect the buyer's own size and objectives rather than a single playbook applied uniformly. A large brand pursuing upper-funnel awareness may reasonably continue treating CTV as competitive with social video, per the report's journey-stage data. A smaller, performance-driven advertiser chasing lower-funnel conversions is working with a channel that a majority of its peers still rate behind social video at every stage, where the obstacles, second-device friction and limited shoppable formats, are well documented rather than speculative.

The agentic AI findings carry a related lesson for how the industry frames automation to buyers. Ninety-six percent acceptance that agentic AI has some role sounds like consensus until the data is examined: buyers are evenly split on whether that role is optimization or replacement of the auction model, and the trust-building priorities they name, visibility and explainability, rank above the guardrails and audit trails vendors have tended to market as the primary safety feature.

Timeline

  • May 2025: IAB releases its 2025 Digital Video Ad Spend and Strategy report, projecting 86 percent of buyers would adopt generative AI for video creative by 2026
  • August 5, 2025: IAB Tech Lab's CTV Ad Ops Workshop identifies standardization gaps across shoppable formats, live event delivery, and creative tracking
  • February 20 to March 13, 2026: Advertiser Perceptions fields the quantitative survey underlying the full report, drawing responses from 360 verified digital video decision-makers
  • April 2026: IAB Europe publishes its detailed guide to programmatic CTV, flagging CPM as an unreliable value proxy in the format
  • May 2026: IAB publishes Part One of the 2026 Digital Video Ad Spend and Strategy Report, establishing that U.S. digital video ad spend would surpass $80 billion this year
  • May 7, 2026: DoubleVerify's 2026 Global Insights report documents a 140 percent rise in CTV fraud schemes during the first quarter of the year
  • June 15, 2026: Fox Corporation agrees to acquire Roku for approximately $22 billion, citing combined live sports and streaming distribution scale
  • June 22, 2026: Samsung Ads introduces remote-based, in-stream commerce on Samsung TV Plus
  • July 9, 2026: Jamloop publishes survey findings showing only a third of marketers fully trust platform-reported CTV performance claims
  • July 14, 2026: IAB, Advertiser Perceptions, and Guideline publish the 2026 Digital Video Ad Spend and Strategy Full Report

Summary

Who: The Interactive Advertising Bureau, in partnership with Advertiser Perceptions and Guideline, surveyed 360 verified U.S. digital video ad spend decision-makers, split between brand marketers and agencies, at companies spending at least $1 million annually on advertising.

What: The 2026 Digital Video Ad Spend and Strategy Full Report finds that fewer than 60 percent of buyers have high confidence in CTV inventory transparency even within the most trusted buying methods, that targeting capabilities have overtaken content quality as the top spending criterion, that 96 percent of buyers see a role for agentic AI without agreeing on what that role is, and that generative AI adoption for video creative has climbed to 62 percent of buyers, up from 51 percent a year earlier.

When: The survey was fielded between February 20 and March 13, 2026, and the full report was published today, July 14, 2026, following Part One of the study in May 2026.

Where: The research covers the U.S. digital video advertising market, spanning connected TV, social video, and online video formats.

Why: The findings matter because digital video spend is projected to exceed $80 billion in 2026 and now represents more than 60 percent of total U.S. TV and video ad spend, meaning the transparency, targeting, and trust gaps the report documents apply to a majority of the television and video advertising economy rather than a marginal corner of it.