How to Manage CTV Advertising’s Shifting Power Dynamics
Are the mediation layers between publishers and advertisers in the CTV space dropping off with the increasing emergence of new ad exchanges and the like? And how can platforms adapt? Eventually A Castle’s Andrew Baritz discusses the market’s shifting tectonics and what platforms like Cineverse and C360 Technologies, Inc. are doing to bring buyers closer to publishers in this discussion with Ring Digital’s Brian Ring at the latest Streaming Media Connect.
The Changing Relationship Among Buyers, Advertisers, and Publishers
Ring Digital llc Principal Analyst Brian Ring invites Eventually A Castle CEO Andrew Baritz to dissect the power dynamics surrounding demand-side platforms (DSPs) and supply-side platforms (SSPs) and publishers. He suggests that Cineverse, for which Baritz runs adtech ops, makes a bold statement by refusing to compete with big players and instead using its own distribution scale. “Describe for me how you guys are attacking this,” Ring requests.
Baritz notes that over the past 24–36 months, there’s been a shift in CTV power dynamics due to “a shakeup across DSPs, SSPs, how publishers connect to them, and the various intermediation and mediation layers across the different services, whether that’s Publica, SpringServe, Indicue, C360, or others. There’s a shift in the traditional path that a buyer gets to an advertiser, gets to a publisher, and vice versa. And we’ve seen this with [The] Trade Desk and Openpath, Magnite and other exchanges and SSPs, cutting deals with advertisers directly and often, and [increasingly,] publishers going direct to those advertisers as well.” He adds that a platform like Cineverse helps buyers get closer to publishers. Its technology solutions “bring buyers directly to the publishers with as few of those layers as possible while still being available on all of those other layers.”
Blurred Lines and New Tools
“We’ve really hit a broad commoditization of each of these different pieces of the ecosystem. So depending on where you used to sit doesn’t directly require you to still sit there,” Baritz explains. He’s seeing a blurring of lines across DSPs, SSPs, publisher networks, and audience networks regarding questions such as: “[W]ho does what, how do they do it, should they be doing it, are they doing it right, and who does it bring value to?”
Companies such as Magnite has been growing and acquiring other companies, and publishers are growing and gaining confidence in the market and the tools available to them, so inevitably publishers are going to provide new opportunities for buyers to reach them, Baritz concludes.
Join conference chair Andy Beach and other streaming media experts in person Oct. 6–8 in Santa Monica, CA, for more thought leadership, actionable insights, and lively debate at Streaming Media 2025. Registration is open!
Related Articles
VAST (video ad serving template) is an XML-based standard developed by the IAB Tech Lab that defines how video players and ad servers communicate to deliver video ads. It is designed to allow for the consistent and dynamic delivery of video ads across different platforms and devices. But in the ever-shifting and fast-evolving world of adtech, has VAST grown long in the tooth? Ring Digital's Brian Ring, SVTA's David Hassoun, Eventually a Castle's Andrew Baritz, and IAB Tech Lab‘s Raymond Holton discuss the issue in this clip from May's Streaming Media Connect.
22 Jul 2025
As more innovative and integrated ad formats continue to transform CTV advertising and monetization, are smaller publishers without dedicated ad sales teams in danger of being left behind? What creative strategies can they deploy to seize these opportunities? Fan Serv's C.J. Leonard and Eventually A Castle's Andrew Baritz offer practical, strategic recommendations in this discussion with Ring Digital's Brian Ring at the latest Streaming Media Connect.
18 Jul 2025
IAB Tech Lab has recently released some new standards for CTV advertising, known as the Ad Format Hero Initiative. The organization asked and received more than 100 CTV ad format descriptions/concepts from the industry on classifying new formats. Next up, they ran an industry survey (completed 16 April 2025) to determine what should be prioritized. The Ad Format Hero Task Force selected eight formats based on the survey results. The idea is to create standards so that sensibly, engineering and operations teams don't have to reinvent the wheel every time they want to insert the right creative.
15 Jul 2025
Server-guided ad insertion (SGAI), and the variety of squeeze-back and picture-in-picture (PiP) ad options it enables, creates great opportunities for brands to innovate and engage audiences in new ways, particularly for live sports events. But it's still early days for SGAI implementation, and scale and standardization still pose significant challenges that old solutions and approaches won't solve, as Ring Digital's Brian Ring, SVTA's David Hassoun, Fan Serv's C.J. Leonard, and Eventually A Castle's Andrew Baritz discuss in this clip from May's Streaming Media Connect.
10 Jul 2025
On Thursday, May 22, Brian Ring, Principal Analyst, Ring Digital llc, will moderate the Streaming Media Connect May panel "Publishers Pay to Play Free: Next Steps in Ad-Based Streaming Monetization." Increasingly, content publishers are finding they need more control over their ad stack. This panel looks beyond the touted monetization-ready feature sets in streaming playback solutions and drills down with key content providers on how well these solutions facilitate ad signaling and ad stitching and integrate with ad servers, discussing what kind of reporting they provide to measure success. The panel also highlights the differences in ad-based monetization strategies as between CTV platforms, online video players, and mobile apps. And finally, panelists dig deep into critical emerging standards that are changing SSAI this year.
14 May 2025