Why CTV revenue isn't keeping pace with audience growth. CTV is having a moment - but for media owners, the narrative isn't lining up with reality. The streaming audience keeps growing. Nearly three in four advertisers plan to increase CTV spend this year. Recent moves like Viant's acquisition of TVision and Publicis' $2.2B agreement to acquire LiveRamp show where the buy side is putting its money: signal quality and identity infrastructure. The category is expected to hit $46 billion by 2028 - with half of all CTV/OTT advertising purchased programmatically. And yet, revenue for publishers keeps lagging. Fill rates shift without a clear cause. CPMs stay flat or soften. Reporting doesn't explain it, and many assume the problem is on the demand side, when it usually isn't. If that pattern sounds familiar, you're not imagining it. In a recent EX.CO survey of CTV media owners, nearly 80% said they believe their current setup is leaving revenue on the table. That distance - between what CTV inventory is worth and what media owners are actually realizing - has a name. EX call it the yield gap, and it's the topic of its newest industry guide. Three reasons the CTV yield gap persists The yield gap isn't a demand problem, even though it can look like one. It's a structural mismatch between how CTV inventory is bought today and the infrastructure used to sell it. When EX asked CTV media owners to name the biggest limiter on their revenue growth, three issues rose to the top: low bid density, floor pricing challenges, and inefficient auctions. Most legacy pipes were retrofitted from display: designed for banner auctions, not ad pods; with decisioning for single impressions, not sequential slots; and built for a world where signal loss was an inconvenience, not a CPM problem. As CTV grew, new SSP integrations got layered on top - with little visibility into what's actually happening at the impression level. These structural issues don't show up in standard reporting: * Signal degradation. Content, audience, and pod-level signals routinely get stripped or dropped as bid requests move through the supply chain. When buyers can't see what they're bidding on, they bid less - and the CPM impact is bigger than you'd think. * Static floor pricing. CTV inventory value changes by daypart, content type, device, and live market conditions. Most floors are set manually and revisited quarterly. The mismatch leaves money on the table in strong weeks and suppresses fill in soft ones. * Legacy auction architecture. Since most CTV programmatic stacks were retrofitted from display, they evaluate each ad slot in isolation. CTV pods don't work that way, and the mismatch shows up as lower CPMs, partial fill, and timeouts. Why adding more SSPs won't fix monetization For years, the default playbook for closing the CTV yield gap was simple: add more demand partners. More SSPs, more integrations, more bidders. More competition to lift CPMs. That strategy has hit diminishing returns. The average CTV platform now authorizes around 30 SSPs to sell its inventory - roughly double a year ago. But more partners have produced more reselling, not more revenue. And reseller economics inflate what buyers pay without additional dollars flowing back to publishers. Meanwhile, the buy side is moving in the opposite direction. Major DSPs and agencies are actively consolidating spend onto fewer, more direct supply paths. The more SSP integrations a publisher adds, the noisier they look to the buyers running supply path optimization - and the less spend moves their way. The answer isn't more demand - it's smarter infrastructure The good news in all of this? The yield gap is mostly a technology problem, which means it's solvable - and not by rebuilding from scratch. When EX asked CTV media owners to name the biggest barrier to changing or upgrading their stack, the answer wasn't switching costs or ROI uncertainty. It was internal resource and engineering constraints. What's changed in the past 12 months is the kind of infrastructure available to the majority of mid-tier CTV media owners - operators with real programmatic complexity but without the engineering bench that the major streamers can throw at it. ML-driven decisioning that used to require a dedicated yield engineering team is now within reach as a layer that works alongside the SSPs and ad server you already have. Smarter auctions, not more partners. It's also arriving just in time. The Trade Desk's recent acquisition of Sincera - a company built around signal quality intelligence - and Pinterest's acquisition of tvScientific both prove the buy side is investing in performance-driven CTV. Agentic AI buying systems will only accelerate the consolidation already seen in recent acquisitions, raising the cost of an unoptimized stack. The media owners who close their yield gap in the next 12 months will capture a disproportionate share of this consolidating spend. The ones who don't may find themselves continuing to lose buyer share, even if their content and audience are stronger. Stop leaving CTV revenue on the table Its new guide, Closing the CTV Yield Gap, walks through the key fixes for media owners: * Survey insights on CTV owners' top monetization barriers, priorities, and bets * Which monetization challenges SSPs can - and can't - solve * How to prepare for agentic advertising's CTV supply chain impact * How one CTV media owner recovered 33% more revenue in 30 days * A four-step audit any revenue lead can run in two weeks to find their gap See where the gap lives in your stack. Access the full guide below. Get the guide Why Publishers Are Leaving Money on the Table With Irrelevant Video About Tammy Blythe Goodman. Tammy Blythe Goodman is VP, Brand Marketing & Communications at EX.CO. Prior to joining EX.CO in 2022, Tammy managed global communications at Taboola, Innovid, and SpotX, respectively. She has an MFA in Film from Columbia University and a BA in Communications and Literature from American University. Tammy lives in New York City and is a proud rescue dog owner and passionate pluviophile.

Pinterest unveils new AI tools for marketers. Ahead of Cannes Lions, Pinterest unveiled new AI tools designed to improve ad performance, streamline workflows and support conversational discovery. AI is reshaping how people search and decide, moving the industry past the search-and-click model toward a conversational and generative future. Ahead of Cannes Lions, Pinterest rolled out a new set of AI ad tools focused on three things marketers care about right now: performance, workflow efficiency, and interoperability. "The future of discovery won't be driven by keywords alone. It will be shaped by context, taste, and trusted recommendations," said Lee Brown, Chief Business Officer, Pinterest. She adds, "Pinterest has a unique advantage because people come to our platform to plan, curate and take action on what they want to do next. We're building AI experiences and infrastructure that tap into those signals in more useful and relevant ways." This launch includes: * Pinterest Model Context Protocol (MCP), an AI-native infrastructure layer that connects Pinterest campaign, analytics, and keyword insights to the copilots and agentic tools advertisers and partners already use. Available to select partners globally. * New Performance+ creative, a new AI model that can evaluate a broader set of creatives and identify the variant most likely to perform for each ad impression. Available globally. * Business Assistant and Ask Pinterest, only available in the US at the moment. In addition, tvScientific by Pinterest also announced Creative Advisor, a predictive AI Tool for TV Ad creative optimisation. Making Pinterest operable in AI-driven workflows. Pinterest is also embedding AI into partner tools with Pinterest MCP (Model Context Protocol), an AI-native infrastructure that connects Pinterest to the copilots and agentic tools advertisers rely on. As AI transforms marketing, partners need a reliable, standardised integration. Built on the Model Context Protocol, Pinterest's offering provides secure access to campaign, analytics and keyword insights. It grounds AI workflows in Pinterest's unique signals including taste, trends and intent, allowing partner copilots to provide platform-specific guidance directly within existing tools. The platform is evolving Pinterest MCP alongside alpha partners like PMG, Pacvue, Dentsu, Havas, Innovid by Mediaocean and Omnicom's Jump450. Their feedback is shaping the protocol across reporting, analysis, campaign planning and execution, directly informing how Campaign Middle East expand in the future. "Pinterest MCP helps us integrate Pinterest directly into the workflows our teams are already building, making it easier to analyze performance, uncover insights and act on opportunities without switching tools," said Chris Ivey, President of Jump 450. "What makes Pinterest especially compelling is the strength of its intent signals. People come to Pinterest to plan what they want to do next, creating valuable context that helps marketers make smarter decisions." Increasing creative variation through new models. As AI scales creative variation across platforms, brands need smarter selection models to turn more assets into stronger performance. Pinterest is introducing a new AI model to work with Pinterest Performance+ creative to deliver the right variation at the right moment. Through dynamic creative selection, the model can evaluate a broader set of creatives and identify the variant most likely to perform for each ad impression. This moves performance optimisation from the ad level to the asset level, delivering a more personalised experience for users and better results for advertisers. In testing, the new model increased click volume by 7.5 per cent compared to the previous singular variant model. In addition to a more powerful creative selection model, brands will also have access to new ad review tools and enhanced creative reporting breakouts, giving them greater confidence in how their creative appears and performs on Pinterest. Pinterest is also building AI into advertiser workflows with Business Assistant, an AI collaborator in Ads Manager and mobile, currently in a closed beta in the US. It combines a deep understanding of an advertiser's business with Pinterest's platform insights to help advertisers drive the best performance, building on the approach pioneered by Pinterest Assistant. Like Pinterest, Business Assistant is visual. It doesn't answer with walls of text, but demonstrates breakout Trends in graphs and shows top Pins to promote. For example, if "clean beauty routine" searches are up 42 per cent one week and an advertiser wants to join in, Business Assistant can represent how user interest grew, alongside real Pins leading the Trend to inspire their ads. Ask Pinterest: AI experiments outside the Pinterest app. As consumer behavior around AI search and discovery evolves, Campaign Middle East is creating a new space to rapidly test and learn. Ask Pinterest is a new experimental app for exploring more conversational, visual-first and agentic shopping experiences. Ask Pinterest brings Pinterest's Taste Graph and the visual discovery experience beyond the core Pinterest app, using Pinterest's proprietary signals around taste, intent and preferences to power more personalized recommendations and inspiration. Ask Pinterest is designed for more conversational, complex, multi-step decisions that don't fit neatly into a single search, like planning a dinner party on a budget, finding a gift that feels truly personal, or furnishing a room over time. The experience helps Campaign Middle East explore how AI can better support those richer shopping experiences while retaining context across sessions. What the platform learns from Ask Pinterest will help inform future AI-powered experiences across the main app. Hiba Faisal is a Junior Reporter at Campaign Middle East, part of Motivate Media Group. She handles coverage on sports marketing, the luxury industry, social media trends and influencer marketing. She specialises in exclusive features that bring industry leaders together to offer insights on the latest trends and pressing topics, highlighting how brands and agencies build emotional connections through relevance, authenticity and storytelling. Alongside her daily reportage, she is tasked with the brand's social media presence, which includes producing and editing reels, interviews and behind-the-scenes footage for Campaign's digital platforms.