CTV’s Trust Gap: 62% of Buyers Doubt Platform Numbers

CTV advertising has a trust gap, and a July 9, 2026 survey from CTV ad platform Jamloop put a number on it: of 120 senior brand and agency marketers surveyed, 62% expressed skepticism toward platform-reported CTV results, and only 33% said they fully trust most platform performance claims. Half of the same 120 raised their CTV budgets year over year anyway.

That combination — rising spend, falling belief — is the story. Buyers aren’t walking away from connected TV; they’re buying a channel whose scoreboard they don’t trust, because the alternatives (paid search and paid social, where more than 63% of the 120 respondents report diminishing returns) look worse. And the skepticism isn’t paranoia: DoubleVerify measured a 140% global surge in CTV fraud schemes and variants in Q1 2026 versus Q1 2025.

This post covers what the Jamloop survey actually found and how honestly to read a vendor-commissioned study, why the fraud data says the skeptics are right, and the practical fix — an independent accountability layer of incrementality testing, log-level data, and third-party verification. We’ve already covered how to buy and run CTV as a performance channel in our CTV performance-marketing guide; this is about why buyers don’t trust the numbers that channel reports back — and what to do about it.

On July 9, 2026, Jamloop released a survey titled “CTV Is Winning Budget. Trust Is Still Catching Up.” based on responses from 120 senior brand and agency marketers. The findings were covered the same day by four independent trade outlets — ppc.land, TV Technology, MarTech Series, and Advanced Television — with mutually consistent numbers across all four write-ups.

Two disclosures before the numbers, because sourcing honesty is the whole point of a post about measurement trust. First, Jamloop is not a neutral observer: it operates a CTV ad platform whose product line includes CTV attribution and incrementality measurement — the exact category its survey says buyers are demanding. That doesn’t invalidate the data direction, but it means the headline framing serves the sponsor. Second, the primary report was not published alongside the trade coverage: sampling method, field dates, and exact question wording are not public. Every figure below is confirmed by corroboration across the four outlets, not verified against a primary source — and every percentage is a proportion of a modest 120-person sample, which is why we state n=120 next to each one.

With that frame in place, the signal still matters. A 120-person panel of senior buyers is exactly the population that decides where CTV budgets go, and the pattern the survey describes — budgets up, belief down — matches what independent fraud and quality data (Section 03) has been showing all year. Jamloop’s CMO Jeff Fagel, commenting on his own company’s findings, framed the shift as CTV no longer needing to prove it belongs in the media mix, but needing to prove it belongs in the next wave of performance budgets. Vendor commentary, yes — but it’s the right diagnosis of where the channel sits in mid-2026.

The survey’s core findings sketch a channel that has won the budget argument and lost the belief argument. Half of the 120 respondents increased CTV budgets year over year, and 63% of the 120 say CTV plays a strong performance role or is becoming a more accountable channel. Yet only 42% of the same 120 say CTV is held to the same accountability standards as search and social — which means 58% of these senior buyers think the channel they’re funding grades on a curve.

The most operationally important number in that chart isn’t the headline 62% — it’s the 39%. Only 39% of the 120 respondents feel very confident defending CTV spend to leadership. That is the number that decides next year’s budget: a channel can survive buyer skepticism, but it can’t survive a marketing lead who walks into a finance review unable to defend the line item. And the two gaps compound — if you don’t trust the platform’s numbers, you can’t confidently repeat them to your CFO.

None of the four trade write-ups connected the Jamloop trust numbers to the independent fraud data — but the connection is the point. Two months before the survey, on May 7, 2026, DoubleVerify published a global study finding that CTV fraud schemes and variants surged 140% in Q1 2026 versus Q1 2025. The same study identified more than 50 distinct CTV bot attacks and variants across 2025, and 10x more fraudulent CTV apps in 2025 than in 2024. When more than 60% of Jamloop’s 120 respondents say they worry about fraud or misrepresented inventory, they are describing a measured reality, not a vibe.

Two more DoubleVerify findings complete the picture. Bot fraud made up 82% of ad-fraud violations in North America in the same report — and yet only 21% of advertisers measure CTV performance using invalid-traffic or fraud-detection as a KPI, meaning the large majority of buyers are not even watching the metric where the money leaks. DoubleVerify has also reported, earlier in 2026, that more than 1 in 3 CTV impressions were delivered to powered-off screens — a secondhand figure we haven’t verified against the primary study, but one that illustrates the category of failure platform dashboards don’t surface on their own.

Put the two datasets side by side and the survey reads differently. The 62% of 120 buyers who doubt platform numbers aren’t behind the curve — they’re ahead of the 21% of advertisers actually screening for invalid traffic. The trust gap is the market correctly pricing in a fraud problem that most measurement setups aren’t built to see. We saw the same pattern in adjacent channels in IAS’s 2026 Media Quality Report: quality problems concentrate exactly where independent measurement is thinnest.

Underneath the trust problem sits a definition problem. When Jamloop asked its 120 respondents what CTV performance means, the answers fragmented — and because respondents could select multiple definitions, the categories overlap and the totals exceed 100%.

This fragmentation is what makes platform self-reporting so hard to trust. A platform optimizing toward its own attributed conversions can legitimately report success against one definition while a buyer is silently failing against another. If one buyer means qualified leads, another means incremental revenue lift, and a third means store visits, then a single platform-reported “performance” number is answering a question nobody precisely asked. Standardizing the definition — per advertiser, in writing, before the campaign — is the cheapest trust repair available, and it costs nothing but a planning meeting.

The four trade write-ups all report the survey stats as a list. The more useful move is to operationalize them: each gap the 120 respondents flagged maps to a specific accountability component most CTV reporting doesn’t provide by default. This is the checklist we’d run against any CTV platform relationship.

Reading the table top to bottom, one pattern emerges: every row is the same structural failure — the entity being measured controls the measurement. That’s why the trust gap won’t be closed by platforms shipping better dashboards. A more detailed self-report is still a self-report. The only durable fix moves the measurement outside the platform’s control.

The practical response to the trust gap is an independent accountability layer that sits between platform reporting and budget decisions. It has four components, and they map directly to the table above. None of them requires abandoning the platforms — they require refusing to let the platforms be the only witness.

Sequencing matters. The written performance definition and the verification layer can ship this quarter on any budget; log-level access is a contract negotiation; incrementality testing needs enough spend concentration to read a signal. For most advertisers, the realistic path is definition first, verification second, incrementality once CTV crosses a meaningful share of the media mix. This is the same measurement discipline we build into our paid media engagements — and the reporting side, reconciling platform claims against independent data, is core to our analytics practice.

The context makes the stakes concrete. eMarketer projects US CTV ad spend will reach $37.95 billion in 2026 — roughly 43% of US TV ad budgets — the same projection we used in our CTV performance-marketing guide. Against that base, the survey’s most valuable finding is the conditional one: more than 70% of the 120 respondents would increase CTV investment if measurement and attribution improved. The growth is pre-approved; it’s gated on proof.

The push factor is just as real. More than 63% of the same 120 respondents report diminishing returns from paid search and paid social — which explains why half of them raised CTV budgets despite doubting the numbers. Budgets are flowing toward CTV because the alternatives are saturating, not because the channel has earned full confidence. That’s a fragile kind of growth: spend that arrives on push factors leaves on the first bad quarterly review. For the broader spend picture across channels, see our 2026 digital advertising statistics roundup.

Looking forward, we expect the accountability gap to become the main axis of CTV competition through 2027. Platforms that open up log-level data, submit to third-party verification, and support buyer-run incrementality testing can convert the conditional 70%+ into committed budget; platforms that keep grading their own homework will likely watch spend consolidate toward those that don’t. The Jamloop survey — whatever its sponsor’s stake — is an early reading of that repricing: buyers are telling the market, at n=120 but in plain language, that the next dollar goes to whoever can prove the last one worked.