Digital video spending is booming. Confidence in the inventory being bought is doing the opposite. US digital video ad spend reached $80 billion this year, according to the IAB’s 2026 Digital Video Spend & Strategy report — and the same research found buyer confidence deteriorating across every single buying method. 43% of buyers have somewhat-to-no confidence in direct I/O, programmatic guaranteed and self-serve. For private marketplaces, 55% lack confidence. For the open exchange and RTB, it’s 67%. A market can grow while its trust base erodes. It just can’t do it forever.
01What’s driving the erosion
The IAB points to three causes: supply-chain fragmentation, transparency gaps, and inconsistent measurement standards. IAB VP Chris Bruderle frames it as a two-front problem — “buyer trust is being eroded on two fronts”: bad actors injecting invalid inventory, and genuine uncertainty about where legitimate inventory actually originates and runs. Note the second half. Even clean inventory is suffering, because buyers can’t verify that it’s clean.
The premium-pricing angle sharpens it. Dept’s Lyndsey Garza: “CTV has matured into a premium channel with premium price tags, and when you’re paying TV-sized CPMs, you expect TV-sized transparency.” That’s the whole bind. CTV successfully argued its way to TV-level rates without delivering TV-level provenance, and buyers have now noticed the gap.
02How buyers are already responding
They aren’t waiting for standards. Agencies including Kepler Group and Crispin are moving toward direct SSP relationships and curated deals, and away from pure programmatic automation. Read that carefully: the response to a trust deficit is not more spend on verification tooling, it’s fewer intermediaries and shorter paths. The confidence numbers are a ranking, and buyers are walking up it — 67% distrust in open exchange, 55% in PMPs, 43% in direct. Money is migrating toward whichever path a buyer can personally audit.
03Why this matters
| The distrust gradient is your pricing map | Buyers trust direct and PG most and open exchange least. That's not a survey result, it's an instruction: every impression you can move up that gradient is worth more, and every impression left in the open auction is being discounted for sins that may not be yours. |
|---|---|
| Curation is becoming the default, not the premium tier | When agencies build direct SSP relationships to solve a trust problem, the publishers already in curated packages get the budget. The ones reachable only through the open exchange get whatever's left after the distrust discount. |
| Provenance is now a product feature | Bruderle's second front — uncertainty about where legitimate inventory originates — means clean publishers are paying for the industry's opacity. Documenting your supply path is no longer compliance overhead; it's a competitive differentiator you can charge for. |
An $80 billion market where 67% of buyers distrust its largest transaction method is a market with a correction priced into it.
04What publishers should do
05What marketers should do
06The bottom line
An $80 billion market where 67% of buyers distrust its largest transaction method is a market with a correction priced into it. The correction is already happening, quietly, as agencies reroute spend toward paths they can verify. For publishers, this is one of the rare industry problems where the fix and the opportunity are the same action: make your supply legible, and get paid for being the inventory nobody has to take on faith.