Digital video ad spending is on pace to top $80 billion in the United States this year, and buyers still do not trust the inventory they are paying premium prices for. A new IAB benchmark, the 2026 Digital Video Ad Spend and Strategy Report, is turning a quiet complaint from trading desks into an industry-wide data point: growth and confidence are moving in opposite directions.
The Trust Gap Behind the Spending Boom
The IAB report, produced with Advertiser Perceptions and Guideline, tracks how U.S. buyers allocate video budgets across connected TV, direct insertion orders, programmatic guaranteed deals, and the open exchange. Spend keeps climbing because video, and CTV specifically, still delivers reach that linear TV cannot match at the same efficiency. But the same buyers writing those checks are telling the IAB they cannot verify what they are actually getting.
Across every buying method the report measured, including direct I/O and programmatic guaranteed, 43% of buyers said they have somewhat to no confidence in inventory quality. That number gets worse as deals get less direct: 55% lack confidence in private marketplace deals, and 67% lack confidence in open exchange and real-time bidding inventory, the buying methods that make up a large share of programmatic video volume.
What the Report Actually Measured
The IAB built the report with Advertiser Perceptions, a research firm that regularly surveys agency and brand-side buyers on media behavior, and Guideline, an ad verification company. That pairing matters: the confidence numbers are not a vendor’s self-reported satisfaction score, they come from buyers describing their own experience, cross-checked by a firm whose business is verifying whether ad delivery matches what was promised. The report also builds on a first installment released in May 2026, meaning the trust gap has now been tracked across two waves rather than a single snapshot.
Why the Premium Price Tag Is Not Buying Certainty
Lyndsey Garza, VP of programmatic at Dept, put the mismatch plainly: CTV has matured into a premium channel with premium price tags, and paying TV-sized CPMs creates an expectation of TV-sized transparency that the supply chain is not yet delivering. Buyers are effectively paying a premium for a promise, not a guarantee.
Ben Vaske, a media supervisor at Collective Measures, described the practical effect of that gap: agencies are forced to put a lot of trust and faith into whatever partners send them, because there is no independent way to check bundled inventory claims before a campaign runs. That dependency is exactly what the IAB numbers are now quantifying at scale rather than leaving as anecdote.
Buyers Are Retreating to Known Partners
The report’s confidence gradient, direct deals trusted most, open exchange trusted least, is pushing budget behavior in a specific direction. Kevin Cahn, VP at Kepler Group, said his team strongly favors a deals-based approach that accesses supply from known partners rather than the open market. Freddy Dabaghi, chief transformation officer at Crispin, framed it as a relationship requirement: buyers need direct ties to the SSPs in the chain and a real understanding of who the direct partners are, not just a reporting dashboard after the fact.
That retreat toward curated, relationship-based buying is itself a market signal. It means the open exchange, the part of programmatic video built to scale efficiently, is the part buyers trust least, even as CTV inventory overall commands rising prices.
Verification Is Trying to Catch Up
The trust gap the IAB documented is exactly the opening ad verification vendors have been racing to fill. Guideline, one of the IAB report’s own research partners, is part of a wider push in which ad verification is catching up to the AI ad economy, extending credibility checks beyond traditional programmatic video into newer AI-mediated buying surfaces. The overlap is notable: the same firm helping the IAB measure buyer confidence is also building the tools meant to restore it.
What It Means for the Marketing Leader
For marketing and media leaders, the IAB numbers are a mandate to treat CTV and programmatic video spend the way finance teams treat any large, hard-to-audit expense: verify before you scale. Three moves follow directly from the report.
First, map current video spend against the confidence gradient the IAB found. If a meaningful share of budget sits in open exchange or unbundled programmatic buys, that is the segment most likely hiding quality problems that will not show up until a post-campaign audit. A simple spend-by-buying-method breakdown, direct I/O versus programmatic guaranteed versus open exchange, turns an abstract trust problem into a concrete budget-reallocation decision.
Second, push for named-partner transparency in every deal, not just a reporting dashboard after delivery. The buyers quoted in the IAB research are not asking for more data; they are asking to know exactly which SSPs and publishers sit inside a bundled deal before it runs.
Third, treat verification vendors as a line item, not an afterthought. As AI-driven ad buying expands the number of places a brand’s ads can land, independent verification is becoming the only practical check on inventory claims that buyers cannot audit themselves.
The lesson from this report is not that CTV is a bad investment. It is that the growth phase of video advertising has outrun the trust infrastructure meant to support it, echoing a broader pattern in which more measurement data isn’t producing better decisions on its own. Buyers are now pricing that gap into how, and where, they spend.
Source: IAB
