India’s CTV surge is unstoppable, but trust gaps worry advertisers

New Delhi: WPP’s This Year, Next Year (TYNY) 2026 report forecasts a powerful surge in India’s Connected TV (CTV) advertising market, nearly 20% growth in 2025 and 22% in 2026, fuelled by booming smart-TV penetration, rising OTT consumption, and a strategic shift by brands toward premium video environments.

As marketers chase digital reach amid declining linear TV, CTV has quickly become the most aspirational and “brand-safe” part of India’s digital ecosystem. Yet, as billions flow into CTV pipes, a fundamental question looms larger than ever: Can advertisers actually trust what they are buying?

A growing body of industry evidence, global measurement reports, fraud analyses, and on-the-ground insights from verification firms suggest that the CTV surge is increasingly outpacing the industry's capability to measure, verify, or control it. And in India, where device-level transparency is still inconsistent and log-level reporting varies widely across OEMs and platforms, the risk-reward equation is shifting quickly.

The paradox of premium

According to DoubleVerify’s 2025 Global Insights on the Modern Streaming Landscape, CTV video ad monitoring grew 66% year-over-year globally in 2024. This surge solidified CTV’s place as one of the fastest-growing channels in digital advertising, outperforming desktop, mobile web, and even mobile app video volumes.

But DV’s report also revealed the fractures beneath the surface:

• Only 50% of CTV impressions offered full app transparency in 2024.

• 63% of marketers who advertise on CTV say it’s hard to tell if their buys reach real viewers.

• A significant 110% year-over-year increase in CTV fraud/SIVT filter rates, driven primarily by bot fraud.

In short, advertisers are pouring money into a medium where half the supply chain is still partially opaque, increasingly targeted by sophisticated invalid traffic, and difficult to measure with confidence.

The India insight

Amit Relan, Founder & CEO of mFilterIt, offered one of the sharpest assessments of CTV’s emerging cracks.

“CTV may be seen as a premium, safer environment, but it’s far from immune to challenges. In fact, the biggest issue in CTV today isn’t bots; it’s frequency and control. If an advertiser sets a cap of three and a viewer still sees the same ad ten or fifteen times, that’s a clear signal that delivery isn’t being honoured,” he said.

This echoes a core problem DV highlighted globally: advertisers cannot reliably validate whether frequency caps, targeting filters, or placement controls are being respected, because measurement depends heavily on what platforms and OEMs disclose.

“This is exactly why CTV needs independent verification, log-level transparency, and content-level ID controls. Without consistent device-level transparency, advertisers simply cannot know whether their targeting, brand-safety settings, or frequency caps are actually working,” Relan added.

This lack of standardisation is the biggest chasm between India and regulated CTV markets like the US, where device-level logs, app metadata, “TV-off” signals, and program-level IDs are becoming baseline expectations.

The silent budget killer

Globally, advertisers continue grappling with delivery integrity: ads appearing when screens are off, being cut off mid-stream, or looping excessively.

According to DV, CTV ads can continue playing even when the TV is switched off. “TV Off” issues were present on 11% of CTV inventory in July 2024 and 3% even in December, despite platform maturity. These issues appear even in major apps from leading TV publishers, not just long-tail platforms.

For Indian marketers, who have already voiced concerns over repetitive ads during live sports and marquee OTT events, this insight is crucial: viewability is not guaranteed simply because the ad appeared on a TV screen.

Relan’s warning reflects a growing realisation in India: CTV’s biggest threat today is not fraud bots, but breakdowns in frequency enforcement, device-state detection, and delivery verification, all of which blunt impact and inflate wasted impressions.

Fraud is rising, and India can’t ignore it

Despite frequency and transparency issues taking centre stage, India cannot ignore fraud. Globally, DV’s measurements show:

• A 110% YoY spike in CTV fraud/SIVT filter rates.

• Bot fraud accounted for 65% of all CTV fraud in 2024.

• DV identified 12 new bot variants in Q4 2024 alone, including evolutions of ViperBot, CycloneBot, and BeatSting.

• 4 million infected CTV bot devices generate extreme volumes of invalid traffic daily.

• One bot variant alone has the potential to waste over $7.5 million per month in advertiser budget.
  

India specifically saw a 60% improvement in CTV fraud/SIVT violation rates over the previous year, suggesting better filtration but also exposing how vulnerable the region was to begin with.

Dhiraj Gupta, Co-founder & CTO at mFilterIt, contextualised this risk within a broader ecosystem: “Advertisers are going very heavily for creating a little bit of a bubble, and whenever there is a bubble, then it’s a very fertile ground for advertisers to come in to monetise on that bubble.”

CTV’s meteoric rise in India, fueled by discounted bundled OTT subscriptions, cricket properties, and FAST channels, has created the perfect conditions for exploitation.
Gupta added a deeper structural concern: “AI-level bots are making this data so polluted. All of those data metrics are now spoofable, cheatable; your experience is no longer going to help you.”

As machine-driven fraud becomes more sophisticated, traditional signals like CTR, completion rates, and engagement patterns are increasingly unreliable. This presents a real challenge for India’s marketers, many of whom still rely on heuristic or platform-reported metrics to judge performance.

Transparency, the missing ingredient

Industry-wide, the demand for transparency is loud and clear. “68% of marketers say they must have transparency to justify CTV’s high costs,” DV reported.

App transparency, essential for knowing where ads actually appeared, has improved globally from 46% in 2022 to 64% in Q1 2025. APAC saw a 13% increase in app transparency in 2024.
India, however, still falls on the more opaque end of the spectrum.

OEMs provide varying levels of device-level data. Many AVOD platforms hesitate to expose log-level signals. FAST channels often package inventory without granular content metadata. And unlike the U.S., India lacks industry-backed baseline standards for transparency.

This is precisely why Relan stresses unified measurement. “Most major platforms are open to measurement, but the real gap is setting unified standards,” he said.

The cost of poor measurement

The DV report offered a stark benchmark: Without protections, advertisers lose an average of $700,000 per billion impressions on CTV inventory that fails fraud-free, viewability, and brand-safety standards.

This number is globally averaged, but the pattern is universal: High CPMs + opaque delivery + frequency failures = amplified media waste.

India’s premium OTT platforms often command the region’s highest digital CPMs, sometimes matching or exceeding television. This means even small inefficiencies translate into disproportionate losses.

Gupta reinforced that the risks are identical for all advertisers, regardless of size. “Bots don’t care about size. If there’s an ad and they can click on it, they will click on it! It will end up being similar for small or large.”

Are we ready for 2026?

CTV’s appeal in India is unquestionable: Premium placement, high completion rates (DV reports ~97% globally), immersive storytelling, and household reach! But completion alone does not guarantee outcomes, especially if the ad looped excessively, ran on a dormant screen, was delivered outside a brand-safe context, or reached non-human traffic.

“Without consistent device-level transparency, advertisers simply cannot know whether their settings are actually working,” Relan puts it plainly.

The next 24 months will determine whether CTV becomes a truly premium, measurable, transparent environment or a scaled-up version of the early programmatic web, powerful but plagued by opacity and waste. 

If India can solve transparency, standardisation, and verification at the pace that CTV is growing, 2026 could mark the year when connected television becomes the country’s most trusted digital channel. If not, its premium promise risks becoming a very expensive illusion.