The debate premium TV should actually be having
Partner content
Talk to a broadcaster about programmatic, and four objections come up time and again. The Trade Desk’s Theo Luke looks at each in turn.
A recent VideoWeek interview made a provocative claim: linear TV is getting “battered by video every single time” on ROI. It sparked a lively debate on LinkedIn, with broadcasters pushing back, agency heads weighing in, and ad tech voices making their case.
The exchange was revealing – not because anyone was entirely wrong, but because it exposed a set of assumptions about programmatic trading that continue to hold premium TV back.
The assumption that concerns me most is that programmatic is somehow the enemy of premium. That opening inventory to auction-based buying is a race to the bottom. That the safest strategy for a broadcaster is to keep things controlled, direct-sold, and away from the messy world of biddable media.
That logic is understandable. But it’s solving the wrong problem, and at exactly the wrong moment.
The real threat to premium TV isn’t programmatic, it’s the walled gardens.
Google, Meta and Amazon continue to grow their share of advertising spend at the direct expense of premium television and journalism. Consumers spend more than half their online time on the open internet, yet barely a third of ad budgets follow them there. That gap isn’t closing on its own. And every year broadcasters spend defending against programmatic is a year the platforms spend getting further ahead.
So the question for premium TV isn’t whether to engage with programmatic. It’s about using it as the weapon it was designed to be – one that lets publishers compete with the platforms on their own terms: data, measurement, transparency, and scale.
And yet, the scepticism persists. Talk to a broadcaster about programmatic, and the following objections come up time and again, sometimes with good reason.
First: The platform fee
In the robust discussion that followed the interview, one broadcaster made the point that if there’s no evidence of incremental revenue, any technology fee is simply extracted from the ecosystem – money that could otherwise fund content.
It’s a fair challenge. The Trade Desk’s fees are transparent. We don’t bake them into CPMs. We don’t bias toward owned inventory, because we don’t own any. Clients can see exactly what they’re paying and assess whether the value justifies the cost. That’s a fundamentally different model from platforms that obscure their margins inside vertically integrated stacks.
But the more important point is this: the maths only works against ad tech fees if you assume the open internet’s current share of spend is fair and there’s no upside.
It’s a zero-sum game where every intermediary simply extracts value from a fixed pool. Is anyone really satisfied with the trajectory – with how premium TV’s share of digital budgets is trending relative to the walled gardens? If the answer is no, then the conversation has to shift from cost to growth. From protecting what’s there to expanding what’s possible.
The principle is simple: every player in the chain should add more value than it extracts. If it doesn’t, the market will correct. If it does, the pie gets bigger for everyone.
Second: Programmatic bundles cheap long-tail inventory with premium, eroding value
Bundling existed long before programmatic, and it was often worse in opaque insertion order deals where buyers had little visibility into what they were actually getting.
Done properly, programmatic enables real price discovery. When premium inventory is clearly marked – via content metadata, first-party audience data or deterministic identifiers – it attracts more bids and those bids are higher.
We see this consistently: auction CPMs on premium, signal-rich inventory frequently exceed those achieved through fixed-price, guaranteed deals. Scarcity, transparency and addressability drive price up, not down.
Third: The persistent suggestion of fraud
The suggestion that programmatic opens the door to ad fraud is one of the industry’s most persistent myths.
Fraud isn’t caused by the mechanism of trading – it’s caused by bad actors. And the tooling available in programmatic environments – such as supply path optimisation, seller verification, and direct integrations – actively helps reduce it.
There is no technical reason fraud should be an issue in a well-constructed programmatic supply chain.
Fourth: This one matters more than all the others – measurement
Walled gardens are exceptionally good at taking credit for campaign success. Sitting at the last click in the consumer journey, they capture attribution for decisions they often didn’t influence.
Premium broadcaster content drives real consumer behaviour, but if that impact can’t be measured, it can’t be priced. And if it can’t be priced, the budget follows whoever can measure it, which, today, usually means the platforms.
This is why deterministic identifiers matter beyond targeting. Addressability enables measurement – the ability to follow a consumer’s journey from a broadcaster ad impression through to a conversion, and to prove the impact that premium content had along the way. Without that infrastructure, broadcasters are effectively subsidising last-click platforms that take credit for outcomes they didn’t drive.
None of this requires broadcasters to surrender control. Control isn’t a fixed price and an opaque supply chain. Real control is a setup where every source of demand competes fairly on price, inventory is declared with enough signal to attract the buyers that value it most, and measurement proves what that content is actually worth.
The broadcasters that have leaned in are already seeing the results. Markets like Germany and Spain, where biddable CTV is more mature, show measurably higher demand density and better price discovery for premium inventory.
The UK, for all its strengths in content, still skews heavily toward programmatic guaranteed and IO-based trading, which limits its ability to capture the full value of its inventory in a market that’s moving fast.
The real debate isn’t programmatic versus premium. The debate is whether the open internet – premium TV, quality journalism, diverse content – can compete with the platforms for its fair share of advertising spend.
I believe it can. But only if every part of the ecosystem stops fighting each other and starts building the infrastructure to win.
Theo Luke is the senior director of inventory development at The Trade Desk