Wurl report finds 89% of CTV ad requests lack program names

The lack of granular metadata in the bidstream prevents advertisers from achieving the same level of brand safety and contextual relevance found in traditional linear TV. While viewership is migrating rapidly to ad-supported streaming, the disconnect between time spent and ad spend will persist until buyers can verify exactly where their ads appear. This transparency deficit forces reliance on broad genre tags that often fail to reflect actual on-screen content. As Wurl and other tech providers push for scene-level signals like emotion and object recognition, the industry must now standardize these identifiers to move beyond fragmented metadata. Watch for whether DSPs adopt these enriched signals to justify shifting larger portions of linear budgets into programmatic CTV.