Where the Billions Go - and Who's Watching

It's been a few months since I've written here, and that's on me. The honest reason is that we've been busy building — and most of what I've had to say has been going out in real time on LinkedIn. This post is the catch-up: where TrueView Media Group is right now, what we believe, and what's coming next.

The channel won. The accountability didn't.

Streaming is no longer the future of TV advertising — it's the present. U.S. connected TV ad spend will reach roughly $38 billion this year, up about 14% year over year. For the first time ever, CTV upfront commitments have passed primetime linear. The "why CTV" conversation is over.

But here's the number that should bother every dealer and every OEM: CTV now accounts for about 20% of viewing time and still only about 8% of ad dollars. Money is chasing attention into streaming faster than ever — and the buyers writing those checks have almost no visibility into what they're actually getting. Measurement and transparency remain the number-one challenge advertisers name in this channel, year after year.

Too many advertisers get back a blended CPM, a delivery report averaged across dozens of companies they've never met, and an attribution dashboard that takes credit for sales that would have happened anyway.

Most CTV advertising is a black box. I've decided that's our opening.

What's actually inside a programmatic CTV buy

Here's what most dealers don't know about how their streaming ads get bought: at the moment of a programmatic bid, the buyer often can't see the program title, the genre, or the content rating — sometimes there's nothing but an app name. Linear TV buyers have had program-level visibility for decades. In CTV, that signal is rare, and an entire ecosystem benefits from keeping it that way. Meanwhile, what's sold as "premium CTV" can turn out to be a fake app, a spoofed device, or made-for-advertising junk — and the report a dealer gets back won't tell them the difference.

Dealers are among the biggest local advertisers in the country. Tier 3 stores spend roughly $10 billion a year on advertising — a record, per NADA's 2025 data — with less than 5% of it in streaming today. That number is moving fast, which means billions of dealer dollars are about to shift into a channel most dealers can't see into.

Here's why none of this is acceptable anymore: the transparency is available — it's just not being handed out. Earlier this month, AdExchanger reported on a collaboration between Peer39 and Pontiac Intelligence — the DSP TVMG runs its campaigns on — that delivered show-level reporting for 94% of the impressions bought on a recent CTV campaign. In a channel where buyers are typically lucky to get a show name on 10–15% of what they purchase, that's a different playing field altogether. Not just where the ads ran, but cost-per-acquisition by individual show, fed back into the live campaign. Performance varied by as much as 4x across programming categories, and optimizing against that signal lifted conversions 64%. Peer39 CEO Mario Diez put it best: without these signals, "the Yule log is valued the same as a Yankees game."

So when a vendor tells a dealer that show-level visibility isn't possible, that's about to be no longer true. It's will be a choice — and it's the level of visibility we're building toward for every store we run.

This confirms what I learned firsthand years ago, when I built a direct partnership with a major publisher to test one question: if you buy streaming straight from the publisher instead of through the programmatic chain, does it perform better? It did. And it showed me how little of a dealer's "CTV" budget actually reaches a real screen.

The question I keep coming back to: when you buy CTV, can anyone actually prove you got it?

What we've been building

TrueView Media Group was built to close that gap — and we engineered it into our backend, not just our positioning. Every campaign we run has to answer three questions:

Is it REAL? Publisher-direct buys with transparent media cost, architected to break out to your own results — not the average of strangers. In shared programmatic deals, delivery reporting aggregates across every advertiser in the deal, which means most dealers running streaming today have never actually seen their own store's delivery. We built our structure to break a single rooftop out of that average.

Is it AIMED? Real signal on what's actually driving conversions, pushed straight into how the campaign bids and delivers. Not the generic "in-market auto" segment everyone buys.

Is it PROVEN? Exposed audiences measured against a matched control group, so we can isolate the sales our media actually caused. Attribution finds a sale near an ad. Incrementality proves the ad made it.

No black boxes. No borrowed metrics. No credit for sales you were already going to make.

What's next: we're taking this conversation public

On July 20, I'm joining Car Dealership Guy's Daily Dealer Live Show for a panel on exactly this subject: transparency in automotive advertising — where the billions go, and who's watching.

It's a panel you don't usually see in one room: Shelley Pratt, Director of Brand & Retail Demand Media at Nissan USA; Kristin Coleman, VP of Marketing at AutoNation, who spent nearly a decade inside BMW and Volkswagen before jumping to the retail side; and Mario Diez, CEO of Peer39 — the company behind the show-level reporting breakthrough above, and the person who can tell you what's actually inside a programmatic buy. Sam D'Arc, COO of Zeigler Auto Group, moderates.

We're not doing "the power of TV." We're getting specific about CTV: what you bought, what actually ran on a screen, and what your reporting will never show you. An OEM media leader, a marketing lead at one of the largest public dealer groups in the country, the person who sees the plumbing, and a publisher-direct operator — all looking at the same supply chain from different seats.

If you buy streaming for a dealership or a brand, this one's for you.

The homework I'd give any dealer

Before the episode airs, here's what I'd tell any dealer to do Monday morning: ask your current CTV vendor to show you your own store's delivery — app-level and domain-level, for your rooftop, not a summary blended across the deal. Ask whether your buys are publisher-direct or resold through layers you can't see. Ask what % of your budget went to actual working media.

If they can answer, stay. If they can't, now you know what you're paying for.

We've put the full version of that homework into a five-question vendor audit, and we'll be sharing it alongside the episode. If you want it now — or you want us to run a market-read on your store — reach out.

You made the right call on streaming. Now make sure you can prove you actually got it.

Advertising works better when no one has anything to hide.

— Shane

Shane Helms is the founder of TrueView Media Group, a publisher-direct CTV company built for automotive retail. TVMG runs 100% private-marketplace, publisher-direct streaming with disclosed fees and delivery reporting built to break your store out of the blended average.