Report: Gaps in CTV safety put brands at risk
September 29, 2026



Peer39 has released a report titled The Brand Safety Illusion: Why Web-Level Verification Doesn’t Travel to CTV, which finds that CTV impressions can receive brand safety classifications even when the information describing the programme on screen is incomplete or self-declared.

Brand safety tools built for the web can read the page surrounding an ad. CTV has no page to scan, so buyers rely on fields such as title, genre and rating supplied with a bid request. Those fields can be partial or absent, limiting what a safety classification can tell buyers about the content behind an impression.


Key findings include:

– Peer39 compared bid requests for Man of Steel with authenticated information about the film. None of the observed requests carried the complete set of genre and mood descriptors. In 58 per cent of cases, the bid requests supplied only one genre: Fantasy; and roughly 11 per cent had no content object at all.

– In a separate 45-day analysis of CTV placements, 3.8 per cent of impressions showed direct evidence of invalid traffic. Another 10.7 per cent could not be confirmed as either valid or invalid using the available signals.

“When a buyer sees ‘safe,’ they should know what was actually checked,” commented Mario Diez, CEO of Peer39. “A partial genre tag can’t tell the full story, and an impression that can’t be verified shouldn’t be treated the same as one that has been cleared. Buyers need those distinctions before they spend.”

The report also examines the limits of film and television ratings, how web-based suitability rules can misread CTV genres, and the questions buyers can ask to determine what their current controls verify. It recommends making authenticated programme and traffic signals available before a bid is placed, when they can inform the buying decision.