At CES 2026, TV Finds Itself at an Identity Crossroads

The IP address is looking increasingly wobbly

As TV delivery and advertising become more digital, the business should have two big things going for it:

• TV never had cookies, or mobile IDs, so it doesn’t have to deal with all this nightmarish ‘signal loss’ the industry is constantly talking about

• A large number of people streaming TV are logged-in, whether they’re watching Peacock or Netflix or YouTube

Therefore, TV ad targeting should be simple, right? If only that were true.

Rather, increasingly, the would-be backbone of CTV ad targeting - the IP address - is looking more and more unstable. At the same time, fragmentation is proliferating in TV - creating ID turf wars, and a general sense that publishers can’t get out of their own way.

There is a lot of “we can solve this problem - if you do it my way,” said JiYoung Kim, Chief Operating Officer, WPP Media, at an OpenAP-hosted event this week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Throw in the potential for AI-driven media optimization - still mostly a maybe in TV - and the mechanics of CTV ad targeting feel uncertain, despite the medium’s vast potential.

First off, there’s the IP address itself. A few years ago, there was a worry that IP address data was vulnerable to regulators, as legislation such as the California Consumer Privacy Act contained language that could be interpreted as seeing IPs as personally identifiable information, and thus off limits for marketers.

That hasn’t really come to fruition. But instead, you hear TV buyers and ad tech execs talking about how IP addresses are becoming less viable - and useless unless they have access to the right supplemental audience graph data.

“IPs were always questionable,” said Amol Waishampayan, Co-Founder at fullthrottle.ai. “But volatility in TV connections is the new problem.” He’s referring to the fact that many TV makers are in the process of switching from employing IP4 to IP6 to assign device identifiers, which makes IP addresses prone to changing far more frequently.

“The era of IPV6 has brought dynamic addressing, carrier grade NAT, router resets, ISP practices, and IPv6 privacy features that rotate parts of the address. All of that to mean IPs change too often to function as a durable household identifier.”

In addition, more people are using VPNs in their home for a variety of reasons (including - wait for it - to access porn sites in Florida), further obfuscating IP addresses.

At the aforementioned OpenAP event, CEO David Levy and CIMM lead John Watts cited a recent study indicating that because of flimsy IP address consistency and other factors, TV ad targeting is frequently inaccurate.

“Your ad dollars are not reaching who you think you are paying for,” said Watts. “How did no one notice?”

“Identity is really difficult,” added Levy. “When you look at identity data [in CTV campaigns], you think you have one audience, and then it gets translated. Then you look under the hood - it’s actually not the case.”

Ok, so you might just ask, why bother with IP addresses? For instance, you can just use Amazon’s first-party, uber-rich data, and target ads all over the place. Well, not everyone in TV wants to make Amazon more dominant.

Or, you can just use hashed email addresses for targeting and matching. That’s long been the Trade Desk’s take with its UID 2.0 identifier. It’s also the strategy at Yahoo - which as a sleeper CTV contender boasts of 235 million digital IDs which can be used all over the TV ecosystem, according to Alia Lamborghini, SVP of Global Revenue at Yahoo DSP, at a CES presentation highlighting its In-Flight Outcomes product.

According to Lamborghini, Yahoo’s DSP can now reach 85% of adults 18-34 on CTV, and a full 100% of non-walled garden viewers.

That’s the trick though, right? Increasingly, almost everyone in TV is using the walled garden playbook, meaning you may have to go through their identifier, their proprietary spine, to do the kind of targeting you want. Disney is said to be particularly inflexible on this issue, as is Netflix.

“Let’s say we build the most high quality audience,” said Kim. “When we go to activate - that’s when all hell breaks loose.”

One way around this mess is to potentially target households, rather than individuals, on TV - an old-school tactic that is seemingly having a renaissance - and is espoused by ad tech firms like Viant and Fullthrottle. As Fullthrottle’s Waishampayan noted, households worked for the TV industry for decades, and continue to pay dividends for direct mail of all industries.

Regardless, it would seem to benefit TV to just make things much simpler, by adapting a single, universal CTV identifier that everyone plugs into. That would make dollars flow more easily and allow for AI optimization to kick in.

Not gonna happen, said Levy, who likened this idea to companies like Meta and Google sharing their ID information with competitors. “Agencies and publishers are investing heavily in their own data solutions,” he said. “We all want more signal. The reality is - with all that investment - they are not going to give it away for the public good. That’s just not going to happen in this space.”

[It seems worth pointing out here that it’s a bit odd when you have an industry trade group (CIMM) and an industry consortium (OpenAP) pointing out how flawed current TV ad targeting is, and how each of the big media companies is touting just how amazing their individual addressable TV products are.]

For its part, OpenAP is advocating for a centralized translation layer for all constituents to use Open Identifier. Thus far, it’s not clear how quickly this is being adopted. But if agencies and brands don’t start leaning in to some sort of standardized, accurate targeting solution, “the alternative is the easy button for brands to go direct to the walled gardens,” said Levy. Particularly Meta, which is promising (threatening) to take nearly every aspect of advertising on for brands.

TV needs to make targeting easy. Right now, it’s less so, which seems risky in the current outcomes-obsessed climate.

“Our biggest threat is the CMO walking over to CFO and saying, ‘let’s just cut this by 10 percent,’” said Tim Natividad, President of U.S. Advertising Sales and Marketing at TelevisaUnivision - and move those budgets to tech platforms.

Thus, it would seem to be imperative for the broader TV ecosystem to get its act together on identity. Maybe all these patchwork solutions and graphs will work together just fine. So far, the market is grappling with an abundance of inventory and little evidence that smaller, data-centric brands are coming on board.

That may be asking a lot. As Michael Law, CEO, Carat North America, put it, all these players want to “own a moat around something that makes them more valuable,” he said. “So you get more walled gardens.”

Things might be different “if we really cared about consumer experience… and not just making more money.”