Connected TV advertising has stealthily seized the living room, becoming the primary screen for today’s people how to actually watch content. However, the issue that marketers have been facing is the very reason for that growth. Buying CTV ads still feels clunky, expensive, and nowhere near as accountable as running a campaign on digital. It’s reach without performance, and that gap has kept many advertisers at arm’s length.
That’s where PubMatic and MNTN step in. Their partnership aims to break this performance barrier, turning premium streaming inventory into something measurable, transparent, and genuinely results-driven.
This is not a small upgrade. It’s a reset. By combining PubMatic’s high-quality supply network with MNTN’s performance-first platform, they’re opening up premium CTV inventory to a wider market and setting a new standard for what accountability looks like on television. And with U.S. CTV ad revenues projected to hit 42.4 billion dollars by 2027, the timing could not be sharper.
Why CTV Needed a Redefinition
Connected TV advertising was supposed to be the next big thing, but for most brands, it’s been a walled garden with velvet ropes.
Advertisers faced steep entry barriers, long agency loops, and almost zero control over measurement. It looked premium, but it didn’t perform like digital.
You couldn’t track what actually moved the needle, and that killed confidence for smaller or performance-driven marketers.
Publishers didn’t have it easy either. The company was relying on a few major advertisers with high budgets, which made them very vulnerable whenever one of these advertisers decided to reduce their spending.
The mid-market and digital-first buyers, who thrive on transparency and metrics, mostly did not participate.
At the same time, companies like Amazon Ads experienced a 22% increase in ad revenues year on year for 2025, which indicated the exact platforms that advertisers were actually investing in: the ones with guaranteed outcomes.
Thus, the CTV model required a reevaluation, that kind of solution which offered a combination of premium reach and the performance accountability the marketers had come to expect.
Also Read: How Local SMBs Can Leverage Comcast’s Universal Ads API for Targeted TV Advertising
Unpacking the Partnership Mechanics
In order to comprehend the significance of this collaboration, one must delve into the details. PubMatic operates on the supply side, functioning as the discreet powerhouse that links brands to high-quality streaming inventories such as Paramount, NBCUniversal, and Sling, among others.
The major advantage of its Sell-Side Platform is that it offers publishers a direct and clear route to demand, thus eliminating the presence of superfluous middle layers that characteristically obscure the transparency of pricing and performance. That is what supply-path transparency really means: knowing where every dollar goes and what every impression delivers.
With omnichannel video, including CTV, now driving 40 percent of PubMatic’s total revenue and growing 20 percent year over year, the company has built serious scale and credibility in this space.
On the other end, MNTN brings the demand firepower. Its self-serve Performance TV platform takes everything digital marketers value about search and social, such as measurable results, quick optimization, and easy controls, and applies it to television.
The service translates those well-known digital workflows into campaigns of television scale without the conventional agency headache. Advertisers can create, monitor and modify campaigns live, as they would with Google Ads or Meta.
In tandem, PubMatic and MNTN are setting up a connection that at last allows connected TV advertising to operate the same way as the other performance marketing channels. Simple, transparent, and built for results.
The Pillars of Performance
Performance in connected TV advertising has always been tricky to nail down. The PubMatic and MNTN partnership is trying to fix that by building on three solid pillars: intelligence, transparency, and accountability.
The AI-powered optimization is the first pillar and it is led by MNTN. The platform of MNTN employs artificial intelligence to automatically process the changes of bidding, targeting, and the creatives in real-time. Not merely going after reach, it focuses on what is really important: sales, registrations, and visits to the website.
MNTN’s auto-optimization tool studies what is working across thousands of campaigns and instantly shifts budgets toward the best-performing spots. That approach clearly works, since agency-led accounts on MNTN grew four times in 2025. The message here is clear. Advertisers want a TV experience that acts like digital, where every dollar spent earns its proof.
The second pillar is transparency, and that is where PubMatic shines. Traditional ad setups are full of hidden markups and unclear fees. PubMatic clears that up by giving advertisers direct access to premium publishers. No middlemen, no blind buys, just clean supply paths where you know where your money is going. This builds trust and helps brands stay safe while improving their overall returns.
The third pillar is digital-grade attribution, the part that finally brings it all together. PubMatic and MNTN have partnered to link CTV ad exposure with actual online activities such as website visits or sign-ups. Marketers can then evaluate their TV campaigns in the same manner as search or social media. It takes television from being a guessing game to being a performance channel.
Put together, these pillars show that CTV is no longer just about reach. It is about results, clarity, and control, and it is setting a new bar for what smart advertising should look like.
The Dual Value Proposition That Sparks New Growth for All Stakeholders
The PubMatic and MNTN partnership is not another fancy tech handshake. This is a true remedy for a system that has been unbalanced for a very long time. The issue is to provide each side with what they have been deprived of: publishers’ stability and advertisers’ access.
For publishers, this is a real game changer. Their earnings used to rely on a few giant advertisers, which meant one budget cut could throw everything off balance. With this partnership, that risk starts to fade. PubMatic is supplying-path transparency and streaming giants to be directly accessed, while MNTN is introducing a new wave of performance-driven advertisers. These digital-first brands are the ones that had no means to reach premium TV. The outcome is the inflow of new money; it is not the transfer of old money only. Moreover, the preliminary figures support it since the publishers are already experiencing a 10 percent revenue increase. This is consistent and sustainable growth, not a sudden increase in sales.
For advertisers, especially smaller and mid-sized ones, this is their long-overdue invitation to the big screen. Before, platforms like NBCUniversal or Paramount were out of reach unless you had Fortune 500 money. Now, MNTN’s self-serve system makes it feel as simple as running a social or search ad. You can set your goals, track results, and tweak things live. No middlemen. No gatekeepers.
So both sides win. Publishers find stability. Advertisers get access. Thus, the combination of the two proves that connected TV advertising could be nothing less than; open, transparent and true to great maturity, which is its very nature.
CTV’s Future in 2025 and Beyond
Connected TV advertising is finally getting the reset it needed. The PubMatic and MNTN alliance is closing the gap between the broad reach of traditional television and the precision of digital performance marketing. It is the kind of structural change that gives CTV real accountability instead of just better targeting or flashier creative.
The long-tail effect is a major factor that increases the power of this transition. In the past, a huge premium CTV was exclusively for enormous companies with lots of cash to burn. The scenario has now changed and performance-oriented marketers together with small enterprises are entering the very space, armed with the same tools and data transparency. That changes the entire market dynamic. By distributing risk, co-opting innovation, and reducing the whole ecosystem’s reliance on a few major customers, it has some positive impacts like that.
Seeing the future, this alliance gives an impression not so much as a single event but more as a model. It defines what programmatic CTV in 2025 should represent in terms of: clarity, artificial intelligence-powered insight, and showing that advertising on the big screen can bring about tangible business results.
