Welcome to Spotlight on CTV

My goal is to keep you informed about all things streaming TV advertising

Author

Sean Nowlin
March 27, 2025

Another newsletter!?! This one will be fun and informative, I promise. My initial goal is to send this out monthly. I’ll curate a collection of news topics and industry announcements I think will keep you in the loop on all important CTV matters — and sprinkle in some of my own witty commentary and videos we produce at SpotlightIQ. (Sporadically I might announce something specific at SpotlightIQ we are proud of talking about.)

You’re getting this because at some point in the past we have interacted IRL or via email. If you’d like to unsubscribe I will not take it personally! But I hope you stick around and find some value in these words.

First: Who Am I?

If you are receiving this when I hit publish, you probably already know me. But in case the SEO juice works and you have found this years after it initially hit inboxes, I’ll give you a bit of a bio…

I am Sean Nowlin, Founder & CEO of SpotlightIQ. My career began 16 years ago at Progressive Insurance; since then I have racked up programmatic and CTV experiences on both the brand and agency side with brands including StockX, Danone, Fandango, and Pampers, solidifying an approach that blends what I refer to as “an insider’s DNA with an outsider’s holistic POV.”

When I am not helping brands connect with new audiences, I live outside of Cleveland with my wife and two kids; you might find playing guitar or getting emotionally invested in Cleveland’s sports teams. The latter I have apparently passed on to my kids. To them: I am very sorry.

Me snarkily enjoying something smart Tom just said

Thanks to Tom Leonard for being the first guest on Decoding CTV. We are aiming to have at least one podcast per month. In this episode we are focusing on measurement, including the pitfalls of attribution and the promises of incrementality.

AdExchanger - Victoria McNally

It shouldn’t take pressure from large brand advertisers for streaming providers and content owners to offer show-level data. Knowing exactly during which show your ad appears is one reason linear TV advertising is still huge. Many of the publishers claim the Video Privacy Protection Act is the reason show level data should be obfuscated. But it’s really about protecting the premium (read: costly) upfront buying process.

There has been some progress depending on the content owner and streaming service. My prediction is a lot more transparency by the end of 2025.

EMARKETER - Arielle Feger

Combining retailer first-party data with CTV campaigns can be a powerful thing; just look at Amazon DSP and STV campaigns. But we are throwing around “closed-loop measurement” without thinking big picture. Having a ton of closed loops to analyze will create a lot of measurement pockets. Better to think about incrementality instead (scroll back up to watch Decoding CTV to learn more).

AdAge (PAYWALLED) - Garett Sloane

This is a few months old but I wanted to talk a little bit about it. (Also, Garett Sloane is a great journalist in the space and I highly suggest reading his stuff.) Because CTV never used cookies, it was largely unaffected by Google’s yes/maybe/no approach to deprecating the identifier. But with Google allowing IP addresses to be used by advertisers, tying CTV to other digital channels should be come easier. The speed of CTV advertising growth could increase a ton this year thanks to this decision. The best time to test into this would be now!

Thanks again for subscribing. If by any chance this was forwarded to you, throw your email address into the subscribe field and click that button to get future installments!