When “Addressable” Isn’t: What Truthset’s CTV Identity Study Means for IP-Based Targeting

The headline is simple but uncomfortable: when you’re using IP addresses as an identity signal for CTV, you may be targeting the wrong household at least half the time. Truthset benchmarked data from major providers against verified ISP and MVPD records and found that IP-to-email and IP-to-postal “matches” are mostly misfires. In some cases, the error rate exceeds 80%.

To get a view of who is behind a CTV impression, most platforms rely on a chain of identity “hops” – IP to postal, postal to email, email to demographic segments. Each hop introduces its own error, and Truthset’s CEO Scott McKinley estimates that every step in that chain can add “a minimum of 50% error.” By the time a household is labeled as “young families,” “pet owners,” or “in-market auto shoppers,” the odds that you’re right aren’t much better than a coin flip.

Across 25 demographic categories, the average error rate is 55%, based on analysis of 85 million U.S. adults over five years. Truthset estimates that about 40% of open-market CTV ad spend is effectively wasted, which they peg at $7.4 billion in the U.S. alone.

As ISPs roll out large-scale network address translation, multiple households are collapsed under a single public IP, making household-level inference even more fragile. In one example Truthset cites, a household that should have had one to two IP addresses over nine weeks was associated with eleven. Nine of those IPs likely belonged to other households that still received the ads in question.

For advertisers, this isn’t just an academic identity problem; it’s a media efficiency problem. If you believe you’re paying CTV CPMs to connect with a very specific household, but in reality half (or more) of your impressions are reaching the wrong audience, your effective cost of targeting is far higher than you think.

This is where CTV OOH comes in. Connected TV Out-Of-Home uses CTV content and buying logic in real-world environments; bars, restaurants, gyms, hotel lobbies and other high-attention venues. What’s important is the value proposition doesn’t hinge on a fragile IP match. Instead of building elaborate identity graphs to guess which household might be behind a screen, CTV OOH leans on contextual and venue-based signals: where the screen is, what content is playing, what time of day it is and what people are there to do. 

For brand marketers and agencies, that means two things. First, CTV OOH can operate as a more affordable complement to CTV, extending premium video into the physical world without paying a “precision tax” on identity that may not actually be precise. Second, it’s a reminder that “addressable” isn’t synonymous with “accurate”, and that sometimes, the most reliable targeting signals are the ones we can actually observe.

If IP-based identity is this noisy, it’s time to rebalance the mix: combine household-level CTV where it truly adds value with high-intent, contextually rich CTV OOH that captures audiences in the real moments when they’re most receptive. That’s where the next generation of video planning, and performance, is headed.