The Accuracy Crisis in Advertising: Scott McKinley on Bad Data and the Hidden Tax on CTV

What if nearly half of every dollar spent on Connected TV is being wasted before an ad is ever served to the right person?In this episode of Signal & Noise, Brett House and Rio Longacre sit down with Scott McKinley, one of the advertising industry’s most outspoken voices on data quality and identity. As founder and CEO of Truthset, Scott has spent years exposing a problem that sits at the heart of modern advertising: the vast majority of audience data flowing through digital and CTV ecosystems is far less accurate than marketers assume.Drawing on decades of experience spanning Nielsen, Exelate, and his own entrepreneurial ventures, Scott explains why advertising markets ultimately run on one thing: trust. When buyers and sellers lack confidence in audience quality, the result is friction, inefficiency, and billions of dollars in wasted media spend.The conversation takes a deep dive into Connected TV, where Scott argues that a hidden “accuracy tax” is undermining the promise of precision advertising. Much of today’s CTV targeting relies on probabilistic links between IP addresses and consumer identities—connections that, according to Truthset’s research, are often wrong the majority of the time. The result is a system where advertisers believe they are buying highly targeted audiences, while in reality they are frequently reaching the wrong households altogether.  Scott also shares a provocative thesis about the future of media: publishers, broadcasters, and streaming platforms must embrace authentication if they hope to compete with the walled gardens. Companies like Google, Meta Platforms, Amazon, and Netflix command premium advertising economics not simply because they have scale, but because they know exactly who their users are. Without authenticated audiences, much of the open internet risks becoming an increasingly commoditized marketplace of low-quality impressions and collapsing CPMs.Along the way, Scott and the hosts explore:Why trust is the foundational currency of advertising marketsHow bad identity linkages create massive inefficiencies in CTVThe historical role Nielsen played in establishing confidence in television advertisingWhy many marketing measurement systems reward cheap reach over true effectivenessThe economic case for authenticated audiences across the open webHow publishers can dramatically increase yield by prioritizing data quality over scaleWhy CPMs for truly verified audiences are likely to rise significantly in the years aheadThe need for independent standards and governance to restore confidence in digital advertisingThis episode is a powerful reminder that sophisticated algorithms, AI, and attribution systems are only as good as the data beneath them. If the underlying audience signals are wrong, every optimization built on top of them becomes suspect.For marketers, publishers, and technology providers alike, Scott makes the case that the future of advertising belongs to those who can prove that their data is accurate—and earn the trust that makes markets work.