Performance marketers spend most of their time optimizing what they can see: audiences, creative, budgets, and conversion signals. When performance plateaus, it’s easy to assume the model has learned everything it can.
In connected TV, that’s often not the real constraint.
There’s another, largely invisible factor that determines performance outcomes long before targeting or optimization logic ever kicks in: how many opportunities your platform actually gets to evaluate in the first place.
Performance TV is a game of milliseconds
In programmatic CTV, every bid decision happens under extreme time pressure. If a bidder can’t respond fast enough, it doesn’t just lose the auction — it never even gets the chance to participate.
That distinction matters more than most marketers realize. Performance is driven by how selectively you bid. When a platform only sees a subset of available auctions, even the best model is forced to compromise. It bids on impressions that are “good enough” simply to keep pace and spend budget, not necessarily because they’re the impressions most likely to drive incremental impact.
More speed = more selectivity = more performance
Recently, we completed a major bidder upgrade that reduced our tail latency (how long the slowest auction takes) by a factor of 4, allowing us to participate in significantly more auctions for every campaign.
That increase in speed doesn’t just make bidding faster — it expands the decision set available to tvScientific AI. With greater auction exposure, our models can afford to be selective because they can skip marginal impressions and bid only when the expected incremental value is highest. In other words, we’re not just optimizing within auctions. We’re optimizing to see more auctions, too.
This creates a powerful compounding effect and it all happens without increasing ad spend:
- More auctions evaluated → more signals observed
- More signals observed → better decisions made
- Better decisions made → higher ROAS, lower cost per incremental outcome, and stronger performance
Don't waste impressions
Most performance marketers don’t think about infrastructure. But in CTV, infrastructure determines speed, and speed determines opportunity.
When a platform responds slowly, bids time out. Those missed auctions are invisible; they never show up in reports, but they create real opportunity cost. If the model never sees an impression, it can’t decide whether it’s worth buying.
Over time, that lost opportunity accumulates quietly, showing up as performance plateaus, diminishing returns at scale, and “the AI stopped working” moments that aren’t actually model problems.
Drastically reducing bid timeouts translates into participating in more auctions and accessing more inventory for our advertisers—without increasing ad spend. This is why infrastructure isn’t just a backend concern, but a performance lever.
The impact
Based on increased auction participation and improved bid selectivity, we expect this upgrade to drive approximately $5 million in incremental performance across our advertisers over the next year.
To recap:
- More speed → more auction access
- More auction access → more choice
- More choice = more selectivity → better outcomes (at the same spend)
Want to level up your TV advertising in 2026? Get in touch with us.
Interested in hearing from the team behind tvScientific AI? Check this out.
