CTV ad buyers, agencies, and brand marketers say one thing in a QBR and do something different when they pick a DSP. Winston Francois runs primary research – buyer interviews, viewer behavior studies, competitive perception audits – so you know what the market actually thinks before you build the next pitch deck. No syndicated panel report substitutes for asking your own buyers directly.
The Problem
Buyers say they trust your measurement. Sales cycles say otherwise.
Every CTV platform claims transparent, verified measurement in its deck, which means the phrase has stopped meaning anything to agency buyers. The objection that kills late-stage CTV deals usually isn't price – it's a procurement lead or media buyer who's been burned by duplicated impressions across FAST apps, or an MMM number that doesn't match the DSP's own dashboard. Most CTV companies have never formally asked their buyers what would move them from skeptical to signed, so sales keeps pitching claims that miss the real objection. That gap shows up as stalled pipeline, not as a line item anyone can point to.
Viewer behavior data comes from Nielsen and Comscore, not from your own inventory.
Decisions about FAST channel mix, AVOD ad load, and SVOD bundling get made off syndicated panel data that's aggregated across the whole category and months old by the time it reaches a roadmap meeting. That data shows what the category is doing broadly; it doesn't show how viewers on your specific app behave fifteen seconds into a mid-roll break, or whether your FAST tier is quietly cannibalizing your AVOD tier. Product and revenue teams end up betting on category-level trends instead of platform-specific behavior, and the miss doesn't surface until a quarter of underperformance later.
The competitive set keeps rewriting itself and nobody owns tracking it.
The Trade Desk is building CTV-native demand tools, Amazon DSP is bundling Fire TV inventory into its own measurement stack, and Roku keeps expanding its own demand side – the competitive map that was accurate in January is wrong by the third quarter. Most CTV companies track competitors through press releases and win-loss anecdotes from individual sales reps, which means positioning decisions lag the market by two or three quarters. Without a repeatable process for finding out how agency buyers actually rank the competitive set, instead of how competitors rank themselves in their own marketing, pricing and packaging decisions get made on assumptions nobody has checked recently.
Nobody agrees whether you're CTV advertising, streaming measurement, or a FAST channel operator.
Category confusion inside a company always shows up outside it. Sales calls it a measurement platform, marketing calls it a CTV ad network, and the RFP response uses a third phrase entirely – so the buyer evaluating three vendors in a spreadsheet can't tell which box you belong in. That confusion costs shortlist spots, because procurement teams eliminate vendors they can't cleanly categorize before a pricing conversation ever starts. Fixing it requires knowing the actual language buyers use to describe the problem you solve, not the language your own team defaults to internally.
How We Help
We start with an audit of what you actually know about your market versus what you're assuming.
From the audit, we build a research plan scoped to specific decisions, not general curiosity. If the question is why late-stage deals stall, that's structured interviews with agency media buyers and procurement leads who evaluated you and didn't sign.
Execution runs on two tracks. Primary research – buyer and agency interviews, viewer surveys, win-loss debriefs – gets run by people who've sat in CTV sales cycles before, so the questions probe past the polite non-answer a buyer gives when a vendor rep is still in the room. Secondary research pulls in IAB, Nielsen, and Comscore data as context, not as the finding itself. We also run competitive intelligence audits that roll straight into the growth strategy work we run for CTV platforms.
Research that sits in a slide deck nobody opens is wasted spend. We build the findings into something sales, product, and marketing can each use without a translator: objection-handling language for sales pulled from actual buyer quotes, a viewer behavior model that feeds into product roadmap decisions, and positioning language marketing can pressure-test in creative before it ships. Where findings touch attribution or measurement credibility specifically, they feed our measurement practice directly.
Most market research vendors hand you a report and leave. We stay embedded through the decision the research was scoped for – if the finding is that buyers don't trust cross-app frequency capping, we're in the room when product decides what to fix first and when marketing decides how to talk about it.
What we deliver
- Buyer trust and measurement perception study – structured interviews with agency and brand buyers on what actually moves them from skeptical to signed
- Viewer behavior analysis across FAST, AVOD, and SVOD tiers – built from your own platform data, not aggregated category panels
- Competitive perception audit – how buyers rank you against The Trade Desk, Roku, Amazon DSP, and Google DV360, refreshed on a repeatable cadence
- Category positioning brief – the language buyers actually use to describe the problem you solve, tested against internal sales and marketing language
- Objection-handling and messaging inputs – research findings translated into scripts sales and marketing can use the same quarter
The CTV buyer who says 'we trust your measurement' in a QBR and the buyer who picks a different DSP six months later are often the same person – the QBR answer is politeness, the renewal decision is the real research finding.
Our Methodology
Our approach runs on a 90-day sprint split into three phases. The first 30 days are audit and scoping: we inventory what you already know, identify the two or three decisions the research needs to inform, and build interview and survey instruments against those decisions specifically, not a generic market research template. CTV research fails when it's designed to produce a report instead of an answer.
Days 30 to 60 are fieldwork: structured interviews with agency buyers, brand marketers, and procurement leads, both active customers and lost deals, plus any viewer behavior analysis your own platform data supports. We recruit from your actual pipeline and customer base wherever possible, because syndicated panels tell you about the category, not about the specific buyers deciding whether to sign with you.
The final 30 days turn findings into working assets: messaging inputs for marketing, objection-handling scripts for sales, and a competitive positioning brief we track through our data reporting and analytics work, since a static one-time report goes stale long before the next board deck asks what buyers think now. Traditional market research firms hand off a PDF; we hand off language your team is already using in calls by day 90.
How We Work
The first 30 days are discovery-heavy: kickoff, stakeholder interviews with your sales, product, and marketing leads, and instrument design. You'll see a research plan and target respondent list by the end of week two, not a vague we're getting started update.
On our side, the team is a lead researcher plus an operator who's run CTV or ad-tech go-to-market before – the second person exists specifically so findings get translated into something sales and product can use, not just a survey summary. From your side, we need access to CRM and win-loss notes, a handful of warm intros to buyers or agencies for interviews, and one point of contact who can unblock scheduling.
Cadence is weekly during fieldwork, a short async update plus a live call every other week, and shifts to biweekly once we're in synthesis and rollout. Most engagements run 8 to 12 weeks for a focused research sprint on one or two core questions, with quarterly refresh cycles for companies that want the competitive and buyer-sentiment picture kept current rather than re-litigated from scratch every time a board member asks what buyers actually think.
Initial engagements typically run 8 to 12 weeks; companies that want a standing research function, refreshed competitive perception tracking, quarterly viewer behavior checks, extend into ongoing quarterly cycles alongside our broader go-to-market work. If your CTV platform is walking into RFPs without knowing what buyers actually believe about your measurement, we should talk.
- Sales objection-handling grounded in real buyer language
- Viewer behavior clarity across FAST, AVOD, and SVOD tiers
- Competitive positioning that reflects current buyer perception, not stale press narrative
- Category language buyers actually recognize in RFPs
If your ctv / connected tv company needs market research & insights leadership, we should talk.
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Frequently asked questions
How much does a market research engagement cost for a CTV company?
A focused 8 to 12 week research sprint on one or two core questions typically runs in the low-to-mid five figures, well under the cost of a full-time market research hire at $120K to $160K in salary and benefits. What moves the number is sample size, how many buyer segments you need interviews from, and whether you want one-time findings or a quarterly refresh cycle.
How long before we see results from a market research engagement?
You get a research plan and target respondent list within the first two weeks. Fieldwork, the buyer interviews and viewer behavior analysis, typically wraps by week six to eight.
How does the market research team integrate with our existing sales and marketing staff?
We embed rather than hand off a report and disappear. The lead researcher works directly with whoever owns the decision the research was scoped for, usually a head of sales or head of marketing, through weekly updates during fieldwork and biweekly check-ins during synthesis.
What makes Winston Francois different from a traditional market research firm?
Traditional research firms hand you a PDF and move to the next client. We stay through the decision the research informs, sitting in the room when product decides what to fix or marketing decides how to reposition.
How do you measure ROI from a market research engagement?
We track it against the decision the research was scoped for: shorter sales cycles once objection-handling reflects real buyer concerns, better shortlist-to-close rates on RFPs after positioning language matches what buyers actually type into a search, and product roadmap decisions grounded in your own platform's viewer data instead of category-wide panels. Most of these show up within one to two quarters after the findings roll into sales and marketing workflows, not immediately after the report ships.
What type of CTV company is the right fit for this service?
Series A through growth-stage CTV companies in the roughly $5M to $100M ARR range, where deals are stalling on measurement trust objections, the competitive set has shifted since the last positioning refresh, or leadership genuinely doesn't know how buyers rank them against The Trade Desk, Roku, or Amazon DSP. The first step is a short audit call to figure out whether the gap is primary research, synthesis of data you already have, or something else entirely.
