Does CTV Have An Addressability Problem?
The ID5 myth-busting series has come to an end, and for the last episode, Mathieu sits down with Paul Gubbins, former VP of CTV Strategy at Publica, to discuss a new frontier: CTV.
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22 September 2026
IP Addresses Aren't the Villain in CTV. They're Just Miscast.
IP addresses have been coming under fire lately, and rightfully so. What once was considered an easily accessible and cheap signal input to identify households is now considered the villain when it comes to household identity. It all comes down to one key issue: IP rotation.A recent ID5 study put household IP persistence below 7% after 30 days. But if you're running household resolution at scale, IP rotation is something you’re already familiar with. You’ve seen the churn in your logs, you already know the worst offenders, and may have even built in some workarounds.
We don’t need to question whether IP rotation is happening. We know it is. The real question is: how is IP inaccuracy impacting your campaigns?
When does IP rotation become a commercial problem for platforms?
Platforms that provide reach, frequency capping, and attribution need to know which household is which. When household identity depends primarily on IP addresses, each of these carries a margin of error that can be tricky to quantify but easy to overlook. Reach figures cannot reliably distinguish one household from two, which leads to overstatement in some cases and understatement in others. Frequency caps reset when an IP changes, so the cap set is not the cap the household experiences. Attribution assigns conversions to an address rather than to the household that was actually exposed.
The buy side is starting to pay attention. In November 2025, CIMM and Go Addressable commissioned research into how accurately IP addresses map to households. In June 2026, Omnicom and Acxiom launched a clean room capability that lets agencies measure reach and frequency across multiple CTV platforms rather than relying on each platform's own reporting.
Both point the same way: numbers buyers once had to take at face value are becoming numbers they can verify.
How ID5 approaches household identity
ID5 treats IP addresses as just one input, not the anchor. Our adaptive identity solution runs on stable, consented signals, hashed emails, ID5 IDs, partner user IDs, and much more, collected through direct publisher integrations, with IP adding scale rather than carrying the identity itself. Because we're observing the IP in use rather than reconstructing it downstream, we get it with context attached.
This means IP rotation is something we can measure and solve for. When a household's address changes, the signals the identifier is built on do not change with it, so the ID persists and the new address simply attaches to it.
Those anchored households also show us how each ISP behaves, and reassignment patterns vary considerably by ISP and by country. Watching them play out against a stable identifier is what allows the same treatment to extend to households where no deterministic signal is available. One household stays one household, whether or not we hold a deterministic anchor for it.
Having a solid identity layer resolves the issues caused by IP rotation. It’s the difference between a household ID that survives rotation instead of resetting with it: reach that counts households correctly, frequency caps that meet expectations, and attribution that lands on the right households.
Give IP addresses the right role
Anchoring identity on a signal designed to move is a choice that’s getting harder to defend. And the pressure is rising: nearly 70% of advertisers plan to increase their spend on CTV this year. It’s an ad tech partner’s job to provide them with a product and results that justify their investments, and that’s hard to do if identity is tied to an unreliable signal.
IP addresses aren’t the problem. Depending on them for identity is. The IP address should be valued for what it is: a signal that offers scale while we leverage other signals for accuracy. Get in touch to find out how a dependable identity layer can improve your campaign performance.
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