By Amara Osei

A blunt open letter published on AdExchanger calls on performance-oriented connected TV (CTV, television delivered over internet streaming rather than broadcast) vendors to stop labeling their entire product category "performance CTV." The author's core claim: a pixel, an attribution window (the period after an ad view during which a conversion is credited to that ad) and a CPA column do not amount to a reinvention of television as a performance channel.

The column, which appeared on AdExchanger under the headline "Dear Performance CTV Companies: Please Stop. You're Hurting Us," does not attack measurement itself. The author draws a deliberate line between legitimate accountability work and category rebranding.

What does the author actually object to?

The author lists three practices they explicitly endorse:

• Measure outcomes
• Optimize toward sales
• Make television more accountable

The objection targets the packaging, not the practice. "But if the product is basically a pixel, an attribution window and a CPA column, that doesn't mean we've transformed television into Google," the author writes. The sentence is the column's sharpest verdict, and it frames the rest of the argument: CTV remains a different medium with different mechanics, whatever the sales deck claims.

The author's closing formulation is terse: "TV is still TV." No qualifier follows in the excerpted text.

What is not said?

The AdExchanger piece, at least in the portion released ahead of the full post, names no companies, cites no spending figures and offers no case studies. That absence matters. The critique lands on the category broadly, which weakens its evidentiary weight even as it sharpens its rhetoric.

Readers looking for data on how widely "performance CTV" labeling is used, or whether buyers are actually confused by it, will not find it here. The argument rests on definition and industry positioning, not measurement.

Why does the framing matter for buyers?

The column's implicit warning to advertisers is about expectations. Treating CTV as a search-style performance engine risks judging a brand-building medium by direct-response metrics (cost per acquisition and similar formulas). The author does not spell out the consequences for media planning in the excerpt; that gap leaves the practical implications for advertisers to be inferred.

What the piece does establish is a growing internal disagreement over how the CTV sector describes itself. One columnist has put vendors on notice in public, in writing, by name of category.

AdExchanger has published the full column on its site under its "On TV and Video" section, and vendors in the space now have a stated position to answer — or ignore.