Why TV Advertisers Should Care About SOC 2 Certification

When brands and agencies audit their vendor stack for data security, TV advertising platforms rarely come up first. 

But they should.

For TV platforms handling sensitive data, SOC 2 certification provides independently verified proof of rigorous security and compliance, often a prerequisite for data partnerships.

SOC 2 is an independent audit standard for security, availability, confidentiality, and privacy developed by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. An auditor reviews your controls and verifies they're operating effectively. The key word here is independent. It's not a self-assessment. An outside party reviews how the data is handled and confirms if it meets the standard. It’s verification.

Tatari is now SOC 2 certified. And that matters. For a TV buying and measurement platform, the data in scope is significant: your first-party customer data, campaign performance data, and audience matching data across publishers all need to be secured, verified, and governed by documented controls. SOC 2 certification means we have the controls in place to handle all of it responsibly. Not our word — theirs.

SOC 2 is Tablestakes. But Not Everyone Has It.

Here's something that might surprise you: SOC 2 is standard practice across most enterprise software. Your CRM has it. Your analytics platform has it. Your cloud storage vendor almost certainly has it. In TV advertising, adoption has been slower. TV historically has operated on relationships and trust rather than formal verification. That was fine when TV was a simpler, more siloed medium. The rise of streaming has dramatically changed things.

When your campaign data flows through a platform connecting streaming publishers, identity graphs, and measurement systems, you're running on digital-grade infrastructure. The data risks are digital-grade too.

That means you should be asking your TV partners the same question you ask everyone else in your stack: has an independent auditor verified how you handle my data? 

Not every platform can say yes. It's worth knowing which ones can't. SOC 2 is a rigorous security audit, and attaining it can give you confidence that you are working with a reliable vendor.

What’s the Risk of Not Being Certified?

Working with an uncertified platform isn't automatically a crisis. But it is an unverified assumption.  Essentially, you’re trusting that internal processes are rigorous without any outside confirmation. For brands in healthcare, financial services, or pharma, that assumption can block partnerships entirely. SOC 2 is often a prerequisite for any data collaboration in regulated categories, not a preference.

For other advertisers, the risk is more subtle: without independently audited controls, you don't actually know how your first-party data is being stored, accessed, or protected. You only know what your vendor has told you.

Engineering for Trust from Day One

As head of engineering, I can tell you that achieving SOC 2 isn't a sprint. The controls auditors verify, like access management, encryption, incident response, and monitoring, have to be built into how a platform operates, not retrofitted after the fact. We didn't pursue certification and then figure out how to comply. The certification reflects how Tatari was built.

SOC 2 isn't a competitive differentiator in the sense that we're looking for applause or accolades. It's a baseline and one that should be standard across our industry. We pursued it because the brands and agencies using our platform deserve verified assurance.

If you haven't already asked your TV partners whether they're certified, now is a reasonable time to ask. And if the answer is not yet, it's fair to ask when.