Gracenote is finally, umm, gracing DSPs.
Nielsen’s content intelligence unit (Nielsen has been busy!), which indexes content and metadata across 55 million titles, 80,000-plus channels, and catalogs in over 80 countries, is partnering with The Trade Desk to bring more granular content intelligence directly to CTV buyers.
At its core, Gracenote is essentially a massive, standardized card catalog for entertainment. Its databases cover TV, movies, sports, music and podcasts, offering up persistent IDs and structured metadata to help platforms recognize and organize content. For TV, that includes everything from program and episode titles to cast, descriptions, images, genres, and channel lineups.
Why This Matters:
CTV transparency has been an ongoing issue for the industry. Gracenote’s own research from a year ago underscores the problem. In a survey of brand and agency execs, four of the top challenges cited around CTV advertising were related to content transparency. Relatedly, more than half of the marketers polled said standardized and unified content metadata would justify increasing their CTV ad spend. (It is Gracenote’s study, sure, but this makes sense.)
That’s where this deal comes into play. Gracenote is bringing its content IDs, metadata and taxonomy into TTD, helping them move beyond genre-based targeting to give advertisers more precise ways to target CTV based on the actual programs being watched.
TTD is Gracenote’s first DSP integration, but not its first move to bring its data into programmatic CTV. Last year, Gracenote partnered with Index Exchange in its first SSP integration, bringing show-level data to the supply side. The Trade Desk extends that push into the buy-side.
Experts React:
Unsurprisingly, TTD is positioning the integration as a way to give advertisers more of the precision and transparency (key messages for them). Here’s Jay Goebel, VP of data partnerships at TTD, on the partnership:
“Advertisers increasingly expect the same precision and transparency in CTV as they do across the rest of their digital media buying. By bringing Gracenote’s programming intelligence into The Trade Desk, advertisers can combine show-level context with the other signals available on our platform to make more informed buying decisions and gain greater visibility into where their ads appear.”
Our Take:
CTV transparency remains one of the hottest adtech storylines of the year, particularly as buyers spend more. They want to know where their ads are running, have data to better target, and get more performance.
Gracenote was actually one of the companies that signaled this was coming late last year. In December, it launched Content Connect, the platform to make its CTV program-level metadata more available to marketers, agencies, and adtech players (SSPs, DSPs).
A TTD integration feels like a big next step in that strategy. Gracenote has the data, of course, to create a more common language around TV programming. The opportunity is getting that data directly embedded into the adtech platforms where CTV dollars are actually being spent. With Index on the supply side and now TTD on the demand side, that push is definitely progressing.
