NEW YORK—As part of a push into the contextual advertising business, Nielsen’s Gracenote has announced that it is developing new contextual categories to give advertisers greater visibility into the content that their messages run against on connected TV (CTV) and that it is working with a number of partners on the effort.
High quality Gracenote metadata has long been trusted by the world’s leading publishers and streamers to power innovative video experiences and advanced content discovery, Gracenote reported. With this announcement, Gracenote is making its program genres, ratings, content types and advisories available as the common taxonomy for media buyers and sellers to transact direct and programmatic CTV buys.
For the push into contextual advertising, Gracenote said it is teaming with Peer39, the leading global provider of contextual suitability and quality solutions for modern marketers, to make Gracenote-powered contextual CTV categories available on Peer39 partner DSP platforms.
In addition, Gracenote has tapped Magnite, the largest independent omnichannel sell-side advertising company, as the first SSP to support and scale these new CTV categories.
Gracenote reported that the result allows such publishers as Cineverse, DirecTV Advertising, Philo, Tastemade and Xumo to enhance their programming with Gracenote Contextual Video Data. Gracenote Contextual Data describes individual TV shows and movies in ways that provide more visibility and transparency for media buyers who want additional signals around content.
Such agencies including Cannella Media and Ocean Media also intend to use Gracenote CTV categories to optimize targeting and deliver incremental reach, Gracenote also said.
“For CTV advertising to reach its full potential, scale and transparency are critical,” said Trent Wheeler, chief product officer at Gracenote. “Gracenote is uniquely positioned to become the taxonomy for the CTV marketplace providing program-level metadata for sellers and buyers to transact on. The insight into content enabled by Gracenote Contextual Video Data will help publishers optimize their CTV inventory and advertisers reach target audiences at scale.”
Gracenote data provides unprecedented granularity at scale for programmatic ad buys. Publishers can use Gracenote’s deep descriptive metadata to package ad inventory to unlock incremental revenue for content catalogs. Magnite’s controls allow publishers to determine when this content metadata is shared with advertisers.
For example, if a sports documentary is only identified as a "documentary," it may miss out on suitable bids for “sports enthusiasts” and other sports categories, limiting incremental reach. A “drama” set in Paris could have multiple sub-genres such as “fashion” and “travel” that would appeal to luxury goods or airline advertisers opening new ad matching opportunities. CTV publishers and content owners can be assured that media buyers will not have access to show, series or episode titles for targeting.
“CTV represents the future of television advertising and the ability to pass standardized contextual data signals at scale will improve results for advertisers and lead to more investment for publishers,” said Mario Diez, CEO of Peer39. “We’ve spent the past several years looking to bring more effectiveness to CTV ad targeting. Together with Gracenote, we hope to create a strong ecosystem where advertisers, publishers and consumers all benefit from content supported through contextually relevant advertising.”
Making Gracenote’s contextual CTV categories available through Peer39 will allow advertisers and agencies to better understand available programming and more effectively target audiences to achieve their advertising goals. Media buyers can also use keyword targeting to match against or exclude actor, director, sports type, mood, theme, subject, location and other types of in-content metadata. Gracenote’s program ratings and parental advisory categories give brands the confidence to lift channel blocks while avoiding unsuitable content.
