The CTV Data Gap Explained

Sponsored by Gracenote

CTV has become a central part of the TV experience, but the data available to advertisers has not kept pace with the way viewers now consume television. Consumers can browse streaming environments by title, genre, cast, language, rating, and episode. Platforms and content owners know exactly what is being watched. But in the programmatic advertising workflow, much of that intelligence falls away before it reaches the buyer.

The result is the CTV data gap: a disconnect between the rich program-level information that exists in the viewing experience and the thin, inconsistent signals available for CTV buying, optimization, and reporting.

Gracenote’s recent report, “TV Audiences Have Shifted. Ad Dollars Have Not: The Need for Content Intelligence in the CTV Era,” underscores why this gap matters now. The report (based on a survey of 500 U.S. media buyers, including planners, linear TV buyers, and programmatic traders) found that:

• 47% of media planners cite limited program data as a barrier to shifting linear dollars to CTV.

• 98% of TV buyers say show-level placement is important for campaign success.

• 91% of programmatic traders frequently struggle to explain CTV performance because of limited content-level transparency.

• 86% of media planners say they would shift more linear dollars to CTV if show-level targeting were available — and notably, 65% would also reallocate budget from programmatic video and 63% from display.

The Ad Tech Explained team developed this explainer, in partnership with Gracenote, to explore why the CTV data gap exists, how it limits CTV investment, and what it will take to give advertisers the content intelligence they need.

Let’s start with the basics: What is the CTV data gap?

The CTV data gap is the loss of content-level intelligence between the viewer experience and the advertising transaction. CTV is rich with information. A streaming service knows the program title, episode, genre, cast, language, rating, and other details that help people find and watch content. But by the time an ad opportunity moves through the programmatic pipes and reaches a DSP, the buyer might see only limited or inconsistent information, such as an app bundle ID, device ID, or a broad and unverified genre label.

That means advertisers often have poor visibility into CTV content. They know they are buying a premium video impression, but they might not know enough about the show, episode, or programming context in which that impression appears.

Why does this matter now?

CTV has grown up, but the buying infrastructure around it has not fully caught up. Viewers have shifted decisively toward streaming environments, and advertisers are increasing their CTV spend. However, linear TV budgets remain outsized relative to audience behavior. One reason is that advertisers still have more confidence in the planning and placement conventions of traditional TV than they do in the opaque programmatic mechanics of CTV.

According to Gracenote’s report, 85% of CTV inventory is now purchased programmatically, up from 75% a year earlier. That makes the quality of bidstream data enormously important. If CTV is bought programmatically but the bidstream lacks reliable content signals, advertisers are being asked to shift major TV budgets into an environment where they cannot always see what they are buying.

What specific signals are missing?

Advertisers want more than a vague content category. They want program-level intelligence.

That includes show title, episode information, genre and subgenre, content language, ratings, cast, network, publisher, live versus on-demand status, and whether sports-related inventory represents a live game, highlights, shoulder programming, or unrelated commentary.

The distinction matters. “Drama” can describe prestige television, crime procedurals, teen romance, horror-adjacent thrillers, or family-friendly programming. For a media planner, that level of categorization is too blunt.

Why isn’t this data already available in CTV buying?

In many cases, the data exists, but it is not consistently passed through the programmatic ecosystem. CTV platforms, publishers, studios, and distributors often have deep knowledge of their content. The issue is that programmatic infrastructure was not originally built to carry standardized content intelligence at scale. Publishers might pass different signals in different formats. SSPs might provide varying degrees of program information. DSPs might receive incomplete, inconsistent, or non-standardized metadata.

The result is a marketplace where one publisher’s “comedy,” another publisher’s “sitcom,” and another platform’s “general entertainment” might all describe similar inventory, or wildly different inventory. Without a common language, the ecosystem ends up with a sack of mismatched keys and no clear door.

How does Gracenote help solve the CTV data gap?

Gracenote helps solve the gap by providing a normalized content intelligence layer for CTV advertising. Gracenote’s core business has long been powering search and discovery on the TV screen. Through direct relationships with studios, streaming and pay TV platforms, content distributors, and other sources of TV programming, Gracenote has built the industry’s most comprehensive database of normalized program-level TV and video metadata.

The key is the Gracenote ID. Rather than relying on every publisher or platform to define content attributes differently, the Gracenote ID creates a common identifier for programming across the fragmented CTV ecosystem. Each ID is associated with rich metadata attributes, such as genre, title, episode, language, rating, cast, and other contextual signals.

For advertisers, that means CTV can move into a realm where content intelligence can be activated for targeting, optimization, and reporting. The point is not just more data. It is standardized data that gives buyers, sellers, and platforms a shared way to understand what content is actually being monetized.

What does this unlock for advertisers?

It gives advertisers a clearer path to buy CTV with the same kind of confidence they have historically associated with TV planning, while retaining the flexibility of programmatic execution. With standardized content signals, advertisers can target specific types of programming, align campaigns with suitable content environments, distinguish premium live events from adjacent programming, optimize based on show-level performance, and report back to clients with greater clarity.

For example, by integrating Gracenote’s metadata with Index Exchange’s supply, Dos Equis successfully scaled a niche live sports strategy with zero waste. The campaign delivered 100% of its impressions within targeted college football content, 84% of them during live college football playoff games — all while maintaining CPMs that were 7% under the benchmark.

The information advertisers need already exists across the entertainment ecosystem. The challenge is getting that intelligence into the programmatic workflow in a consistent, standardized and actionable way. As more TV viewing shifts into CTV environments, the industry can no longer afford for rich content data to become thin bidstream data.

About Gracenote

Gracenote is the content intelligence business unit of Nielsen. It standardizes the way the global media and entertainment ecosystem indexes content and associated metadata, allowing it to flow between creators, distributors, platforms, and advertisers. By providing unmatched depth across 50M+ titles and 80K+ channels and catalogs, Gracenote powers the modern search, discovery and navigation experiences that connect people to the TV, movies, music and sports they love — in 70+ languages across 80+ countries. For more information, visit Gracenote.com or follow us on LinkedIn.