Gracenote Tunes Up Its Contextual Ad Targeting Game With Content Connect

Contextual advertising has been hailed as a way to target consumers without getting overly personal.

You put the right ad in the right part of a show, and voila, it gets noticed. If someone's selling flour, you put the ad in a scene where someone’s baking. And so on.

Gracenote, Nielsen’s programming data unit, has a lot of metadata about shows and what’s in them. That data has been used by studios to let distributors know what's in their libraries. It has also been used to help viewers search for the type of show they want to watch.

More recently, Gracenote has been pushing its metadata as a way to power contextual advertising. The company is now rolling out Gracenote Content Connect, a new platform it says provides agencies, brands, supply-side platforms and demand-side platforms easy access to standardized program level metadata. 

Gracenote says this will help make ad targeting better, improve connected TV ad performance and facilitate more transparent post-campaign reporting.

“Gracenote data is widely recognized as the media industry’s gold-standard for powering consumer entertainment search and discovery broadly,” said Kanishk Prasad, VP of product at Gracenote. “By opening up access to content-based signals which enable smarter CTV ad targeting and better campaign performance, we’re taking a big step towards giving advertisers transparency, control and maximum scale across all CTV platforms.”

Gracenote says Content Connect can be used by buyers in ways that fit best with the way they want to work, whether they are building campaigns the traditional way or building programmatic or private marketplace deals.

The company plans to showcase Content Connect at CES in Las Vegas in January.

# # # 

Everyone seems to know that there are problems holding back the flow of ad dollars into connected TV.

In an open letter being distributed Thursday, Todd Randak, GM at DoubleVerify, is identifying some of those barriers and touting ways that DoubleVerify can help the industry.

“For years, streaming TV has operated without the transparency and accountability advertisers expect across other digital channels,” Randak says.

Some of the issues are caused by regulation, he says. “Unlike other digital advertising environments, streaming TV is constrained by laws such as the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA) and a patchwork of platform-specific rules that restrict access to content-level data. Publishers often cannot share the very signals advertisers rely on to verify media quality, ensure contextual relevance, or optimize spend. At the same time, the industry still lacks a scalable, standardized way to validate that CTV ads are truly viewable and delivered to powered-on TVs.”

What's needed is more collaboration, greater interoperability and more shared standards that balance the needs of being able to measure ad delivery and results, while still complying with existing regulation.

Fortunately, DoubleVerify has two initiatives it says address the situation. One is DV’s Certified Transparent Streaming program. The other is the company’s support for an Open Measurement SDK for CTV.

In his open letter, Randak says the Open Measurement SDK will help scale DV’s CTV viewability coverage, enabling advertisers to monitor and address the ad spending currently being wasted on non-viewable ads and ads that are served to televisions that are turned off.

“Publishers need frameworks that enable them to remain compliant while meeting the expectations of advertisers. Advertisers need consistent signals to plan and measure effectively. And the industry needs interoperable standards that reduce fragmentation and rebuild trust across the streaming ecosystem,” he says. 

DV’s solutions can help the industry move forward, but more is needed, he argues. “We invite platforms, publishers, agencies, and measurement partners to join us in building a streaming ecosystem that is regulatory-compliant, measurable, open, and accountable.”

# # #

Pubmatic and BrightLine are teaming up on their own initiative to make CTV advertising more effective.

The new arrangement brings BrightLine’s interactive and addressable CTV ad formats to PubMatic’s programmatic platform. The companies say this gives advertisers the ability to connect engagement to verified purchase outcomes at scale.

“This is not just interactive TV. It is interactive TV as a performance channel,” said Nicole Scaglione, VP of CTV, PubMatic. “By combining BrightLine's best-in-class creative experiences with PubMatic's AI-first programmatic infrastructure and extensive commerce media integrations, advertisers can now connect attention and interaction to measurable business outcomes, with purchase-level insights powered through PubMatic’s commerce-media partnerships.”

Brightline’s interactive ad format are used by many major streamers and by top advertisers. 

The company points to data from a study by FreeWheel and MediaScience showing that 75% of viewers find interactive ads unique and 71% find them attention-grabbing. The interactive CTV ads also deliver 36% higher brand recall and correlate with higher purchase intent.

“This partnership makes high-performing, interactive formats accessible to every advertiser through the open programmatic ecosystem,” said Rob Aksman, president and chief strategy officer at BrightLine. “Together with PubMatic, we’re bridging the gap between interactive engagement and commerce outcomes, bringing accountability to every impression.”

The new Brightline-PubMatic arrangement is launching at a propitious time. The holidays are upon us and football season is in high gear, boosting streaming viewership and advertisers' demand.

# # # 

The IAB Tech Lab said it is releasing a new version of its Deal API, providing a new standard that it says streamlines and automates programmatic deal synchronization between SSPs and DSPs.

"The Deals API sync capability directly addresses a key inefficiency in the programmatic supply chain for high-value, curated, private marketplaces," said Anthony Katsur, CEO, IAB Tech Lab. "The ability to prove transparency to all parties involved in packaging and selling the deal, including curators, will improve accuracy and grow confidence in deal-based media transactions, which are a vital opportunity for publisher growth in a time of reduced traffic."

The new API explicitly identifies the businesses involved in the packaging of a deal, including the seller, packager and curator. 

“Beyond enabling better collaboration and allowing for cleaner data as deal volumes grow, the API novelly addresses curation by bringing transparency to deals including information about who is involved and in what capacity. It paves the way for a more transparent, deal-driven programmatic marketplace in an ecosystem historically challenged by complexity and intermediaries,” said Anna-Maria Nalepa, senior technology product manager at Basis Technologies.