Mumbai: Gracenote, Nielsen’s content intelligence business, and PubMatic, the AI-powered ad-tech company delivering digital advertising performance, have announced a strategic partnership aimed at transforming how connected TV (CTV) inventory is discovered, evaluated and transacted.
The collaboration is designed to address one of the most persistent challenges in streaming advertising — limited visibility into content-level signals behind CTV impressions. As audiences increasingly shift to live sports and premium entertainment on streaming platforms, advertising investment has not matched that momentum.
According to recent research from Gracenote, 86% of media planners identified limited show- or content-level data as a key barrier to moving more advertising budgets from linear television to CTV.
Through this partnership, Gracenote’s content intelligence capabilities, including contextual audience segments and live sports scheduling data, will be integrated directly into PubMatic’s platform. This will enable advertisers, agencies and streaming publishers to package and transact inventory based on programming attributes and live event relevance.
Using Gracenote’s episode-level metadata, PubMatic will be able to match bid opportunities in real time during auctions, allowing advertiser-selected inventory to align with curated deal IDs across the platform.
Additionally, PubMatic is integrating Gracenote’s schedule data into its AI-powered Live Sports Marketplace to identify and curate premium live sports inventory. The approach combines event-based curation with verified programming data, offering advertisers improved transparency and targeting precision around high-value sporting moments.
The integration is powered by the IAB Tech Lab’s Agentic Real-Time Framework (ARTF), an industry standard designed for rapid, containerized data integrations in programmatic advertising, and operates within PubMatic’s AgenticOS infrastructure. According to the companies, the implementation adds only 0.1 to 0.5 milliseconds to transaction times, enabling content intelligence to operate at bidstream speed.
For publishers, the partnership is expected to enhance inventory differentiation and monetisation across live sports, television and movie content using Gracenote’s content IDs and metadata systems already used by streaming services for content discovery.
For advertisers and agencies, the integration aims to improve campaign alignment by replacing broad contextual assumptions with verified content signals and event-based targeting.
“Marketers are paying more for CTV impressions and want to know their ads are running during familiar content they can verify,” said Jake Richardson, VP of product partnerships at Gracenote. “What’s made this difficult is the need for the data to work at the speed of the bidstream to inform what gets packaged and bought. Now, with PubMatic, our contextual segments and live sports schedules operate at that critical decision point.”
“Live sports is the most premium inventory in the industry,” said Nicole Scaglione, VP of CTV and Online Video, PubMatic. “What Gracenote brings to our platform is the verified content intelligence that powers impression-level decisioning to be more precise and more measurable, so buyers get the performance without sacrificing transparency. Whether buying agentically or through existing workflows, there are now tens of millions of verified live sports impressions on our platform ready to deliver.”
The collaboration further strengthens Gracenote’s expansion into streaming advertising and supports PubMatic’s broader ambition to make premium live sports inventory more discoverable, verifiable and intelligently transactable within programmatic CTV environments, whether through direct deal execution or autonomous agentic activation.
