Mumbai: Gracenote, Nielsen’s content intelligence business, and The Trade Desk have announced a partnership to bring content-level intelligence to programmatic connected TV (CTV) buying, enabling advertisers to use show-level data for more precise targeting and reporting.
The integration marks Gracenote’s first partnership with a demand-side platform (DSP). It will allow advertisers to access Gracenote’s content IDs, metadata and standardised taxonomy within The Trade Desk, helping them move beyond broad genre-based targeting and establish more granular content curation and targeting criteria.
Advertisers will be able to combine Gracenote’s content intelligence with other signals available on The Trade Desk and activate campaigns across eligible inventory from connected supply partners. This expands the potential reach of Gracenote’s content signals beyond its direct supply-side platform (SSP) integrations.
The partnership also provides program-level reporting, allowing advertisers to identify the programmes in which their ads appeared and use those insights for future media planning and campaign optimisation.
The move addresses a gap in programmatic CTV, where buyers can often have limited and inconsistent information about the programming associated with available inventory. Gracenote’s 2026 CTV advertising study found that 91% of programmatic traders surveyed said the lack of show-level data limits CTV advertising, while 95% of media planners said show-level reporting would be valuable.
Bill Michels, Chief Product Officer at Gracenote, said, “While programmatic CTV has scaled significantly, it has remained tethered to a playbook built around user behaviour and developed for web and mobile. That data remains critical, but content intelligence deserves a more prominent role in establishing targeting criteria and driving performance. With Gracenote’s persistent identifiers and rich content taxonomy, we are bringing this scale to The Trade Desk, providing customers with greater control before campaigns run and clearer accountability after.”
Jay Goebel, Vice President of Data Partnerships at The Trade Desk, said, “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. This integration gives advertisers another way to apply the data that matters to them, with greater choice and control across their CTV campaigns.”
The partnership expands Gracenote’s advertising capabilities, building on its work with publishers and SSPs to bring show-level content intelligence into the CTV advertising ecosystem. By integrating these signals directly into The Trade Desk, the companies aim to connect content enrichment and inventory packaging with campaign planning, activation and optimisation.
The integration is expected to give advertisers greater control over CTV targeting while providing additional visibility into campaign delivery and the content environments in which their ads appear.
