As the CTV market evolves, calls for transparency in the ecosystem are growing, as advertisers seek stronger signals to inform programmatic buys. Among these calls are buyers reporting a lack of visibility into content signals; labels as seemingly basic as genre are reportedly missing from around 70 percent of bid requests, according to research from Gracenote, the entertainment data business that provides metadata across linear TV, free ad-supported streaming TV (FAST) channels and streaming services.
The company has a storied history, having started life as a music database in the CD era, before branching out into video and in-car entertainment solutions, and eventually being acquired by measurement giant Nielsen in 2017. Last year Gracenote added another string to its bow when it entered the ads business, lauching a CTV ad platform in December, and appointing ad tech veteran Bill Condon as its first Head of Advertising Sales.
This might seem a curious move from a company that has no inventory to sell, but as contextual targeting gains traction in CTV, Gracenote saw an opportunity for its metadata to be layered into ad campaigns. This data has largely been used to power content discovery, distribution and personalistion features by TV platforms and FAST services. Now the company is deploying its metadata to help publishers and advertisers align their content and messaging, according to the newly appointed ads chief.
“We realised we were sitting on this treasure trove of data,” Bill Condon tells VideoWeek. “There is definite opportunity to look at something needed in market, a universal identifier, which goes across multiple platforms, allowing for transparency and content alignment.”
From signals to solutions
Two months into its existence, Gracenote Ads has found a number of advertising use cases for its metadata. Advertisers and agencies can use Gracenote’s data to find content they want to align with, for example a major beer brand wanted to advertise around American college football. Using Gracenote’s platform, and its partnership with supply-side platform (SSP) Index Exchange, the company was able to identify that inventory over a set timeframe.
“Or if you’re GrubHub and you’ve got George Clooney in your big commercial, you can find George Clooney movies or TV shows and advertise there,” adds Condon.
The platform can also be used to avoid content based on Gracenote’s metadata. For example the aforementioned beer brand was reportedly able to bypass inventory that did not comply with legal drinking age rules. Advertisers can then see they avoided this content through Gracenote’s reporting, according to Condon, providing a level of transparency required by clients. He says the beer brand received a report showing every impression served and football game where the campaign ran.
Advertisers and agencies can access the content metadata through Gracenote’s AI-powered Content Connect platform, and describe the type of viewer they are looking to reach using natural language queries. The platform then provides suggested content that the user can review, and uncheck the types of content they want to avoid. The platform then creates a deal ID that the user can activate programatically, through Gracenote’s partnerships with Index and major demand-side platforms (DSP).
Context is key
By leveraging its content signals, Gracenote Ads aims to tap into the growing appetite for contextual targeting in CTV, based on viewers’ preference for ads that are contextually relevant to the content they are watching. A survey by IAS looking at the impact of contextual advertising in digital environments found that 81 percent of UK consumers prefer online ads to match the content they are viewing, and 65 percent have a more favourable opinion of brands that serve contextually relevant ads.
But in CTV, a lack of inventory standardisation and unified context taxonomy has held back contextual targeting, while limitations in accessing video data across different publishers has made contextual solutions difficult to scale. From his background at Xumo and ESPN, Condon says he encountered a number of challenges in integrating contextual solutions, from getting publishers on board to hooking up the programmatic pipes. “That’s a lot work,” he comments.
But he calls Gracenote the “gold standard” for content metadata, offering a scaleable solution that already has buy-in from publishers and platforms, as well as contextual data that covers the characteristics of specific programming, such as theme, mood, scenario, setting and time period.
“If you’re watching a show on streaming, odds are that content from a discovery standpoint, from an EPG guide standpoint, that is powered by Gracenote,” says Condon. “And that for me feels like the true value proposition and differentiator, because it’s there already, and the activation side is fairly seamless.”
He notes that contextual targeting in CTV is still in its early stages, and in cases where advertisers want to appear around a high-profile show, it still makes sense to buy directly from the broadcaster’s sales team. But when it comes to wider programmatic buys, pay-TV companies, TV OEMs and FAST services are increasingly using show-level data to enrich their content, according to Condon, offering more granular targeting opportunities for advertisers.
“Audience buying makes a tonne of sense, but if you look across the programmatic buying ecosystem, our studies have shown that 32 percent of the bids or impressions out there have one signal or less,” says Condon. “So you are potentially finding that right audience, but you’re potentially missing a whole other swathe. Using metadata and content adjacency opens up that aperture to more opportunities.”
Follow VideoWeek on LinkedIn.
