Gracenote, the content intelligence business unit of Nielsen, has released a new report highlighting growing demand among advertisers and media planners for greater transparency and content intelligence within connected TV (CTV) advertising.
The report, titled “TV Audiences Have Shifted. Ad Dollars Have Not: The Need for Content Intelligence in the CTV Era,” found that 86% of U.S. media planners would move more linear television advertising budgets to CTV if show-level targeting and reporting capabilities were available.
Gracenote stated that although advertisers have increasingly embraced connected TV for audience targeting, the market still lacks standardized programming-level visibility tied to ad impressions.
The company refers to this issue as the “CTV Data Gap,” where advertisers have limited insight into the actual content environments in which ads appear. According to the report, this lack of transparency affects planning, campaign validation, brand safety and performance measurement.
“Buyers aren't asking for more complexity — they're asking for the same transparency they've relied on for decades in linear TV,” said Ryan Moore, Chief Business Officer at Gracenote. “Bringing show-level visibility to CTV gives the channel a clearer path to bigger budgets, not just from linear but across the digital video ecosystem. When buyers have the insight to validate placement quality and prove impact, CTV becomes more accountable and competitive.”
Beyond reallocating traditional television budgets, the report found that advertisers may also redirect digital advertising spend toward connected TV if richer content intelligence becomes available.
According to the findings:
The report also highlighted the importance of transparency for programmatic advertising teams.
Gracenote stated that 100% of surveyed programmatic traders consider show-level transparency either very important or extremely important for ensuring inventory quality and brand safety within CTV campaigns.
Additionally, 95% of traders said the absence of content-level signals limits their ability to advocate for larger CTV investments during media planning discussions.
To address these challenges, Gracenote is positioning its Content Graph solution as a standardized intelligence layer for connected TV advertising ecosystems.
The platform provides advertisers with source-validated metadata, including:
According to Gracenote, this infrastructure enables more precise contextual targeting, improved brand safety controls and more reliable campaign performance validation.
The company also referenced a recent Q1 2026 campaign executed for Dos Equis through dentsu X and Index Exchange’s SSP, where Gracenote CTV Content Intelligence was used to target college football audiences.
The campaign reportedly achieved:
Gracenote stated that as streaming audiences continue shifting away from traditional television, advertisers increasingly require deeper contextual intelligence to confidently scale connected TV investments.
The report reflects broader industry trends toward contextual advertising, content-aware targeting and more measurable digital video environments as brands seek improved accountability and performance validation across media channels.
Gracenote is the content intelligence business unit of Nielsen. We standardize 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, we power 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.
TechIntelPro empowers B2B technology decision-makers with the latest industry trends, deep insights, leadership perspectives and actionable intelligence to drive both organizational and professional milestones—and thrive on the tech pulse.