Gracenote Links With PubMatic To Power Content-Informed CTV Buying

Gracenote, Nielsen's content intelligence arm, and PubMatic (Nasdaq: PUBM) have formed a strategic partnership designed to make connected TV (CTV) supply easier to find, assess and purchase based on what is actually on screen.

As live sport and high-end entertainment increasingly migrate to streaming, ad spend has not fully followed audiences due to a persistent "content signal" gap: buyers often cannot see the programme behind a CTV impression before or even after committing budgets. Gracenote research indicates that 86% of media planners cite limited show- or content-level data as a barrier to shifting more spend from linear TV to CTV.

The tie-up closes that gap within PubMatic's platform, giving advertisers, agencies and streaming publishers a shared basis to package and transact inventory around content attributes and live events. PubMatic can match bid opportunities against Gracenote's episode-level data in real time at auction, linking advertiser-selected supply to curated deal IDs across its marketplace.

In parallel, PubMatic is tapping Gracenote's programme schedule data to identify and curate live sport inventory, helping buyers reach fans around premium games and events as they happen. The integration feeds PubMatic's AI-powered Live Sports Marketplace, combining moment-based curation with verified programming data so buyers know exactly what they are purchasing.

The implementation runs on the IAB Tech Lab's Agentic Real-Time Framework (ARTF) and is built to operate within PubMatic's AgenticOS. It supports real-time decisioning while adding just 0.1 to 0.5 milliseconds to the bidstream, delivering content intelligence at bidstream speed whether buyers activate via direct deals or PubMatic's autonomous AgenticOS buying infrastructure.

For publishers, the collaboration helps differentiate and monetise premium supply across live sport, TV series and films. Packages are built on Gracenote data and IDs—the same content intelligence many streaming services use to power viewer search and discovery. For buyers, it brings programme-informed precision to deal-based buying, replacing guesswork with verified signals and aligning campaigns to specific content and live events that command attention.

"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 partnership brings Gracenote's CTV content intelligence deeper into streaming advertising and supports PubMatic's ambition to make premium live-sport supply more plannable, verifiable and intelligently buyable in programmatic CTV—via direct deal execution or autonomous agentic activation.

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