Gracenote, the content intelligence business unit of Nielsen, today released a report arguing that a structural absence of program-level data across connected television is preventing advertisers from reallocating budgets at scale. The report, titled "TV Audiences Have Shifted. Ad Dollars Have Not: The Need for Content Intelligence in the CTV Era," was published on May 14, 2026, ahead of the upfronts advertising season, and draws on a survey of 500 U.S. media professionals fielded between March 5 and March 23, 2026.

The headline finding is direct: 86% of media planners say they would move more linear TV budget into CTV if show-level targeting and reporting were consistently available. That figure, which cuts across media agencies and brand advertisers, is paired with evidence that the reallocation would reach beyond traditional television. According to the report, 65% of respondents would also consider shifting spend from programmatic video and 63% from display - a finding that positions CTV as a potential beneficiary not just of declining linear budgets but of a broader reorganisation of digital advertising investment.

The scale of the problem

Industry projections for CTV ad spend this year exceed $30 billion, according to the Gracenote report, with the IAB and EMARKETER each projecting 14% growth. EMARKETER places total U.S. CTV spend at just under $38 billion for 2026. Yet despite this trajectory, CTV spending is not projected to surpass linear TV until 2028 - and even then by only 2%, according to the report. Viewing behaviour moved faster. According to Q4 2025 data from Nielsen NPOWER and Nielsen Media Impact, CTV accounts for 54% of television time among people aged 2 and older. Among adults aged 18 to 34, that figure reaches 80%.

The gap between where audiences spend their time and where advertising budgets are concentrated is not a secret. What the Gracenote research attempts to quantify is why that gap persists. The answer the data points toward is a specific technical deficiency: the absence of standardised program-level metadata across the CTV supply chain.

"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."

Why programmatic buying makes this worse

The problem is amplified by how CTV inventory is transacted. According to IAB data cited in the report, 85% of CTV inventory is purchased programmatically, up from 75% the previous year. Programmatic systems are built to pass audience signals - demographic data, behavioral segments, device identifiers. They were not built to carry content signals. As the report puts it, the lag is largely the result of a mismatch between intended use and desired use.

The practical consequence shows up in the bidstream. A March 2026 analysis of industrywide bid request data by contextual data company Peer39, cited in the Gracenote report, found that only 40% of CTV bid requests contain usable program-level content signals. Within that 40%, transparency remains thin: 33% carries some genre data, while 7% has shallow or inaccurate genre classifications. Series titles, network information, and episode-level data are inconsistently present. A sample dataset from Rain The Growth Agency, included in the report, shows the variation across three SSPs serving inventory for a single publisher: series information was defined in 72.3%, 70.3%, and 53.1% of bid requests from each SSP respectively, while title data ranged from 65.4% down to just 6.1%.

This inconsistency is not purely a technical failing. According to the report, individual publishers currently choose which content signals to pass to advertisers in programmatic bidstreams, and SSPs are similarly variable - sometimes providing different levels of program signals even for content from the same publisher. No standardised requirement exists to attach program metadata to an impression.

The cost of this fragmentation is substantial. According to the ANA's Q2 2025 Programmatic Benchmark report, cited in the Gracenote findings, $26.8 billion in global ad waste was attributable to programmatic inefficiencies, with CTV representing 44% of total spend. Separately, data company Truthset estimates more than $7 billion in ad waste results directly from bad data signals.

What buyers say they need

The survey results are consistent across buyer types. Among programmatic traders, 100% say that show-level transparency is very or extremely important for ensuring brand safety and inventory quality in CTV. That is the highest possible expression of unanimous concern. A further 95% of programmatic traders say the absence of show-level signals prevents them from advocating for more CTV budget during planning. And 91% say the lack of content and show-level data is a limiting factor in their campaigns - with 52% describing it as a daily or weekly issue.

Media planners and linear TV buyers show comparable patterns. Among media planners, 47% cite limited show- or content-level data as a primary barrier to moving more spend into CTV - ranking it second only to insufficient measurement and attribution, cited by 49%. For TV buyers, 98% say show-level placement is important for campaign success. Among programmatic traders, 80% say they would shift budget from audience-targeted to contextually targeted CTV if actionable content signals were available.

What kind of content data do media planners want most? According to the survey, 49% want show genre and category information, 49% want publisher and streaming app identification, 45% want specific show titles, and 45% want content mood and sentiment data. Content language was cited by 26%. The report notes that genre alone - the one attribute most likely to appear in bid requests at all - is too broad to drive meaningful ad placement decisions. Knowing that a programme falls into the drama category provides little guidance for brand suitability decisions or audience alignment when the drama category encompasses content as varied as family procedurals and prestige crime series.

Fragmentation at the distribution level

The problem of missing signals is compounded by the fragmented nature of CTV distribution itself, which the report illustrates through a single example. The 2026 NCAA College Football Championship game was broadcast on January 19, 2026, across 167 national and local ESPN affiliates. The same event reached viewers across more than 5,300 individual CTV distributors - a ratio of more than 31 to one. Those CTV distribution points included vMVPD providers such as DirecTV, Fubo, Sling, and YouTube TV. The game drew 30.1 million viewers, the largest college football audience since the inaugural CFP National Championship in the 2014-15 season.

For an advertiser seeking to verify placement quality across that inventory, the absence of standardised content identifiers means operating with incomplete and unreliable signals about where impressions actually appeared. The report makes the case that this creates a systematic disadvantage compared to linear TV, where content adjacency has long been a standard part of the buying conversation.

Budget implications follow. Among media planners, 40% say the lack of show-level data puts CTV at a significant or moderate disadvantage from a budget perspective. Only 4% of planners currently allocate no linear TV budget at all, while 42% allocate 41% or more of their total ad budgets to linear TV.

The Dos Equis case and the Content Graph

The report includes a live example of what becomes possible when content intelligence is integrated into programmatic execution. In Q1 2026, a Dos Equis campaign executed by dentsu X used Gracenote CTV Content Intelligence through Index Exchange's supply-side platform to reach college football audiences. The campaign targeted College Football Playoff games and associated shoulder programming across premium streaming inventory, creating what the report describes as a closed-loop solution running from activation through post-campaign reporting. According to the report, 100% of impressions aired within college football content, 84% aired during live CFP games, and CPMs came in 7% under benchmark.

The technical infrastructure enabling this kind of execution is the Gracenote Content Graph, which provides advertisers with source-validated CTV inventory data. According to Gracenote, the Content Graph includes descriptors such as genre, rating, and language, along with program-level metadata and unique content identifiers. These identifiers - known as TMS IDs - enable consistent show tracking across multiple distribution platforms, which addresses the frequency management and reach measurement challenges created by CTV fragmentation. Gracenote's Global Video Data covers titles across 80+ countries and territories in 70+ languages, with TV listings for 75,000+ linear channels, approximately 2,100 FAST channels, and availability data for 260+ streaming catalogs.

This infrastructure has been building throughout 2025 and into 2026. Index Exchange became the first SSP to embed Gracenote contextual intelligence directly into its platform in September 2025, adding brand safety segments and Do-Not-Air controls to programmatic workflows. Gracenote then launched Content Connect in December 2025, providing agencies and DSPs direct access to standardised program-level metadata for targeting. In January 2026, Index Exchange and Gracenote extended that collaboration to introduce show-level reporting through Spectrum Reach at CES.

Why the market has not solved this yet

The Gracenote report is candid about the structural reasons the problem persists. No single company can unilaterally resolve data transparency across the CTV advertising ecosystem. Publishers make individual decisions about what signals to pass. SSPs apply their own variable approaches. DSPs and buyers work with whatever arrives in the bidstream. The result is a system where content metadata is inconsistent even within a single publisher's inventory depending on which SSP is handling the transaction.

This absence is not without precedent as a structural challenge in programmatic markets. The IAB Europe published a detailed guide to programmatic CTV in April 2026 identifying standardisation as a central barrier to efficient programmatic execution across connected television. IAB Tech Lab released CTV ad format standards for public comment in December 2025, covering specifications for the streaming inventory layer while acknowledging that content metadata requirements remain a separate and unsolved challenge.

The Gracenote survey data shows that 89% of media planners anticipate shifting more budget from linear TV to CTV over the next 12 to 24 months. The pressure is already there. What the data makes clear is that the infrastructure to support those moves at scale is incomplete - and that the missing piece is not audience data, where privacy regulation creates genuine constraints, but content data, which the report notes poses no privacy risk and should in principle be available in ample supply.

Among media planners who would increase CTV spending if show-level data were available, the distribution of potential shifts is notable: 39% would move 11% to 20% of their budgets, 29% would move 6% to 10%, and 32% would shift 21% or more. Applied to a market where linear TV budgets remain substantial - 42% of media planners allocate 41% or more of their total budgets to linear - those percentages represent a material volume of spending that has not yet moved.

Relevance for the programmatic community

For the marketing professionals and media buyers who follow PPC Land, the Gracenote research makes explicit something that has been implicit in the programmatic CTV conversation for several years: the channel's growth is constrained not by audience reach or ad spend intent, but by infrastructure. The question of whether CTV can compete for linear TV budgets is, in large part, a question of whether the programmatic bidstream can carry enough content context for buyers to make decisions with the same confidence they have in traditional television.

Gracenote published an earlier survey in October 2025 drawing on responses from 600 U.S. brand and agency executives, which found that 32% viewed CTV as ineffective despite rising spend - a finding attributed to the same mismatch between audience targeting tactics and brand-building objectives. The 2026 report reinforces those findings with a larger and more operationally specific survey population: 500 professionals including media planners and strategists (n=206), linear TV buyers (n=213), and programmatic/digital video traders (n=81).

PPC Land has tracked the Gracenote data infrastructure story from its early contextual targeting partnerships in July 2024through to the February 2026 deals that brought its metadata into Samsung's smart TV platform and renewed its partnership with Google. A detailed analysis of those partnerships is available on PPC Land.

The practical takeaway from the Gracenote 2026 report is straightforward: the data signals that would justify larger CTV budgets are technically achievable but not yet standardised. Until they are, a significant portion of the advertising industry's intent to move money toward streaming audiences will remain hesitant.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Gracenote, the content intelligence business unit of Nielsen, surveyed 500 U.S. media professionals from media agencies and brand advertisers, with respondents including 206 media planners and strategists, 213 linear TV buyers, and 81 programmatic/digital video traders.

What: A new research report titled "TV Audiences Have Shifted. Ad Dollars Have Not: The Need for Content Intelligence in the CTV Era" documents the CTV Data Gap - the absence of standardised program-level metadata in the CTV programmatic supply chain - and quantifies its effect on budget allocation decisions. Key findings include 86% of media planners willing to shift linear budgets to CTV with show-level data, 100% of programmatic traders citing show-level transparency as very or extremely important, and only 40% of CTV bid requests containing usable program-level signals.

When: The report was published on May 14, 2026, ahead of the upfronts season. The underlying survey was fielded online from March 5 to March 23, 2026.

Where: The research covers the U.S. CTV advertising market and is based on responses from U.S. media agencies and brand advertisers. The Dos Equis case study involved a campaign executed in Q1 2026 through Index Exchange's SSP across premium streaming inventory.

Why: CTV now accounts for 54% of U.S. television time among people aged 2 and older, yet CTV ad spend is not projected to surpass linear TV spending until 2028. According to Gracenote, the main obstacle preventing a faster reallocation of advertising budgets toward where audiences actually are is the absence of standardised show-level data in the programmatic bidstream - a technical gap that leaves buyers unable to verify content adjacency, manage brand safety, or report on placement quality with the same confidence they have in linear television.

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