Gracenote and The Trade Desk have formed a partnership that will bring Gracenote’s programming intelligence into programmatic connected television buying, giving advertisers more detailed content signals for planning, targeting and reporting.
The agreement marks Gracenote’s first integration with a demand-side platform, the company said in a press release. Through the partnership, Gracenote will make its content IDs, metadata and standardized taxonomy available within The Trade Desk, allowing advertisers to use program-level information when building and activating connected television campaigns.
The integration is intended to address a persistent gap in programmatic connected television, where buyers often have inconsistent or limited information about the shows tied to available inventory, the companies said in a statement. That can leave advertisers relying on broad categories, such as genre, while limiting visibility into where ads ultimately appeared.
Through the integration, advertisers will be able to use Gracenote’s content intelligence to set more specific curation and targeting criteria inside The Trade Desk. They can combine that information with other platform signals and activate campaigns across eligible inventory from connected supply partners.
Advertisers will also gain access to program-level reporting within The Trade Desk, giving them a clearer view of the shows in which their ads appeared and a stronger basis for future planning and optimization.
In one of its recent studies, Gracenote said 91 percent of programmatic traders said the lack of show-level data limits connected television advertising. The same study found 95 percent of media planners said show-level reporting would be valuable.
“While programmatic CTV has scaled significantly, it has remained tethered to a playbook built around user behavior and developed for web and mobile,” Gracenote’s Chief Product Officer Bill Michels said in a statement. “That data remains critical, but content intelligence deserves a more prominent role in establishing targeting criteria and driving performance.”
Michels said Gracenote’s persistent identifiers and content taxonomy will give The Trade Desk customers more control before campaigns run and clearer accountability afterward.
Jay Goebel, the Vice President of Data Partnerships at The Trade Desk, said advertisers increasingly expect the same level of precision and transparency in connected television that they receive across other digital media channels.
“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,” Goebel said.
The partnership comes at a time when The Trade Desk is working to build its own streaming operating system, called Ventura OS, into a viable solution for consumers and advertisers alike. The Trade Desk says Ventura OS is positioned as a more-holistic solution for both, because the company doesn’t have a separate, consumer-facing content or subscription business, as other companies like Roku and Amazon do.
By staying out of content, The Trade Desk says Ventura OS will be able to provide ad buyers with lower costs based on their specific goals while giving consumers an open, objective operating system by which to view content.
Peeling back the curtains a bit, Ventura OS is based on the Android Open Source Project, though it is different from Android TV by existing as a non-Google certified operating system. In that respect, it is more similar to Amazon’s Fire TV operating system, which also uses a non-Google certified variant of Android as the foundation of its technology; Amazon is in the process of moving away from Fire TV in favor of Vega OS, which is built on Linux.
