Integration embeds Gracenote content intelligence, including contextual segments and live sports schedule data, directly within PubMatic’s platform for activation across premium streaming inventory
Gracenote, Nielsen’s content intelligence business, and PubMatic (Nasdaq: PUBM), the leading AI-powered ad-tech company delivering digital advertising performance, today announced a strategic partnership that makes connected TV (CTV) inventory easier to discover, evaluate and buy based on the programming itself. As live sports and premium entertainment consumption move deeper into streaming, advertising investment has not fully kept pace with audiences. One reason is a persistent content signal gap: buyers often can’t see what is actually airing behind a CTV impression before – or even after – they commit marketing budgets. Recent Gracenote research found that 86% of media planners cite limited show- or content-level data as a barrier to shifting more ad budget from linear to CTV.
The partnership addresses that gap within PubMatic’s platform, giving advertisers, agencies and streaming publishers a shared foundation for packaging and transacting inventory around content attributes and live events. Through the integration, PubMatic can match bid opportunities against Gracenote episode-level data in real time at-auction, enabling specific, advertiser-selected inventory to be associated with curated deal IDs across its platform.
In parallel, PubMatic is using Gracenote’s program schedule data to identify and curate live sports inventory, helping buyers reach audiences around valuable games and events as they air. The integration brings Gracenote’s content intelligence directly into PubMatic’s AI-powered Live Sports Marketplace, pairing moment-based curation with verified programming data to give buyers a complete picture of what they’re buying.
The implementation runs on the IAB Tech Lab’s Agentic Real-Time Framework (ARTF), a standard for fast, containerized data integrations in programmatic advertising, and is built to operate within PubMatic’s AgenticOS. It supports real-time decisioning with minimal impact to the bidstream, adding just 0.1 to 0.5 milliseconds to transactions. The result is content intelligence that works at the speed of the bidstream — available to buyers however they choose to activate, whether through direct deal execution or PubMatic’s AgenticOS autonomous buying infrastructure.
For publishers, the partnership makes premium inventory easier to differentiate and monetize across live sports, TV shows and movies. Packages are built on Gracenote data and IDs, the same content intelligence streaming services trust to power viewer search and discovery. For buyers, it brings program-informed precision to deal-based buying, replacing guesswork with verified content signals and helping campaigns align with the specific content and live events that drive audience 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 collaboration brings Gracenote’s CTV content intelligence deeper into streaming advertising and advances PubMatic’s aim to make premium live sports inventory the most plannable, verifiable, and intelligently buyable in programmatic CTV, whether through direct deal execution or autonomous agentic activation.