Gracenote, the content intelligence business unit of Nielsen, has released a report titled TV Audiences Have Shifted. Ad Dollars Have Not: The Need for Content Intelligence in the CTV Era. The findings reveal that 86 per cent of US media planners would move more linear budget to CTV if show-level targeting and reporting were available.

The reallocation would not stop at traditional TV. Sixty-five per cent say they would also consider shifting spend from programmatic video and 63 per cent from display, suggesting richer content intelligence could help CTV win a greater share of digital ad spend across the broader media mix.

The report spotlights a major blind spot in connected TV: what Gracenote defines as the CTV Data Gap. While advertisers have embraced CTV’s audience targeting, the market still lacks a standardised view of the programming attributes behind each ad impression. Without that content layer, buyers lose confidence at every stage — from planning to post-campaign reporting. This uncertainty makes decision-makers hesitant to fund CTV at scale.

“Buyers aren’t asking for more complexity — they’re asking for the same transparency they’ve relied on for decades in linear TV,” commented 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.”

The Gracenote Content Graph helps close this gap by giving advertisers a source-validated view of CTV inventory, including descriptors such as genre, rating and language, along with programme-level metadata and unique content identifiers. This infrastructure enables more precise targeting, stronger brand safety controls and post-campaign proof of performance that buyers can trust.

A recent activation shows the value of this approach. In Q1 2026, a Dos Equis campaign executed by dentsu X through Index Exchange’s SSP used Gracenote CTV Content Intelligence to reach college football fans with precision. The solution delivered 100 per cent of impressions within targeted college football content, including 84 per cent during live College Football Playoff games, while keeping CPMs 7 per cent under benchmark.

Additional findings from the report include:

• 89 per cent of media planners anticipate shifting more budget from linear TV to CTV over the next 12 to 24 months, underscoring CTV’s continued momentum.
• 100 per cent of programmatic traders say show-level transparency is very or extremely important for ensuring brand safety and inventory quality in CTV.
• 95 per cent of programmatic traders agree that the absence of show-level signals prevents them from advocating for more CTV budget during planning.
• 80 per cent of traders would shift budget from audience-targeted to contextually targeted CTV with actionable content signals.
• 47 per cent of media planners cite limited show- or content-level data as a primary barrier to moving more spend into CTV.

The survey was fielded online in March 2026, among 500 US media professionals from media agencies and brand advertisers.

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Categories: Advertising, Articles, Broadcast, Connected TV, OTT, Research

Tags: advertising, CTV, Gracenote, nielsen