Gracenote, Nielsen’s content intelligence business, and PubMatic, a leading AI-powered adtech company delivering digital advertising performance, have 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, a Gracenote statement said earlier in the week, adding recent research found that 86 percent media planners cited limited show or content-level data as a barrier to shifting more ad budget from linear to CTV.

The partnership, according to the statement, 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.