Sports content is in demand by advertisers, but as new and live programming comes to connected TV, inventory often lacks key data vital for ad buyers that want to target contextually and transact programmatically, a report from Nielsen’s Gracenote shows.
Gracenote is Nielsen’s metadata unit, helping to power content discovery features for major streamers with program-level information. But since last year it’s also been looking to make a splash in the contextual advertising space, where advanced program-level metadata is all the more key for brands that want to reach audiences and buy advertising by aligning with specific content. Gracenote is among multiple vendors working on contextual advertising and metadata solutions and aims to be the bearer of a more standardized taxonomy amid a highly fragmented CTV landscape.
As audiences continue to migrate to streaming, advertisers too are investing in the channel. IAB forecasts US CTV ad spend to grow 13% this year to reach $26.6 billion.
And as Gracenote’s 2025 Contextual Advertising report shows, brands want to advertise around sports - with bid requests for live sports rising in programmatic platforms - but there are gaps in the information ad buyers have about inventory on CTV.
To highlight the appetite the study cited a one-week sample of recent bid volume, as recognized by Gracenote segments, across publishers, which showed more than 362 million bid requests for only seven televised, live sports competitions, and 1.6 billion request for sports-related, or shoulder, programming.
However, per Gracenote’s report, just 14.3% of sports programming in a sample of available CTV inventory included league information, while 17.9% included team information.
And as live sports inventory gets added to CTV, the vendor contends that basic metadata (which offers program information like genre, language) and content ID-driven metadata (providing more granular information about inventory, like college basketball and team event), won’t be enough.
The report used the example of March 27, when a tennis match in the Miami Open and a college basketball game in the Sweet 16 round of the NCAA March Madness tournament were televised at the same time.
“Both were live sports competitions, but they’re very different otherwise – but not to programmatic platforms, unless they have data that distinguishes them from one another,” the study stated.
Here, the report highlights the importance of pairing content ID with Gracenote’s TV listing data, also known as schedule metadata. TV listing data contains information about when and where a program will air according to a linear schedule, regardless of distribution channel. It goes beyond basic and ID-driven content metadata to offer data like time, date, location, channel, program, if it’s an event qualifier and so on, in the sports example. This can also help between different live events or leagues within the same sport genre.
And schedule metadata helps zero in on new and premium sports inventory that’s available on CTV.
As earlier data from Gracenote showed, sports is now the second-largest category on FAST channels, where inventory is often bought and sold programmatically. In March, Gracenote tracked 172,000 programs on FAST channels, of which 16,000 were sports. TV listing data was able to identify premium sports content found that 7.4% were new and live, including 3.6% team sports competitions (like baseball, soccer, basketball), 0.7% individual sports (darts, poker, racing, etc), and 2.7% sports shoulder content (like a live pre-game show for example).
According to the metadata provider, the ability to provide advertisers more visibility into what content they’re buying ads against via TV listing data helps bolster validation needed to invest in key and tentpole events, like March Madness, and allows them to participate in cross-publisher deals at scale.
The study also used the WNBA to showcase the fragmented nature of individual live games, which poses a challenge for buyers who want to be able to purchase across multiple channels and where TV listing data can help distinguish between other live events that might be happening at the same time.
For example, ABC had national TV rights to the Indiana Fever’s home opener against the Chicago Sky on May 17, but Gracenote data had a record of 859 ABC affiliate networks scheduled to carry the game across traditional television and 1,043 individual streaming channels (including vMVPD, DTC streaming from local TV stations and FAST channels) carrying the game. Notably, there was 21.4% more ad inventory for the match up across CTV than traditional TV.
“Basic metadata indicates when a program is a team sports event, but the ‘WNBA’ designation for the May 17 game, coupled with the ‘live’ and ‘new’ qualifiers, differentiates it from the more than 25 other new and live team sports that were broadcast at the same time,” the report noted.
In addition to sports, schedule metadata can be used for non-live programming, for example, to distinguish between a TV series premiere or finale, a new TV episode and a syndicated TV show.
Want to know more about what’s happening in the contextual advertising space? Next week TVREV’s Alan Wolk is hosting a panel session “The Contextual Revolution: How AI is Rewriting the Rules of CTV Advertising” during The Future of Streamonomics Workshop at the StreamTV Show on June 11. Register here today to join.