Metadata: The missing link in CTV advertising transparency

By Bill Michels, chief product officer

The internet has transformed how we watch TV. With connected TV (CTV¹) access nearly ubiquitous in the U.S., American adults are now spending nearly 45% of their daily TV time² with content they get from the internet. 

The IAB forecasts that digital video will account for 58% of all TV and video spend this year, and advertisers are racing to keep pace³. Yet while marketers understand the shift, many remain unsure about the effectiveness of the dollars they’re investing. 

Among the CMOs interviewed for Dentsu’s most recent global ad spending survey, 48% said it’s difficult to know if the new video marketplace will be as effective as broadcast TV, and 34% said they have difficulty understanding the video marketplace’s value.

Much of this is due to transparency. Too often, advertisers don’t have visibility into the content of their CTV inventory buys, and they typically don’t get insights into how their ads are performing across various content types (genre, cast, series, live events, specific scene moments) that their ads appear in. This is an issue across both curated deals and open market buys.

Metadata—the descriptive information about digital content—has the ability to provide that much-needed transparency. But content data gaps, inconsistencies and a lack of standardization are significant barriers to forward progress.

To better understand where the gaps are, Gracenote recently reviewed a small sample of sports program inventory (live sports, sports talk, highlights) from a range of CTV publishers. Of the 28 entries in the sample, only four included league information. Three of the four specified which teams were playing, while three of the 28 didn’t include any genre information.

Herein lies the importance of standardized and industry-adopted metadata. At a basic level, programmatic ad platforms are looking for signals in the form of text (i.e., code) to inform buying and selling decisions. When metadata is missing, incomplete or inconsistent, programmatic platforms lack crucial information that ensures the right ads appear in the right content.

Normalized and enhanced metadata provides significant insight into CTV inventory, including the details needed to distinguish premium videos from other content. This is critical as CTV app publishers look to increase the value of their inventory for advertisers.

The importance of comprehensive metadata in video content notwithstanding, requests for transparency in CTV inventory are becoming increasingly granular, especially as the rights to live sports migrate to streaming platforms. Here, TV listing data provides an additional layer of transparency that distinguishes an NBA playoff game from a sports highlights program or an NWSL match airing or streaming at the same time.

Here’s an example: Across the more than 1,600 FAST channels tracked by Gracenote Global Video Data, 221 are dedicated to sports. In March, these channels distributed more than 16,000 programs. Here, TV listing data can identify which programs feature new and live competitions. Across all sports programs on FAST channels in March, only 3.9% were live team sports (e.g., baseball, soccer, basketball) and 0.7% were live individual sports (e.g., poker, darts, racing).

TV listing data also facilitates scale in CTV advertising. The Indiana Fever (WNBA) home opener, for example, was televised in across nearly 2,000 individual channels in the U.S., more than 1,000 of which were across CTV⁴. Tapping TV listing data before individual games and matches facilitates buying inventory at scale—not just on a single channel from a single publisher. Knowing ALL of the places that a program is airing across ALL of the different rightsholders can make scaling a targeted campaign much more effective. 

The television remains a mainstay for media consumption, but the migration of consumers accessing it through CTV apps continues to impact how advertisers plan, buy, and measure their spend. With the incredible variety of content and channels across the CTV landscape, metadata will expand beyond its critical role powering content discovery experiences, and  play a significant role in advertising. Today, and going forward, it provides the transparency needed to inform programmatic buying and selling decisions at scale. It also holds the potential to lift CMO confidence in CTV advertising.

Notes

1. CTV refers to any television that is connected to the internet. The most common use case is to stream video content.
2. Nielsen National TV Panel; Q4 2024
3. 2025 Digital Video Ad Spend & Strategy Report
4. Gracenote TV listing and streaming availability data; April 22, 2025

This article originally appeared on The Streaming Wars.