Gracenote, the content data business owned by Nielsen, and Magnite, which describes itself as "the largest independent sell-side advertising company", on November 10, 2026 announced an expanded collaboration to curate custom connected TV deals from Gracenote's program metadata.
Gracenote converts an advertiser's targeting criteria into content segments, Magnite assembles the matching streaming inventory, and the buyer receives a deal identifier to run through Magnite's own buying tool or another platform. The arrangement covers the United States only. Advertisers and agencies request a deal by contacting Gracenote, according to the companies.
Gracenote, a Nielsen company that keeps detailed records on TV shows and live events, will now build custom packages of streaming TV ad space with Magnite, grouped by the content those ads run next to. That matters for advertisers who want to know what is actually on screen when their ad plays, a piece of information that streaming ad auctions have often left out.
US buyers can ask Gracenote for such a package and then buy it through Magnite or their usual buying platform, though neither company has said what the service costs.
The announcement describes three steps. An advertiser supplies its targeting criteria. Gracenote, using what it calls its "proprietary, first-to-market content graph", translates those criteria into content segments. Those segments are then used to create custom deals "by targeting specific CTV inventory on the Magnite SpringServe platform", in the release's words.
SpringServe is the ad server and sell-side platform Magnite operates for streaming publishers.
The result is a deal ID, a code that tells a buying platform which pre-arranged package of inventory a bid belongs to. According to the release, buyers "can then use the resulting deal IDs to activate campaigns directly through Magnite ClearLine or their preferred demand-side platform." That second route matters. A Gracenote package is not locked inside Magnite's buying tool.
An agency running its streaming budget through another platform can, on the companies' description, bring the deal ID into that platform and bid on it there.
The graph underneath is large. According to Gracenote, it links records from different sources into shared identities for 58 million TV and streaming titles, each carrying a durable identifier and what the company calls source-verified metadata: genre, content rating, language and mood among them.
Inconsistent descriptions of the same program across services have made streaming inventory hard to evaluate at scale, the release argues, and a single identifier per title is Gracenote's answer to that.
There is also a fallback. Where a bid request arrives without a content identifier, the graph can still identify some programming from other signals in the request, Gracenote says. The release does not say what share of programming can be recovered that way, or how often the match is correct.
On the Magnite side, the product carrying the deals is ClearLine Curation. According to the release, the arrangement gives advertisers more options for finding and selecting relevant streaming content, and a more consistent basis for planning and placement.
Jake Richardson, vice president of partnerships at Gracenote, framed the deal around a gap in the data buyers receive. Audience signals alone, he said in the release, do not tell buyers what is on screen; the partnership brings content information into…
