• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, February 27, 2025

Do you know the viewership for a specific show when you placing that media buy on connected TV -- say, Paramount+, Disney+, or Peacock? Probably not.

The connected TV (CTV) business does not offer up granularity of "show-level" data -- something Nielsen has done for decades with linear TV.

But there are ways around it. One Portland, Oregon-based media-buying shop -- Rain the Growth Agency -- built an algorithm to find and bid for programmatic inventory within shows and then match data with metadata and automatic content recognition (ACR) data from Nielsen’s Gracenote.

David Nyurenberg of Rain said to AdExchanger that he can get a “probabilistic match, not a deterministic one.”

Buying a run-of-schedule-like media plan has been around for a long time when it comes to linear TV business -- and now moving over to connected TV. Those media plans offer up less granular show-level data.

CTV platforms do have access to “show-level" viewing data, but they cite privacy issues as the reason they can’t disclose such data. Although show-level viewing data is important to media buyers, engagement data has become more crucial for brands.

Still, Nyurenberg says, clients using the agency’s proprietary show-level algorithm are seeing better engagement results.

Media executives have made a push for a long time for premium streaming platforms to be more transparent with actual census-level data from their streaming server operations -- including for specific shows and airings.

Viewing data may appear to be microscopic versus linear TV shows, which continue to see significant year-over-year declines.

At the same time, while they are growing, streamers need to keep things moving in the right direction -- as businesses that are in the early stages of profitability, although nowhere near what linear TV networks still bring in.

Some forward-thinking young streaming platforms soon may try to meet CTV advertisers somewhere where they need to be as the business becomes more mature.