Are You Missing Show Genre and Rating Categories for CTV?

The more advertising buyers know about placement locations, the more confident they can be about ROI, performance, and brand suitability and safety.

Information about CTV programming is hard to come by for advertisers. It's incomplete, not available, or pieced together from multiple sources in a non-standardized way. The result can be a lack of clarity and control for advertisers into what they are able to target on CTV. 

What problems does CTV Show Genre and Ratings targeting solve?

Prevailing challenges in CTV advertising include: 

• Fragmentation. Subscribers tune into multiple streaming platforms and devices on a regular basis, meaning audience attention is fragmented and decentralized. 

• Competition. CTV has grown rapidly in recent years, bringing with it a spike in content distributors and advertisers, and vying for the same audiences. 

• Limited inventory. Available inventory on CTV is smaller than traditional advertising, but growing at a rapid pace. As it grows, new opportunities are made available, but only for those who have transparency into how, where, and to whom they are targeting. 

To combat these three challenges, CTV advertisers need granularity in their targeting capabilities, and transparency in their reporting and analytics. Pulling together and normalizing data across platforms is necessary to help provide advertisers with the ability to make smart buying decisions. Show Genre and Ratings targeting helps to provide buyers with the information to do that. 

Show Genre and Ratings categories from Peer39

Our goal with the CTV toolset is to provide a complete picture of CTV data, based on all possible and available signals and information. We want to provide useful knowledge for advertisers, not just data. 

Genre and ratings information are two critical pieces of the puzzle that help to create transparency in reporting, and an extra layer of targeting capabilities. With them, advertisers gain greater precision and granularity in these vital advertising channels, helping to refine their targeting, reduce wasted spend, and take greater control over brand suitability. 

The benefits are wide-ranging, and include: 

• Improved precision and reduced waste. Adding the right genre and rating category to targeting parameters means that the advertiser’s budget is focussed on the right audience. 

• Added scale and coverage. The additional data signals for CTV targeting provides more content-level data, adding to advertisers’ ability to grow their campaigns with the confidence that they are reaching the right audiences. 

• Advanced targeting, Genre and rating categories can be layer, excluded, or targeted individuals to create greater granularity and improve ROAS. 

Peer39’s Show Genre and Ratings categories are created using content ID and content object signals to assign genres, rating, and broadcast information to each of the available targeting categories. We are constantly gathering additional information and signals from the supply path that is then used to improve our overall understanding of CTV content. Through this methodology, we’ve been able to compile a list of 125 genres and a half-dozen ratings categories (see this list below).

This information will be part of Peer39’s analytics dashboard, which will help to inform wider targeting strategy and performance tracking across CTV and other digital advertising channels. 

What Show Genre and Ratings Categories Enable 

These categories provide buyers the ability to scale campaigns within the content that best aligns to target audiences. This reduces wasted spend on less-relevant viewers and improves campaign performance.

With CTV quickly becoming one of the biggest budget items for advertisers, targeting audiences with ads that match the content will keep viewers and advertisers content with what they're seeing.