Advertisers are flooding Connected TV with dollars, but a new industry report suggests they’re flying blind. The missing ingredient isn’t creative firepower or bigger budgets. It’s data.
The 2025 Gracenote Contextual Targeting Report projects that U.S. CTV ad spend will hit $26.6 billion this year, an increase of more than 12% from 2024. Almost half of advertisers surveyed reported moving more than a quarter of their budgets into CTV over the past three years, with a growing share now allocating 40% or more. Key verticals, including financial services, retail, technology, and health care, are leading the shift.
But the promise of scale and brand impact remains out of reach without standardized metadata and stronger contextual targeting, according to Gracenote’s findings.
Marketers told Gracenote that brand awareness is their primary goal in CTV, ranking higher than direct revenue growth or customer acquisition. Yet the report warns that most CTV strategies remain narrow and performance-driven, creating a gap between intent and execution.
Thirty percent of respondents listed brand awareness as their top priority, while 28% cited revenue growth, 22% pointed to new customer acquisition, and only 16% focused on retention.
Measuring results has become a sticking point. Nearly seven in ten advertisers said inconsistent or missing metadata across streaming platforms and FAST channels makes it difficult to plan, target, and assess campaigns. Just 27.8% of respondents rated their CTV campaigns “extremely effective,” while more than 40% said they were only “moderately effective.”
That gap suggests marketers are struggling to justify higher CTV investments even as viewership moves decisively away from linear.
FAST channels are a major driver of audience growth, with nearly 1,850 active channels carrying more than 182,000 programs as of July 2025. But metadata gaps are pronounced: in a sample of sports content, Gracenote found more than half of FAST programming lacked original air date information prior to enrichment, leaving advertisers unable to distinguish live games from repeats.
Without consistent metadata, advertisers cannot verify whether campaigns appear in brand-safe environments or whether spend is optimized for fresh, high-value programming.
The report argues that contextual targeting offers a solution, giving marketers visibility into content categories, genres, ratings, moods, and themes to match creative with programming environments. With 85% of CTV buys now made programmatically, Gracenote says contextual metadata can both reduce reliance on cookies and strengthen campaigns by expanding reach beyond current customers.
Gracenote warns that without adapting strategies, marketers risk leaving reach and brand impact on the table at a time when streaming fragmentation, platform competition, and rising ad prices are reshaping the market.
The study also highlights industry support for metadata standardization. More than half of advertisers surveyed said they would allocate more dollars to CTV if program-level metadata was consistent across platforms.
The full Contextual Targeting Report is now available.
