PubMatic brings episode-level targeting to CTV ads. Silverpush supplies the tags

PubMatic and Silverpush said on 24 September that buyers can now pick connected TV ads by episode. The tags cover 28 of the 30 largest streaming services and come with more than 50 ready-made segments.

Silverpush reads the episode and PubMatic sells it before the bid

Silverpush runs a contextual engine over the programme itself. It reads the genre, the type of show and whether the episode is safe for a brand. PubMatic turns that into a segment a buyer can add before the bid. No cookie and no user profile is involved.

The old way was to buy an audience called something like travel enthusiasts. That segment came from what people did somewhere else on the internet. The new way is to buy the episode where the characters talk about a holiday. Buyers can reach it through PubMatic or through any large demand-side platform.

Abbie Reichner says publishers write S1E1 and also Sea1 Ep1

Abbie Reichner, a vice president at PubMatic, said the problem was never the data. It was the labels. One streamer marks an episode as S1E1 and the next writes Sea1 Ep1. Silverpush maps those labels onto one list, so a buyer sees the same show under the same name everywhere.

Jeff Rich, executive vice president at Silverpush, said watching behaviour tells you more than an IP address. Nicole Scaglione, who runs CTV and OTT at PubMatic, said the segments put a message “alongside matching content across all major platforms”.

WPP Media reports 20 percent more conversions on one campaign

WPP Media ran a contextual CTV campaign for a school and reported 20 percent more conversions than the benchmark, measured with Lumen Research data. Silverpush published its own set of results for 2026 clients: 48 percent more awareness, 22 percent more consideration and 40 percent lower cost per view. Those are vendor numbers and no one outside the two companies has checked them.

Telly and Best Buy show where the rest of the market is going

PubMatic is late to this. Gracenote, iSpot and several measurement firms already sell show-level data, and rivals have been curating streaming inventory for a year. The pattern is wider than targeting. Telly sells its home screen through programmatic pipes, and Best Buy turned the sets it sold into ad space.

One thing to open this week: the curated deal list in your CTV buy. Check whether your packages are still built on third-party audience segments, and ask your platform which of the 30 big streamers are missing from the episode tags. Two of them are.