Today as always, every company must carefully study its markets, decide where to allocate its media budget, and measure the performance of its campaigns. But the time window to do those things has compressed considerably. Consumers are more volatile. Competition is stiff. New channels keep emerging, and economic conditions change faster and are harder to predict. 

That’s why it’s so crucial for marketers to use the right data to guide their spending decisions. And one set of data that often gets overlooked in media planning is competitive advertising intelligence: reliable, granular data that comes from monitoring detailed ad spend from all the major players—industry by industry, country by country, month after month. The insights can be invaluable to inform strategy, identify new opportunities and outmaneuver rivals.

Let’s review ad spending trends across the five largest product categories around the world.

Ad spending trends by category

The holiday season is the busiest spending time for nearly all of the five largest. The data supports the general consensus that if there’s a time to advertise, it’s in November and December, when consumers do the bulk of their holiday shopping. But that doesn’t mean that they don’t run any advertising the rest of the year. 

There are sales to support throughout the year, of course, as well as long-term brand building efforts. Drafting off the heights of November and December, October is proving to be an equally valuable month. This is when spending was at its highest last year for internet service providers (like Netflix, Google, and Virgin Media), professional services (like law, accounting and  IT consulting), and the auto sector. 

Of the top five categories, the two with the largest investments shifts month to month are auto and multi-product retailers. Auto sector spend tends to be at its lowest in August and, in addition to the holiday season push, has a consistent bump in March. Whereas in the retail category, spend is relatively low with spikes during the holidays and between March and May. 

Now let’s explore how these trends shift when you drill down to the country level. 

Ad spending trends by country

When digging into investment trends at the country level, we see just how much product categories differ. For example, between 2021 and 2023,  Internet Service Providers spent considerably more in Mexico and a notably smaller amount in Italy, especially when compared to other European countries. Broadcasters, on the other hand, spent more in Indonesia, and the bulk of investment for the Calling Services and Networks category was in the U.K.  

Why is it important to know when spikes and drops in ad spending tend to occur in your industry and how it shifts across countries? Because you don’t want to ignore critical time periods when your consumers are out shopping, but also because you might be able to find off-peak opportunities to stand out, perhaps in a different market, on a different channel and at a better CPM. Whether you ultimately decide to go with or against the flow, you’re better armed with a full understanding of your competitors’ activity.

What these trends mean for marketers

There are two important takeaways. One is that media markets around the world are at various stages of development, and there’s no assurance that they will converge to a single picture anytime soon. Are you investing in the right markets at the right time? Are your campaigns set up to cut through the noise or capitalize on your competitor’s inactivity? There’s no need to make fatal assumptions when these insights (and more) are available.

The second is that with the right data intelligence partner, you can dive in and learn what your local competitors’ favorite channels are or what their creative sounds like, much like we showed across category spending peaks at the country level. This can help you find holes in their positions and optimize your own media strategy.

Learn more about our ad intel solutions and how they can help you stay ahead of the competition.

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Up until now, mobile ad IDs (MAIDs) and third-party cookies were used to connect the dots, at least across open digital platforms. But their days are coming to an end, and the transition continues to be hectic. What options do marketers have now?

Most marketers are betting on first-party data because it allows them to stand out from their competitors, maintain control over their data assets, and steer clear of privacy complications. But everyone uses different identifiers. Netflix knows you by your email address, Macy’s by your phone number, Delta by your SkyMiles number, Instagram by your handle, Xbox by your gamertag. A website you visit without logging in might still assign you a third-party cookie today or collect your IP address. 

For consistent, comprehensive and comparable audience measurement across platforms, marketers need a robust ID system with an identity graph designed specifically for measurement.

What’s an identity graph?

Consumers use many devices, apps and identifiers to interact with the world, and those interactions leave a steady trail, like snapshots in a photomosaic. Every snapshot tells only one fragment of the story, but put together, they produce a 360° portrait of who we are, our likes and dislikes, our interests and preferences, and—most crucially for marketers—what we might do next.

To put the pieces together, large advertisers, publishers and data providers have developed identity graphs: large databases where millions of devices, identifiers and their users are linked together to create unified customer and household profiles. They use those graphs for targeting and personalization, matching customers and prospects on a brand’s mailing list to a platform’s audience members. For example, Nielsen’s activation side of the business has a graph that focuses on targeting. 

Campaign activation isn’t the only reason to use an identity graph. Let’s examine why a reliable, independent and well-calibrated identity graph is essential for modern measurement.

What makes a measurement-grade identity graph different?

Not all identity graphs are focused on accurately representing the population at large. The data sources they use might be biased toward a certain geography, the users of a certain platform or just one type of device. Deduplicating records may not be a top priority either, as long as some matching can take place and ads end up in front of people.

But match rates aren’t everything. If measurement is the ultimate goal, statistical representation and deduplication are necessary to properly measure reach, frequency and other important campaign KPIs like return on ad spend (ROAS) or lead conversions. At Nielsen, when we load new data into our identity graph, we take great care to validate matches between devices, people and households against census data and our own people-based panels. As we learned earlier in our Need to Know series, carefully curated people-based panels are critical to calibrate big data.

How extensive is our data cleanup process? Every year, our systems ingest billions of identifiers and links from a wide variety of external data sources, but only 20% make it into the resolved identity graph. We use our people panels to calibrate these Big Data sets and ensure the accuracy of our audience assignments and graph clustering. As a result, the Nielsen Identity graph is optimized for the representativeness and accuracy needed for measurement.

How are marketers using the Nielsen identity graph?

Identity graphs are not built to stand alone. The Nielsen identity graph sits at the center of a comprehensive ID system that includes four distinct steps:

As we mentioned earlier in the article, Nielsen’s activation side of the business, Nielsen Marketing Cloud, has a person-level activation graph that uses many of the same sources as Nielsen’s measurement graph and shares the same resolution logic that delivers a deduplicated view of the audience. But instead of measurement, it’s engineered to drive campaign reach and personalization at scale. 

What are the privacy implications of a digital ID system?

Ingesting ad exposure and outcomes data from external sources can be a thorny proposition in today’s data privacy climate. Even when user consent has been secured, marketers are justifiably nervous about testing the limits of that consent by sharing customer data with outside partners. This is especially true in highly regulated industries like healthcare or financial services. Hash algorithms can help obscure sensitive identifiers like email addresses, but hashed IDs are considered personal identifiable information (PII) in some jurisdictions (like Europe), and they can’t always prevent bad actors from identifying the person behind the hashed ID anyway.

What’s the solution? At Nielsen, we’ve implemented a suite of data privacy and security processes to facilitate data collaboration (such as finding the overlap between an advertiser and a publisher dataset) without actually sharing sensitive information between data partners. For example, clean room integrations ensure data from Nielsen, our clients and our partners stay within their respective environments while still enabling measurement. Techniques like confidential computing and differential privacy allow for parties to work together without seeing each other’s data.

Privacy is a top priority for marketers and consumers. Any digital ID system you work with should take it seriously. 

Digital measurement beyond third-party cookies

Third-party cookies might be on their last leg, but marketers still need to make sense of their cross-platform campaigns. And they want to capitalize on new planning and targeting opportunities—like those unlocked by advanced audiences—to stay ahead of their competitors.

Perhaps more than ever, marketers need measurement partners that can help them connect the dots, and produce accurate and consistent audience and outcome metrics relevant to their business.

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While not every publisher can afford to bid for sports rights, the field of content destinations is far more expansive than it was just four years ago—and sports rights are steadily headed to streaming services, including select, high-profile NFL playoff games.

And at the same time, some publishers that once expressed little interest in live sports have changed position and are now staking claim to what remains the most watched content on TV. Netflix, for example, has hosted two live sports events since November, ending an extensive period of previously abstaining from entering the space.

Not every event, however, has the notoriety of the Super Bowl, Thursday Night Football and Netflix’s recent Netflix Slam tournament—an important consideration as the new MLB season kicks off, which features 30 teams that each play 162 games. Die-hard fans of the New York Yankees, for example, will need access to three traditional TV networks (YES Network, ESPN, FOX) and three streaming services (Apple TV+, Amazon Prime Video, MLB TV) if they want to catch all of the season’s on-screen action. On the west coast, fans of the Los Angeles Dodgers have even more to navigate, as their 2024 season will be televised across ABC, CBS, ESPN, FOX, FOX Sports 1, SportsNet LA and Apple TV+.

And outside of major markets like New York, Boston and Philadelphia that can sustain regional sports networks (RSNs) because they have major teams across the NFL, MLB, NBA and NHL, teams and leagues in smaller markets have started striking over-the-air broadcast rights deals with local TV stations while simultaneously offering games direct-to-consumers via streaming apps.

The bottom line in this extremely fragmented market is that live sports command massive audiences, but only if the audiences can find the games. A recent web search, for example, noted that a recent NHL game between the Arizona Coyotes and the Washington Capitals was on ESPN+, but the results proved to be incorrect—a frustrating experience for anyone outside of the local markets looking to watch the matchup.

This is not a unique example, nor will it be the last. The proliferation of services and the drive for monetization with high-profile content suggests that the future will grow even more fragmented. 

When Nielsen launched The Gauge, for example, streaming accounted for 26% of our total time with TV, and only five services had enough viewership to warrant being independently reported. Two of the services also didn’t include advertising. In January 2024, by contrast, streaming accounted for 36% of TV usage and 11 services are independently reported (and all either include ads or have ad-supported subscription tiers). And what’s more, four have exclusive rights to select sporting events, as do ESPN+ and Apple TV+.

At a very high level, a single season of the five major sports leagues in the U.S. includes thousands of games. The MLB, for example, has nearly 2,500 in a single season. Historically, audiences would be able to find complete game listings in the weekly TV Guide, but today, not even the internet can keep up with program information for live sports schedules. And on the flipside, publishers are typically focused on providing information solely for the contests that they host.

This is where consumer electronics makers (OEMs), MVPDs and digital service providers can take the lead—and ultimately win with audiences and rights holders. With a clear understanding about the power of live sports, which remain the largest driver of audiences, these organizations can deliver information about live sports and related content across over-the-top platforms, giving audiences comprehensive, real-time information for a streaming-first media landscape.

A version of this article originally appeared on sportsbusinessjournal.com. 

Source

¹Services are independently reported once usage represents at least 1% of TV usage. 

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Following seasonal viewing trends that typically begin in February, overall television usage in the U.S. dipped again in March. Despite declines across categories, cable and streaming saw their share of TV viewing increase in this month’s report of The Gauge^TM as a result of smaller declines in viewing in these categories compared with the overall decline of 3% on a monthly basis. While these changes follow similar month-over-month trends from last year, they also point at larger shifts happening to Americans’ media habits. 

The growing influence of women’s sports

Similar to March 2023, the NCAA “March Madness” tournament helped cable viewing hold steady and gain 0.7 share point, as the category saw a 43% bump in sports viewing, to finish the month with 28.3% of TV. However, unlike last year, which was driven almost exclusively by the men’s division, the NCAA women’s games charged onto TV screens this March. 

In fact, the NCAA Women’s Basketball matchup between the Iowa Hawkeyes and the West Virginia Mountaineers on March 25 on ESPN was among the top 10 cable telecasts for the month (seventh overall). The comparable game last year barely made it into the top 100 among cable telecasts. And this didn’t include the Elite Eight, Final Four and Championship games, which took place in April.

The appeal of the tournament among sports fans highlights the impact that high-demand content has on viewership, regardless of platform or channel, and also highlights a larger trend we’re seeing in the rise of women’s sports.

Seasonality or changing media habits?

Beyond March Madness, TV’s February-to-March changes in 2024 are almost identical to the transition we saw last year, reflecting seasonality in viewing as a result of annual changes in weather, vacations, holidays etc. However, we can see evidence of larger transformations affecting the industry as we look deeper into the data.

Following seasonal trends similar to the past few years, broadcast viewing fell 6% in March to finish with a 22.5% share of television. To add some perspective, when Nielsen released the first edition of the Gauge^TM in May 2021, the broadcast category accounted for 25% of television viewing, and despite the continued declines, the category has been fairly resilient, with a less sharp drop than some might have expected.  

Comparatively, streaming viewing declined just 1% versus last month but gained 0.8 share points to finish with 38.5% of television viewing in March. No category has seen a more dramatic shift than streaming on an annual basis, as it’s gained 12% versus a year ago and added 4.4 share points. Some of that shift has come from FAST channel providers (PlutoTV, The Roku Channel and TubiTV), with a considerable portion of the titles being fueled by cable network content. 

So while the cable category may be shrinking in terms of its share of television, cable content remains powerful with consumers. In addition to March Madness, the State of The Union address on March 7, which drew 32.2 million viewers in total (14.1 million on cable alone), reminds us that cable remains a news-driven category as six of the top 10 cable telecasts this month were related to the event. As we look toward November, cable will play a significant role in how audiences connect with news media ahead of the 2024 U.S. elections. 

March data trends with Brian Fuhrer

Methodology and frequently asked questions

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Advertising in the age of Convergent TV

TV is top of mind for many of us as we head into the official Upfronts/NewFronts season. But is there a common understanding of what “watching TV” means anymore?

With every new channel that arises, new screen that gains ubiquity or new micro-generation that ages into the consumer spotlight, our collective grasp on what TV is shifts. The once-crisp lines between linear and streaming have blurred, and it could end up being a best case scenario for everyone. Welcome to the world of Convergent TV. 

Everything, Everywhere, All at Once

There’s a phrase I’ve heard kicked around before, most recently at the CIMM East conference, that’s stuck with me: TV isn’t going anywhere, it’s going everywhere.

Is YouTube TV? What about FAST channels, or shows you watch on a phone? Definitions change depending on who you talk to, and I’m starting to wonder if it even matters. For advertisers, the important question—now and forever— is where the audience is. Increasingly, it’s multiple places at once. “Television” is no longer confined to tidy channels and specific screens, it’s all of the above. And this flexibility is creating incredible opportunities.  

It also means that broadcasters and publishers aren’t just competing with themselves for audience attention. Now they’re up against the entire digital ecosystem. It’s taken some time, but the industry is starting to catch up with where audiences have already been, which means it can truly start capitalizing on it.

Live TV moments can reach even larger audiences when those audiences have more choice in how they watch them. Imagine what new formats can be created now that users can actively engage with TV ads. And with the introduction of so many new data sources, we’re able to plan and measure well beyond the standard demos to build truly resonant, scalable campaigns.  

Of course, all of this requires a reconsideration of the entire campaign process —not just measurement but planning and optimization, too.

The Power of Planning

Lately, marketers have been asking themselves if planning is dead. I don’t think so, but the way many of us were taught to plan probably needs to. 

Media plans are developed at the channel level, and even the vendor level, because that’s where the data is. This makes things nearly impossible to scale. Add to that a continuous trend of new, buzzy and sticky platforms forcing marketers to reconsider or even overhaul their plans, yet again. And it’s not just buying that gets upended. The metrics, insights and performance also get caught up in channel-specific siloes and the audience’s actual user experience gets lost in the mix.

This doesn’t negate planning’s importance, it highlights it. Audience behaviors are changing faster than the industry can keep up. Doubling down on planning helps you get ahead of that change and use it to your advantage. 

If you plan in silos, your ROI will remain in silos. And any understanding of your campaign’s true impact goes out the window. Optimizing needs to happen constantly and holistically, which means planning is a continuous, cross-media exercise built on reliable data. 

Great Decisions Depend on Great Data

Ultimately, success in this new media ecosystem will hinge on data. And not all data is created equally. 

As an advertiser, you’re going to stand in front of bosses and stakeholders and say this plan is going to deliver this result. To do so confidently, you have to trust your data. And to get trusted and stable data, I’ve learned that there are two non-negotiables: 

Your data must be cross-channel 
If you want to scale without losing accuracy, your measurement must work across channels, be resilient against regulatory/privacy concerns, and give you the full, deduplicated picture of your audience and their consumption habits. To pull that off, you need big data sets that are calibrated by panels.

Your data must be independent 
Measurement solutions need to be platform and publisher agnostic. That’s the only way they’ll be truly interoperable and able to look across all channels. It’s also how you’ll be able to ensure transparency, accuracy and trust that the decisions you’re making are based on facts.

TV is converging and faster than any of us may have thought possible. To keep up, marketers need to reframe what TV means, double down on continuous planning and optimization, and ensure the data that’s fueling their strategies can scale and adapt without losing accuracy. The change may be big, but the wins will be bigger.

The post What’s TV these days? appeared first on Nielsen.

Not only has advertising started to flourish as a means of monetization across platforms and services, live, scheduled programming continues to gain traction as content creators, media companies and device manufacturers roll out new free ad-supported television (FAST) channels to a growing number of platforms.

Yet as quickly as some creators may develop and launch a new FAST channel, ideally with a strategic distribution plan, ensuring a channel’s long-term viability is anything but guaranteed.

For starters, the FAST landscape has become incredibly crowded over the last year. Given the rapidly evolving FAST landscape, industry size estimations are varied. According to Gracenote Video Data, there are more than 1,900 individual FAST channels for audiences to choose from, with more than 1,300 in the U.S. alone. For context, there were just 1,000 in the U.S. mid-way through 2023.

That’s more than 21% growth in eight months. And what’s more, individual FAST platforms, such as Pluto TV, Amazon’s Freevee and Tubi, typically have hundreds of channels within them, providing ample choice within individual electronic program guides.

Industry congestion notwithstanding, viewer engagement and advertising dollars are increasingly focused on over-the-top¹ content that audiences access via their connected TVs (CTV²). In third-quarter 2023, for example, audiences spent just under two hours per day with CTV content³, representing more than 40% of their total time with TV (4:34 per day). 

Time with FAST programming is also growing: Pluto TV, Tubi and the Roku Channel accounted for 3.7% of total TV use⁴ in February 2024. With viewership rising, advertising is following suit. Digital TV Research Ltd., for example, forecasts that global FAST revenue will hit $17 billion in 2029, up from $8 billion in 2023.

Not everyone will benefit from the upswing. More channels does not equate to more viewership. It simply disperses viewership. This is true across the streaming industry, and audiences are overwhelmed. A January Motley Fool survey, for example, found that 62% of audiences say there are too many streaming options, with 39% reporting pulling back on the services they subscribe to on a year-over-year basis.

FAST services stand to benefit from subscription overload, as a 2023 Deloitte survey found that 19% of consumers have switched from a paid subscription to a FAST service. Additionally, Nielsen’s latest streaming consumer survey found that 70% of respondents said they are familiar with FAST and have watched FAST content in the past three months. Access to new content is a primary driver, with 63% saying they have access to traditional VOD services but are interested in exploring new content on FAST platforms.

Yet with the industry intently focused on content monetization, creators, publishers and broadcasters entering the FAST industry need to do more than simply make their programming available to viewers.

The best way to engage and maintain audiences is by offering them something they’re actually looking for. But content isn’t born with an innate ability to deliver itself to audiences. That’s where metadata comes in. But like content, metadata is not homogenous. This is especially the case in FAST services, where individual channels come from an array of distributors.

But when content includes a Gracenote ID, it’s automatically linked to an array of standardized entertainment assets that are critical in fulfilling audience search and discovery journeys. Linked information includes:

• Description
• Genre
• Cast
• Imagery
• Program availability

Still in its early days, the FAST ecosystem is playing catch up with respect to metadata. A recent analysis, for example, found that 31% of the FAST programming submitted to Gracenote did not include any genre information. This, in and of itself, will limit monetization opportunities, as brands and agencies are unlikely to advertise against content without knowing the program genre.

But having the basics is just the beginning. Succeeding in the future will require data enrichment strategies that build on the basics of imagery and descriptions by providing a more complete picture of your content. Additions like mood, theme, scenario and setting provide a new layer of information that can elevate the appeal of programming among audiences looking for something to watch.

Additionally, enriched metadata can help ensure that content stands out as next-generation FAST experiences arrive, including enhanced search and discovery algorithms for recommendation engines—which are now table stakes in traditional VOD environments.

The importance of normalized and comprehensive metadata can’t be over-emphasized. Disney’s recent metadata overhaul to bring Hulu content into the Disney+ app, highlights the immense differences that individual apps and platforms have with respect to content and metadata.

While this exercise took place in the VOD space, it speaks to the myriad approaches to metadata across the streaming landscape and the associated distribution challenges this causes. Having the right metadata partner, however, ensures that content quickly plugs into any platform and offers the richest audience experience possible—including those that have yet to materialize in the FAST ecosystem.

For additional insight into the needs of FAST content heading into the future, download our FAST toolkit. 

Sources:

¹Over-the-top (OTT) refers to streaming video content that audiences access through an internet connection.
²CTV refers to any television that is connected to the internet. The most common use case is to stream video content.
³Nielsen National TV Panel
⁴Nielsen’s The Gauge, February 2024

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While the lines between these two environments are blurring, they currently exist independent from one another, which means that marketers need to understand how each is structured and evolving so they can best navigate the intricacies to best capitalize on the promise of personalization.

The digital advertising ecosystem is fundamentally different for CTV than it is for other platforms.

• In browser-based digital media, marketers have used third-party cookies for audience-specific digital engagement for more than 20 years. Now, as the industry moves away from cookies, Nielsen is prepared to use other identifiers such as hashed emails (HEMs) or any other ubiquitous identifiers that the industry uses, as there is no single universal identifier that the ecosystem has adopted that is a true replacement for cookies. Nielsen is recommending the use of HEMs for digital measurement as it is a non-proprietary identifier that can be generated without integrating with other third-party systems.
• In video-based CTV, marketers use a combination of first-party identifiers, unique device IDs and/or household IP addresses for audience-specific advertising.

While complex and evolving, these environments become significantly more navigable for marketers when they have person-based measurement data to tap into for their campaign efforts.

Foundational differences aside, traditional digital media and CTV are similar in that they offer the same value proposition to marketers: a direct means of communicating with specific audiences. While many throughout the industry expected media spending across traditional digital channels to decline as cookies become obsolete and access to mobile identifiers becomes more difficult, a custom survey² fielded by Nielsen ahead of the 2024 Upfronts/NewFronts season found that advertisers and agencies expect their digital allocations to outpace those across CTV and streaming.

Given the recessionary environment, total ad spending in the U.S. was down in 2023 on a year-over-year basis, but marketers did increase their allocations in select channels to navigate the unsettled environment, including business-to-business, local magazines, local radio, regional cinema, network radio and streaming³. And generally speaking, marketers pulled back less (on a percentage basis) across digital channels than they did across traditional mass reach channels like network and cable TV.

Media allocations are following audience engagement

The increased shift to digital channels highlights marketers’ desire to follow media consumption trends, while simultaneously leveraging technology to bridge more meaningful relationships with audiences. From a digital engagement perspective, CTV now reaches 74% of U.S. TV homes⁴, 84.1% of TV homes have access to a subscription video on-demand (SVOD) service⁵ and U.S. audiences spend nearly four hours each day with their digital devices⁵. 

Despite understanding how audiences are spending their time with traditional digital media and CTV, we know that the emergence of new media channels adds to the measurement needs of marketers. Nielsen’s 2023 Annual Marketing Report found that 62% of global marketers rely on multiple tools for their cross-measurement, and 14% use four or five.

Findings from our 2024 Upfront/NewFront survey support these findings, as 26% of advertiser/agency respondents say that relying on multiple solutions to measure across channels is their top challenge. Additionally, 41% say that a lack of transparency into audience data is among their top two biggest cross-media measurement challenges.

With a lack of clear insight into their audiences, it’s not surprising that 51% of respondents say they’re concerned that their cross-media campaigns are being delivered to their intended audiences, which has a ripple effect with respect to evaluating cross-channel campaign effectiveness. 

Advertisers remain largely dependent on third-party cookies

In web-based environments, Google has stated it plans to deprecate third-party cookies by the end of 2024. While companies like Nielsen have developed technology to match data with HEMs and other identifiers, the digital ecosystem needs to evolve to a point where HEMs and/or alternate identifiers become ubiquitous.

To date, despite the imminent demise of third-party cookies, advertisers remain dependent on them. A recent report from supply chain platform 33Across, for example, found that advertisers throughout the second half of 2023 invested the vast majority of their programmatic spending with the aid of cookies. Retail and insurance brands have made the most progress in moving away from cookies, but still used cookies for 74% and 76% of their programmatic spending, respectively. Food and drink brands are at the other end of the spectrum, with 87% of their programmatic spending dependent on cookies.

With the clock ticking for the ultimate demise of the third-party cookie, it’s critical that brands begin capturing email addresses for use in HEMs and/or alternate identifiers. It’s also important for identity providers to begin passing email addresses in addition to device identifiers. With this information, providers like Nielsen can ingest the necessary data to measure the impact of targeted marketing campaigns in the absence of third-party cookies. 

Staying personal amid the rise of CTV

Unlike in web-based environments, programmatic ad delivery in CTV has never been dependent on third-party cookies. The scaled and addressable advertising ecosystem developing in CTV is based on connections between first-party IDs and IP addresses. Here, the first-party IDs replace cookies.     

In terms of ad spend, GroupM notes that CTV is where all the upside in TV resides, forecasting compound annual growth of 9.5% to $45.8 billion in 2028. From an advertiser and agency perspective, CTV is not as well positioned to deliver on their primary KPIs as online video and online display advertising.

Clarity into the audiences engaging the CTV content is paramount in helping brands best understand how to engage with relevant viewers. And just as in traditional web-based environments, data within CTV is growing increasingly privacy-focused. 

That’s where having person-based panel data as a truth set amid growing big data sources is critical. Nielsen’s big data set, for example, includes 45 million households and covers 75 million devices. When backstopped by a gold-standard panel composed of more than 101,000 individual people, measurement offers the combination of scale, coverage and granularity, all of which are critical for advertisers and agencies seeking to stay connected with specific audiences as the media landscape evolves.

Sources

¹CTV refers to any television that is connected to the internet. The most common use case is to stream video content.
²Custom survey conducted online between Oct. 9 and Oct. 23, 2023. Survey respondents included 250 marketing professionals with responsibility for media planning, media strategy and media buying.
³Nielsen Ad Intel; January-September 2022-2023 YOY comparison.
⁴Nielsen National TV Panel; Q3 2023
⁵Nielsen National TV Panel; February 2024

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In seasonal fashion, TV usage declined in February following the end of the NFL playoffs. While Super Bowl LVIII was a standout that attracted 123.7 million viewers, the 6.4% dip in viewership for the month was considerably larger than it was in the previous two years (5.7% and 5.1%, respectively). This fact, however, is more of a testament to how strong viewing was in January 2024 than in the previous two years.

In addition to attracting the largest TV audience on record, the Super Bowl played a big role in making Feb. 11, 2024, the day with the most TV viewing since The Gauge was launched in May 2021. In total, the game delivered 30 billion viewing minutes—5 billion more than last year’s game. Going into overtime, however, did contribute here.

Outside of the action around the Super Bowl, broadcast viewing receded following its climb into January, with viewing down 10% overall. The sports genre was a major factor in its decline, as sports viewing dropped 66% in the wake of the NFL playoffs. On a year-over-year basis, the overall drop in broadcast viewing is in line with last year’s 9.2% decline. With some new content in rotation, however, the drama category gained momentum to command 26% of broadcast viewing in February. With all eyes on the Super Bowl in February, CBS used the big game to get audiences excited for its new season, featuring Tracker, NCIS, FBI and the final season of Young Sheldon.

Across cable, news viewing increased 7% as audiences tuned in to election year coverage, while sports viewing was down by about one-third. Even without as many sports events, the sports genre still delivered the top programs for cable, with the 2024 NBA All-Star Game simulcast on TNT, TBS and TruTV taking the top slot, followed by the NBA All-Star Saturday Night on TNT and TruTV.

TV viewing typically starts to decline as the spring season approaches. This seasonality affects all TV viewing, but it had less of an impact on streaming in February than the other categories. As a result, streaming usage dipped 1.9%, but the category was able to gain 1.7 share points to account for 37.7% of TV usage, its largest share of total TV since August 2023. It’s also 3.4 share points above February 2023.

As we’re not yet seeing a consistent release of new titles, acquired titles continued to attract the most viewership, with Young Sheldon (Netflix, Max) topping the rankings with 4.6 billion viewing minutes, followed by Bluey (Disney+) with 4.5 billion and Grey’s Anatomy (Netflix) with 3.5 billion. Netflix’s Griselda added some new content to the rankings, coming in fourth with 3.2 billion.

As it does for the broadcast and cable categories, sports has started to make a mark in the streaming category when high-profile events are shown. After gaining in January as a result of its exclusive NFL Wildcard game, Peacock usage dropped 19%, while Paramount+ gained 24% in February as a result of its simultaneous carriage of the Super Bowl alongside CBS. Both platforms have also benefited from the appeal of new original programming, namely Ted and the Traitors on Peacock (1.3 billion minutes combined) and Halo on Paramount+, accounting for 1.2 billion viewing minutes.

February was also a big month for FAST services, as Pluto TV, Tubi and the Roku Channel experienced gains of 10%, 8.3% and 8.1%, respectively. YouTube also posted a platform-best share in February, capturing 9.3% of total TV usage.

February data trends with Brian Fuhrer

Methodology and frequently asked questions

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Follow along as we break down what advanced audiences are, why they matter and how they’re changing the ad world.

What’s an advanced audience?

In traditional media spaces, the standard demographic filters used to understand and reach audiences has been age and gender. Advanced audiences can go well beyond these basic demos. 

Advanced audiences, sometimes called custom audiences, are consumer segments marketers use to group people together based on where they live, what they buy or intend to buy, how much money they make, the media they consume, the communities they’re part of, and so on. Marketers bring these audience lists to advertising platforms so they can reach them there with specific messaging. 

The idea is that by narrowing down the group of recipients, you’re able to get hyper-targeted with your campaigns so they’re more likely to resonate. You increase effectiveness and reduce wasted spend by only reaching the folks who will likely care about what you’re selling, and you’re also able to see exactly how well campaigns performed within these groups. What you sacrifice in mass reach, you make up for in increased relevance. 

Advanced audience segments are built from first, second or third-party data, or some combination of the three, which we’ll get into in the next section. 

Once you have your advanced audience lists, you can build lookalike audiences that expand your initial group based on their commonalities. For example, if everybody in your initial advanced audience list cares about pets and uses TikTok, then a lookalike audience will include people who also care about pets and use TikTok. 

What do you need to create advanced audiences? 

Advanced audiences sound great, right? Now let’s look at how you actually build them. 

The first and most important step is securing your data.

First-party data

First-party data is audience information collected directly from the consumer, by the brand. 

Brands with the ability to collect their own audience data have an upper hand. Since it’s controlled by the brand and gathered straight from the source (in this case the audience), brands are able to easily expand what information gets captured with every channel interaction, new purchase, survey response or chatbot conversation. 
The value of first-party data is exactly why so many brands create incentives for consumers to engage within their ecosystems. Sign up and get 20% off your next purchase. Create an account and see your personalized list of recommendations. Login to track your order delivery.

Second-party data

Of course, not every brand has access to first-party data. It may be hard to convince the general population to login into a soda provider’s website to order their next 12-pack. These brands may rely on second-party data, which is another’s company’s first-party data that’s acquired through a partnership. 

Third-party data 

While first and second-party data is collected directly from the audience, third-party data can come from several sources and is available for anyone to purchase. This is also the data pool most directly affected by the loss of cookies, forcing data providers to find reliable alternatives to digitally identify audiences. 

By combining proprietary Nielsen audience data (we have tens of thousands of advanced audience segments) with first-party data from our partners, Nielsen helps brands get a more comprehensive view of their ideal consumer and sharpen their campaign targeting capabilities. 

Insights are only as good as the data they’re built on. Since third-party data is gathered externally, brands should prioritize working with trusted partners who can prove the accuracy of what they deliver. 

Once you have your audience data, you can create advanced audience lists and upload them across platforms to begin targeting your campaign creative. While this is a relatively straightforward and standardized process across most digital platforms, other channels are playing catch up. 

Where can you use advanced audiences?  

Advanced audience targeting first became a thing online thanks to the level of detail our digital footprints leave behind. Through digital identifiers, like usernames and browsing histories, marketers are able to tap into rich levels of consumer insight: who they are, what they want to consume and what they do after seeing an ad.  All of these inputs help marketers create resonant campaigns for groups as niche as their data allows—informing everything from the creative to the timing and placement. It also helped digital platforms and publishers prove their ability to reach the exact audiences their clients cared about. 

Traditional media like broadcast and cable may have unbeatable reach, but digital media is all about precision. At least that’s been the historical trade-off. But as the world has gone digital, there are new and heightened expectations for all channels to support the same level of audience addressability and performance accountability. 

In the past decade, traditional media have carved out new outlets to dynamically address advertising to advanced audiences, like connected TV (CTV), free, ad-supported TV (FAST) channels and data-driven linear¹. Still, there are foundational differences in how readily these channels can support planning and measuring against niche audience segments.  

The next phase of advanced audiences will be ensuring standardized utility no matter the medium. This will require system overhauls to prioritize interoperability²— with the end goal being that the audience defined is the audience reached.  

How do advanced audiences work at Nielsen? 

Supporting this interoperability vision is at the heart of Nielsen’s strategy. We are acutely aware of the headaches a fragmented media environment creates for all sides of the media industry. It’s harder to reach specific audiences and manage how often they see your campaigns. Comprehensive planning and activation feels impossible as everything gets brought down to channel specifics. 

But what if traditional media consistently operated with the same level of insight and personalization as digital? What if you could bring your own audiences to every platform and use them for planning, measurement and optimization?

Within the Nielsen ecosystem, you’re able to bring your own IDs or choose from audience segments developed from our cross-channel big data sets calibrated by gold-standard people panels. All audience data then goes through the Nielsen Identity System to ensure a deduplicated view of the audience across all screens and channels. What’s more, you’re able to reuse these audiences across all integrated Nielsen products and ensure audiences definitions are consistent across the entire user journey. Using the same defined audience, you’re able to build your media plans based on tailored insights and forecasting, purchase media, and get a deduplicated view of how well you reached your audience across channels.

Depending on where you are in the world, all of this is available today with Nielsen. But we are just getting started. Advanced audiences are now at the center of this brave, new advertising world, and Nielsen is here to help you thrive in it. 

Notes

¹Data-driven linear is a process marketers use to allocate linear TV programming spend against demos beyond age and gender.
²Interoperability, in this instance, is when different technological systems interact with each other seamlessly. For example, being able to send and receive emails across all providers is interoperability at work.

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While prices may be higher, the extra spending could pay off even for non-political advertisers. News programming typically sees a boost in viewership during election years. U.S. News viewership in 2020 was extraordinarily high due to COVID coverage, social unrest and a tight election. But even during the mid-year election in 2022, both broadcast and cable news programming saw audiences spending more time with news than the non-election years 2021 and 2023. 

Time spent with news differs across demos 

Understanding consumption habits can help you reach the right audiences on the right media. With 24-hour news programming, it’s not surprising that Americans spent more time with cable news than broadcast news in 2023. When we look at total time spent by gender, both genders follow the trends for the population as a whole. However, while men watched slightly (5.7%) more minutes of cable news than women, women watched 47.7% more minutes of broadcast news than men.

Black viewers spend the most time with TV in general, including news programming, well ahead of Hispanic and Asian viewers. Both Black and Asian viewers follow the general population pattern, spending more time with cable news programming than broadcast. In this, Hispanic viewers are the outlier, spending slightly more annual minutes with broadcast news than cable. Advertisers looking to influence women and Hispanic voters shouldn’t overlook the power of traditional broadcast news.

News programming access is expanding 

How viewers are accessing both broadcast and cable is changing. Americans are increasingly using over-the-air (OTA) and over-the-top (OTT) devices, including virtual multichannel video programming distributors (vMVPDs), such as YouTubeTV, Sling TV and Hulu+ Live TV, to access TV programming. Household vMVPD subscriptions have increased year-over-year for the last three years, growing from 12.1% of all U.S. TV households in December 2021 to 16.5% in December 2023¹. And news viewing on vMVPDs follows a similar trend. 

The increase in vMVPD viewership hints at a larger shift of audiences toward digital and connected TV (CTV). And these media will likely capture big ad dollars as part of this election cycle–eMarketer forecasts digital political ad spend will hit $3.46 billion this year. 

The right media mix is critical to reach voters

To better understand digital trends, we used our Scarborough consumer insights to study how people affiliated with different political parties use the internet or apps to consume video content. Reaching independent voters will be critical for political campaigns eager to earn votes from undecided audiences. And understanding how they report connecting to digital video content can make sure marketers reach them in the right places. 

Those who consider themselves to be independent but say they align closer to the Democrat party are 15% more likely than the average U.S. adult to watch technology news video content on the internet or apps². Beyond news content, these respondents were 17% more likely to watch cartoon videos. Meanwhile, those who consider themselves independent but say they align closer to the Republican party are 15% more likely than the average U.S. adult to watch business news on the internet or apps. Outside of news, they’re 13% more likely to watch sports videos. 

But with Google’s depreciation of cookies in the second half of this year, all advertisers will likely have a harder time reaching the right audiences on digital media. This could cause marketers to shift their ad dollars, including political ad dollars, toward publishers with their own robust first-party data. The programmatic power of CTV is enticing to marketers, but reach is far more complicated in CTV than linear TV because of the commingled nature of the platform and campaign IDs in measurement data. Through that lens, it’s not surprising that only 31% of global marketers say they’re very confident in measuring the ROI of their CTV investments³.

For political marketers, adding radio to the marketing mix could offer valuable incremental reach opportunities for campaigns. Nielsen recently conducted a study of 2022 political campaigns using Nielsen Media Impact. In the competitive 2022 Pennsylvania Senate race between Dr. Mehmet Oz and John Fetterman, we found that, by allocating one-fifth of the ad budget to AM/FM radio, the Fetterman campaign was able to deliver a 12% bump in audience reach without increasing spend. With radio’s hyper local listenership, tailoring messaging—and media placements—to the city level can help advertisers reach key demographics.

2024 will present challenges for political and non-political advertisers alike to reach audiences across media. Better understanding how audiences are consuming news content can help them navigate this fragmented landscape successfully. And being creative in your cross-media mix can help drive incremental reach with key audiences.

Source

¹Numbers based on Nielsen’s panel penetration. Nielsen began producing households with a vMVPD Universe Estimate (UE) in July 2023. That UE has increased month-over-month, growing from 15.9% in July 2023 to 16.4% in February 2024.
²Includes types of video content streamed from the Internet on a computer (laptop or desktop), mobile device (smartphone or tablet) or Internet connected device (such as Roku, smart TV, game console, etc.) in the past 30 days.
³Nielsen Annual Marketing Report, 2024.

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