For the past decade or so, brands who market their products on television have been hearing the whispers of a “fractured viewing audience” grow into full throated roars. Cord Cutters have given birth (figuratively and literally) to “Cord Nevers” and big cable bundles are being unbound by the consumers themselves. And yes, the little whispers and full-throated roars are true. Look at the chart below, you can see that in just 3.5 years, Streaming and Cable have swapped places as the leader in TV viewing. And that trend is only going to grow…exponentially.
The TV audience is more fractured than a crusty Christmas tree in a January woodchipper. It can be intimidating but “fractured” does not mean “different.”
“Cable,” “Streaming,” “Addressable TV,” “AVOD,” “SVOD,” “CTV,” “OTT” …it’s all enough to make you say “WTF?”
But what if I told you that no matter how many new TLAs — that’s Three Letter Acronyms – they throw at you, or how many new platforms pop up on your screen, it is still all about people watching TV.
Yes, people are migrating to streaming and their viewing choices have never been greater, but people are still watching “Jeopardy.” They are still watching “Gunsmoke.” They are still watching “The View” and “MSNBC” and “Fox News” and “Golf Channel.” And they are definitely watching football. They may just be doing it on apps like Paramount, Peacock, and Prime. They could be flipping on Tubi, Pluto or Hulu. But ultimately, they are watching! More than ever before! They sit down on their couches or on their beds or on the plane or on the train and the watch. And the shows they watch have commercials.
The digital age of TV hasn’t only favored the TV viewer. It also has tremendous benefit to the TV marketer.
Streaming platforms succeed for marketers where linear TV capabilities have forever fallen short. These platforms provide data to tell you EXACTLY who is watching and when they are watching in real time. No more relying on antiquated, small sample sets (I’m looking at you Nielsen) to approximate (another word for guessing) how many people were probably watching a show. Guessing causes inefficient buying. An exact number tells you the real value of every impression, attached to every person watching that episode of “Baywatch” or “House Hunters.”
In your head you’re probably thinking, “But I like buying ‘spots’! ‘Spots’ are great because I can tell my friends to watch “House Hunters” at a specific time and they’ll see it!” True. And that’s great. But your friend (probably) isn’t buying your product, and neither is 99% of the audience watching that episode. Leveraging data and a DSP, we here at Diray can find your exact audience at scale and run your ad not only on “House Hunters” but on any thousands of shows that those specific, desired audiences are watching. So instead of reaching 1% of your audience with a spot on “House Hunters”, we get 100% of your desired audience with the same budget and more targeted impressions (more about impressions vs spend in the next newsletter).
Because of its legacy nature, linear is great (for now) to get a swath of the general public watching all at once. It’s like an FDR Fireside Chat with pictures (btw, if you get that reference, I’m glad you’re reading this. It shows you want to evolve at an advanced age). FAST platform partners like Tubi, Hulu, Xumo, Philo, Samsung+, Amazon, and now, Netflix are great at doing that too. They have linear feeds that carry all of the targeting and audience measurement advantages of digital. They are a great place to start your Cord cutting audience buying journey.
Whether you are ready to buy across the multiple platforms where today’s audiences are watching content, just remember that whether they are flipping on a cable channel or browsing title tiles on any number of streaming platforms, the people are watching more content than ever and among them is YOUR AUDIENCE. Let us help you find them.