Capture Viewers During Summer's Streaming Surge

If this summer is anything like last year’s, we’re in the midst of some of the highest streaming viewership of the year.¹ The average American is estimated to watch about 2.5 hours of TV each day.² Considering that most of us work, try to get the recommended eight hours of sleep (yeah, right), and juggle about 100 other things, 2.5 hours can represent a significant portion of Americans’ free time.

What people watch on TV and how they watch TV reveals more than just their viewing habits. It hints at preferences, psychographics, lifestyles, and more. This is why TV viewership data has become one of the most valuable assets for reaching viewers accurately and effectively. However, there is one major requirement for TV viewership data to be effective: it needs to be commingled, meaning that it should be derived from various sources including set-top-box and ACR, along with a strong panel to reconcile back to people. There are many advantages to commingled data, including that it offers a more accurate and broader representation of viewership. 

This is demonstrated by our recent release of Unified TV Audiences, our commingled data solution that accounts for both linear and CTV viewership. Early adopter eBay saw an average 52% increase in campaign reach across devices and audiences when leveraging Unified TV Audiences compared to a single-source data strategy. eBay also found that their CTV campaigns outperformed the benchmark set by their attention measurement provider by 7%. Additionally, Unified TV Audiences helped eBay achieve 49% higher conversion rates versus consumers who were not exposed to eBay’s CTV ads, showing how a unified data-driven targeting strategy can drive full-funnel outcomes.³

A targeting strategy based on comprehensive TV viewership can unlock blockbuster use cases:

• Incremental reach: Suppress viewers of your brand’s linear commercials or CTV viewers to ensure you’re only targeting new viewers or those that you’re not already targeting on linear.
• Competitively conquest: Target viewers who saw a competitor’s ad.
• Interest targeting: Reach audiences based on viewer behavior such as cord-cutting or viewership of specific content categories, including genre, network, program, events, and more.
• Omnichannel retargeting: Reach TV audiences based on the devices they're using, such as web or mobile. This also enables you to tell a cohesive, sequential story across channels.

You might think viewership data isn’t relevant to your industry, but the beauty of this data lies in its versatility, applicable across all verticals. Explore the use cases below:

• QSR brand that want to target night owls: Target late-night viewers who might have the late-night munchies.
• Home supplies retailer looking for home style enthusiasts: Reach those that watch home Improvement, how-to, or house & garden content.
• Telco capitalizing on its celebrity-featured commercials: Targets viewers of sports, shows, or movies featuring the celebrity showcased in their TV ads.
•  Finance advertiser that wants to grow mindshare: Target heavy viewers of finance news.
• Beverage brand that wants to match drink preferences to viewing preferences: Feature beers for audiences who enjoy live sporting events like football, basketball, hockey, golf, and all the other premier events. Or showcase wine to those that love drama like sizzling dating shows or the Housewives of all the cities.
• Entertainment provider that wants to drive tune-ins: Reach viewers that have watched content in the same category as yours whether that’s based on movies, shows, or more.
• Political advertisers who want to reach voters: Leverage our partners such as AdImpact or Samba TV to reach voters 24 hours after they viewed a political event or target audiences who saw an opponent's ad.

Want to collaborate and brainstorm more ideas on how to use TV viewership data? Reach out to your Yahoo account team today, and we can help design an audience-focused data strategy, enabling you to reach the most relevant audiences.

¹Nielsen, The Gauge, 2024
²Insider Intelligence, eMarketer, June 2024
³Yahoo, Internal Data, 2024