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How Cross-Channel Insights Help Marketers Optimize Their TV & Streaming Advertising

Gavin Meng
Gavin Meng  |  Director, Product Management
Updated: Dec. 20, 2022
Published: Dec. 19, 2022
CTVLinear TVMedia BuyingTargetingMeasurement

For marketers across categories today, it’s tougher than ever to make smart investments in TV and video advertising due to the unprecedented levels of audience fragmentation across thousands of channels, platforms and services. At the same time, budgets are tightening and nerves are fraying as macroeconomic headwinds gather, leaving less room for error and experimentation. Compounding the challenges is the fact that eyeballs are still divided between legacy TV and streaming.

This means that to effectively reach their targets, successful marketers must be able to determine:

  • Whether their audience can be found on linear, streaming or both.
  • How much ad-supported viewing specifically – whether on linear or streaming – their audience consumes.
  • Which TV networks, streaming services and CTV publishers their audience is consuming – and when.

Armed with real-time reporting and insights into their target audience’s viewership behavior, marketers have the ability to adjust and optimize their linear and/or streaming TV campaigns in mid-flight, maximizing reach and results. Here’s how to do it, step by step:

Discover the Size of Your Audience
With more viewing options than ever before thanks to the explosive growth in SVOD, AVOD, FAST and other types of streaming and CTV channels – along with the persistent appeal of linear, especially live sports and news -- it’s crucial to get a clear sense of how your audience consumes video content at the household level so you can start the process of producing the optimal strategy to effectively reach them.

See How Your Audience’s Viewership Is Distributed
Over 120 million households watch TV, with approximately 94% of them reachable via streaming. But what’s the right channel mix and which environments are best for finding your target? You need at least a month’s worth of data on how and where your target consumed video across channels in order to confidently project how and where they’ll watch in the future – for example, during your campaign flight.

Analyze Your Audience’s Time Spent Viewing
The linear channels of broadcast, cable and satellite still aggregate the largest share of time spent viewing ad-supported content, while the majority of time spent viewing streaming TV is currently on ad-free services or tiers. But the landscape is evolving dramatically, with major players Netflix and Disney+ among the latest to introduce ad-supported service tiers and FAST (Free Ad-Supported Streaming Television) channels proliferating. With the right solution or data partner, you can glean where your audience can most likely be reached when you most need to reach them.

Understand Your Audience’s Viewership By Channel
Beyond linear vs. streaming, it’s also critical to understand which specific ad-supported TV networks and streaming services your target audience is watching. This invaluable data will be indicative of your target consumers’ future viewing behavior and a necessary input in any forecasting tool you may use.

Optimize Your Audience Reach
After your TV spots have gone live, you need access to intelligent, real-time reporting and performance insights in order to optimize in mid-flight. That’s especially important in a climate in which marketplace dynamics can change rapidly and unexpectedly.

Now You Can Market Smarter Across Channels

While accessing and analyzing the data needed to effectively reach audiences in a hyper-fragmented, multichannel landscape may seem daunting to marketers, a solution exists to deliver certainty, efficiency, speed and transparency: Simulmedia’s unique TV+® platform for linear and streaming advertising.

And with the Cross-Channel Insights tool, TV+ provides daily and monthly visibility into thousands of ad-supported networks, publishers and services, allowing a marketer to understand their audience composition, viewership behavior, how much ad-supported TV they consume and the budget allocation needed to target them wherever they’re watching or streaming.

Find out how the insights and planning tools of Simulmedia’s unique TV+® platform for TV and streaming advertising have helped over 100 top brands increase their audience reach by an average of 40% across linear and streaming TV. Request a demo or email us at advertise@simulmedia.com.