A quick read each month, The Gauge is full of juicy insights on the state of television: the ebb and flow of TV programming for both subscription-based and advertising supported, the impact of tentpole events and blockbuster releases, a running tally of the top streaming platforms on the market, and many more details to help brands and media companies understand what audiences are watching today. 

If you’re like us, you live for the details. There’s nothing like diving into the data and spotting a new opportunity before anyone else. But it can also be incredibly helpful to take a step back from time to time and look at the bigger picture. And when we look at the data from the past few months, one trend stands out: Television is now a converged experience.

The age of media convergence

Where is the line between streaming and linear TV these days?

Some of the most successful streaming programs in recent memory have been shows licensed from broadcast and cable TV, like Friends, Seinfeld or Suits.

It’s not a new phenomenon. Netflix drew fans and accolades with AMC’s Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead long before originals like House of Cards and Orange is the New Black. Streaming platforms have long been an opportunity for new generations of fans to rediscover big broadcast shows. But the convergence we see today between streaming platforms and linear TV goes beyond the syndication of linear TV’s enormous back catalog.

Take Young Sheldon. The beloved Big Bang Theory prequel had its series finale this Spring after seven seasons. We reported in our May 2024 report of The Gauge that the show earned 6 billion viewing minutes for the month across broadcast (CBS), cable (TBS and Nick-At-Nite) and streaming (Paramount+, Netflix and Max). Its series finale on CBS drew 11.74 million viewers (live + 7).

What makes Young Sheldon stand out from other linear TV crossovers is its simultaneous multi-platform success. Many series wind down on linear TV before breaking through on streaming platforms, but the 6 billion minutes Young Sheldon garnered in May 2024 were split almost exactly in half between traditional linear channels and streaming. Its success on linear TV fed its success on streaming platforms, and vice versa.

An evolution years in the making

Way back in 1999, NBC Research Chief Horst Stipp was witnessing the convergence of TVs and PCs and contemplating what type of multimedia future was in the offing. He wasn’t sure at the time whether the new devices would be “television sets with computer functions (TVPCs) or computers with TV reception facilities (PCTVs),” but he knew that bringing about real change would require the convergence of technologies, companies and consumer behavior.

Today, the impact of new technologies on the TV landscape is very clear. Broadband, streaming and smart TVs have upended how people watch television content. Media companies are forging new alliances to optimize licensing deals and meet viewers where they are. The Media Distributor Gauge we launched in April shows how much convergence has already occurred at the top. All that remained was a convergence of consumer behavior, and that’s what we’re seeing now with programs like Young Sheldon.

An antidote to media fragmentation

It’s not the only example. The April 7th NCAA Women’s Basketball Championship game drew 18.9 million viewers on ABC and ESPN, and the Women’s Final Four took four of the top six spots in April’s cable TV rankings and contributed to a 28% jump in cable sports viewing that month. The tournament’s availability on dozens of online platforms didn’t hurt the ABC broadcast, it helped.

And in late June / early July, the Euro 2024 and Copa América broke viewership records thanks to simultaneous broadcasts on Fox, Univision, the Fox Sports app and TelevisaUnivision’s streaming platform Vix. 

The media industry has long lamented the fragmentation of the TV universe because it saw audiences as a zero-sum game. The fear was that if there was another way to watch a show, it would mean that the audience would split, and therefore become less attractive (smaller and harder to reach) to potential advertisers. But fans who watch Young Sheldon on CBS and on Paramount+ don’t share the same profile. By embracing fragmentation and building convergent TV offerings, media companies can raise the visibility of their programs across a wider and more diverse audience. And that’s music to a marketer’s ears.

Measuring media convergence

“Television is no longer confined to tidy channels and specific screens,” Nielsen’s Head of Global Marketing Alison Gensheimer noted in a recent op-ed. “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.”

What does that mean for measurement? Now more than ever, you need to know how your shows are performing on each and every platform, and you need to be able to compare measurements across all channels and platforms. The only way to design a synergistic programming strategy and turn convergence into a competitive advantage is to have all the cards in hand.

For more convergent TV insights, explore the latest Gauge release. 

The post Trend spotlight: What The Gauge shows us about media convergence appeared first on Nielsen.

As marketers track the trends impacting their cross-channel media strategies, The Record offers a distinct perspective of the time spent with ad-supported audio channels.

Between April and June of 2024, listeners gave 67% of their daily time with ad-supported audio to radio, 19% to podcasts, 11% to streaming audio services and 3% to satellite radio. Among 18-to-34 year-olds, radio’s share of time increased from 45% in the first quarter to 48% in Q2 while podcasts decreased slightly from 37% to 35%.

A quarterly snapshot: Edison Research Share of Ear®

This chart shows how Americans spent their time with ad-supported audio in Q2 2024.

Explore even more audio insights with the additional data tables here. 

Radio, the original ad-supported audio platform, consistently reaches all corners of the population. Among younger consumers, nearly half of all daily ad-supported audio time is spent with radio, while older listeners give almost three-quarters of their time to radio.

These additional tables detail how the share of audience varies by format, age, demographic and platform for the top 15 largest-reaching AM/FM radio formats. These differentiate between the share of all radio listening and the share of streaming listening specifically, which are those listening to the digital streams of radio stations.

Tracking radio listening by format

This chart reveals which radio formats have the highest share of listening and how that differs between total radio (over-the-air and streaming combined) and the radio streaming universe.

Explore even more audio insights with the additional data tables here.

The share of streaming listening by format is generally higher for News and Sports programming and certain rock-based formats including Alternative and Classic Rock. When sorting by race in the additional data tables, the ‘spoken word’ trends generally hold up across groups, while there are other unique differences for some Spanish-Language formats among Hispanic listeners.

Explore even more audio insights with the additional data tables here. 

As the data demonstrates, audio remains a fixture in American’s daily media habits and stands out as an opportunity for enhancing your cross-media campaigns.

The Record provides a quarterly analysis of audio listening behaviors across the total radio universe. The charts represent average daily usage and share of listening for U.S. audiences. 

For even more audio data and insights, connect with our team of experts. 

Source

 ¹Edison Research, “Share of Ear®” Q2 2024

The post The Record: Q2 U.S. audio listening trends appeared first on Nielsen.

It depends on the occasion, of course—what the program is, the time of day, the size of the screen, what room it’s in, the size of the family and whether anyone simply happens to be around. But people get together today to watch the Super Bowl or The Bachelorette  for the same reason they got together to watch M*A*S*H or the Apollo 11 moon landing half a century ago: to have someone to share the experience with.

In the lingo of the media industry, that’s known as co-viewing. Let’s examine why it’s so important for measurement companies to get it right.

How often do people watch TV together?

At Nielsen, we’ve been studying co-viewing for a long time. Our historic measurement solutions have always been people-based, even back when there were just a handful of major broadcast networks. So we’ve always had a reliable source of truth to size up co-viewing. Today, in homes across America, 47%1 of linear and connected TV (CTV) is consumed by more than one person at a time.

Today, there’s virtually no difference in co-viewing rates between linear TV and CTV, but it wasn’t always the case. Back in 2017, we ran a study with Roku and found a significant gap in co-viewing between linear TV (48%) and OTT (34%). Since then, smart TVs have become more widespread and large screens more affordable. And, increasingly, consumers don’t make the distinctions between linear and streaming or TV and digital. It’s all TV. 

But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t any variations and that the same co-viewing factor can be applied across the board. There’s more co-viewing during primetime and on weekends, for sports and children programming, among men, young adults and in houses with more children. It also matters where the TV is located inside the house. Every case is different, and the only way to properly account for co-viewing is to measure it directly or model it separately for every ad impression.

Why care whether people are watching TV together?

Most brands want to reach people, not households—and certainly not faceless devices. Wholesale ad impressions are nice, but they’re not enough. When they buy media, advertisers and their agencies spend top dollars to reach specific demographic targets (like 18-34 year-old women in Philadelphia, or 55+ in Arizona) or advanced audiences (like EV drivers who buy organic). They need guarantees that their ads are reaching the right people, and measuring co-viewing gets to the heart of that question.

Media companies, for their part, need to know who’s watching their content to understand their audience, optimize their programming and properly price their ad inventory. If a new show performs particularly well with young adults, for instance, they can order new seasons, greenlight similar shows, and develop a niche following that they can monetize to grow their subscribers or attract advertisers eager to reach those viewers.

In today’s highly fragmented and ultra competitive TV landscape, media companies aren’t selling ‘tonnage’ anymore, and advertisers aren’t buying indiscriminate ‘eyeballs.’ They all need measurement solutions that can help them deduplicate viewers (within and across devices), calculate on-target ad delivery, optimize reach and frequency, and improve key campaign performance indicators (like target demo efficiency rates). You can’t deliver on any of those objectives without person-level measurement.

How do we measure co-viewing at Nielsen?

The most direct way to measure co-viewing is to monitor TV viewership at the individual level. That’s the case with our National TV Panel and top Local TV Markets. In these markets, our panelists “check-in” to the audience. But to add more depth and stability to our audience solutions—and provide more visibility into smaller audiences in smaller TV markets—we’re increasingly relying on big data based on ACR (for smart TVs) return-path data (for cable and satellite providers), or device and context identifiers (for ad impressions). And those technologies only capture viewing information at the household level.

Nielsen is able to determine who is watching thanks to a process called Viewer Assignment that was developed a decade ago and has since been continuously refined. It uses advanced statistical techniques to match faceless viewing data from big data sources (like Roku, Vizio, Hulu, Netflix, YouTube and others) to our persons-level panel data for every possible viewing event and ad impression. The match is based on similarities in viewing behavior (down to the program level) as well as geography, household composition, device type and location inside the house, time of day, day of week, and other key predictors. The model never stops learning, and we’re constantly validating its performance to make sure it’s as close to reality as possible.

Having panel data on hand pays huge dividends to make the most of those new data sources, but it’s important to recognize that a process like Viewer Assignment does not compensate for all cases of missing viewer data. Sometimes, there’s no reliable match for what we see in the viewing data, or the household composition isn’t readily available. For approximately 9% of all CTV data, it remains difficult to assign even simple viewer demographics like age and gender. In these instances, Nielsen relies on robust predictive models to inform and deliver viewer assignments.

What’s next?

Recent methodological breakthroughs have helped us assign viewer characteristics to many more ad placements—significantly boosting our ability to measure reach in the process. Our models are constantly learning from Nielsen’s vast volumes of data and signals, allowing our prediction of viewers to continue to get more comprehensive.

Co-viewing has always been an integral part of the TV experience, and it’s not changing anytime soon. Make sure it’s an integral part of your measurement strategy, too.

Notes

¹Nielsen Panel Data

The post Need to Know: What is co-viewing, and why should you care? appeared first on Nielsen.

With the 2024 Olympics here, let’s use some new data to review how brands are using long-term sports sponsorships to build brand equity.

Olympic sponsors score big on brand awareness

These days, marketers tend to be judged on their ability to create consumer demand, generate sales, and deliver immediate returns on their ad spend, but top brands know better than to ignore top-funnel metrics. We’ve studied thousands of campaigns over the years and found that on average, a 1-point gain in top-funnel brand equity metrics—like brand awareness and relevance—drives a 1% increase in sales.

The Olympics provide a great example of the impact that long-range sports partnerships can have on brand awareness. A little more than 40% of global consumers were aware of Visa’s association with the Olympics ahead of the Tokyo Games in 2021, and that figure has increased three points to 43% as of May 2024. It jumped two points in France (from 29% to 31%), five points in Australia (from 33% to 38%) and twelve points in the US (from 37% to 49%).

You can find insights about Visa and other Olympic partners on our Olympic Insights Hub, an online resource we launched recently to share data about fans, brands and athletes throughout the summer. For instance, P&G’s association with the Olympics has gained two points in awareness between 2021 and 2024, Samsung’s seven points, and Airbnb’s nine points (figure 1).

Tying long-term goodwill to current fan enthusiasm

The brands above are not resting on their laurels and have been making the most of their association with the Olympics in recent months. From January to May 2024, Visa has spent nearly $29 million on advertising, Airbnb $250 million, and Coca-Cola over $440 million, according to new data from Nielsen Ad Intel.

Since the beginning of the year, nearly 80% of total ad spend from this year’s Olympic sponsors has gone to television, but every market is different. In Germany and Indonesia, for instance, more than half of Coca-Cola’s media budget went to online channels, and in the UK, two-thirds went to outdoor channels.

Wherever they may be, sports fans are simply more likely than the general population to engage with sponsors and purchase their products. By advertising around the Games, Olympic sponsors can capitalize on fan enthusiasm and years of goodwill: short-term and long-term marketing working hand in hand.

Measuring success holistically

Brand awareness is crucial—consumers rarely buy from brands they don’t know—but the benefits of long-term sports sponsorship go well beyond awareness. And measuring success should be an integrated endeavor.  

“We think about measurement holistically,” said Molly Beck, Strategy and Planning Lead for Google’s Center of Excellence for Sports Marketing in a recent Nielsen webinar on driving value through women’s sports. “We’re looking at broadcast reach and views as we always do, as we always will, but being a fan… is more than just tuning in on Saturday night for this or that game.” Streams, game highlights, tickets, scores, following a player on TikTok and shopping for a new signature shoe line are all part of the fan experience, and therefore a part of the measurement equation too. “As a brand, you’re only going to get so much value from showing up courtside. A lot of it is going to come from how the fan is consuming around that moment, before that moment and after that moment.”

That’s where a long-term partnership pays off. For WNBA Chief Growth Officer Colie Edison, “Many brands are trying to seize the moment…but if you don’t have the patience to actually do a multi-year investment, you won’t make the most of your relationship.”

In our interviews for the 2024 Annual Marketing Report, Adam Isselbacher, SVP, Group Director Research & Analytics at UM Worldwide concurred and reminded us that “brand building is not just about making a brand visible. It’s about embedding into the consumer consciousness.” That takes time.

This summer, channel your inner-Olympian and invest in your brand for the long-term.

For even more insights, explore Nielsen’s Olympics insights hub.  

The post Top brands are like Olympic athletes appeared first on Nielsen.

This is a boon for everyone: the fans who love sports, the brands who want to sponsor them and the arenas and platforms that make the viewing happen. The natural question this raises, how do we keep this going?

Maintaining momentum will hinge on the industry’s ability to show measurable upside for those with skin in the game. And the best news is, it’s already there.

Up and to the right

While the rise of women’s sports is bigger than any one sport or any one person, it’s undeniable that women’s basketball has been at the forefront of enthusiasm this year. 

The 2024 Women’s NCAA tournament averaged nearly 19 million viewers (with a peak of 24 million viewers) for the final game between Iowa and South Carolina — up 89% from the previous year and beating viewership for the Men’s final for the first time ever. The 2024 WNBA Draft audience increased 511% and was up 668% with female viewers ages 2-17. And overall interest in the WNBA grew 29% between 2023 and 2024. 

Like a rising tide that lifts all boats, this momentum is spreading beyond basketball. The National Women’s Soccer League had a 17% boost in interest between 2023 and 2024. Interest in England’s Women’s Super League jumped 52% after England won the 2022 EURO—thanks in part to a better broadcasting deal, and is still enjoying gains into 2024.  On June 11th, Tennis Channel’s T2 channel began dedicating every Tuesday exclusively to women’s tennis matches, a weekly initiative called Women’s Day. And 2024 is predicted to be the year that the global women’s sports industry finally breaks the $1 billion barrier, a 300% increase from 2021.

The audiences are there. The growth is there. And once you understand what’s fueling the success, you can prove the value is there, too. 

Value and values

For years, investment decisions around women’s sports have been largely rooted in DE&I aims. This mindset is important, but it can also be limiting. That’s because women’s sports investments make good business sense. Losing sight of the measurable value undermines its ability to flourish. 

Global fans of women’s sports are a diverse group—43% of women’s sports fans are male, and they skew young, are tech savvy and highly engaged consumers. Seventy-four percent of women’s sports fans are the chief income earner in their household, compared to 70% of men’s sports fans. And 57% of women’s sports fans have kids under the age of 18, compared to 53% of men’s sports fans.  

Let’s look at the WNBA again. Compared to other sports fans, WNBA fans are much more likely to engage with a brand online, talk about the brand with friends and family and actually make purchases. 

These are invested audiences with significant purchasing power—a brand’s dream. This advertising potential should translate into strong media rights deals, but, historically, women’s sports have suffered from undervaluation. Nielsen Sports recently analyzed the value the Women’s Super League delivered through broadcast and found it to be €18.3M. Those rights sold for €7.3M, which means the media rights were undervalued by 2.5x. That’s a problem the right data can fix. 

Sponsorship has always been a crucial revenue driver for women’s sports and when broadcast distribution increases and makes it easier for fans to watch games, the value delivered to sponsoring brands naturally increases as a result. This creates the cyclical growth women’s sports needs, delivering and measuring ROI is driving investment. 

In Nielsen’s Driving Value through Women’s Sports Webinar, Google Sports and Entertainment Strategy Lead Molly Beck shared this anecdote: Google wanted to invest equitable spend across men’s and women’s sports and realized they couldn’t. There wasn’t enough women’s sports inventory. “That led us to realize that one of the biggest challenges is visibility,” said Beck. “Google’s sponsorship creates more reach for the League [WNBA], which then improves the return on our investment.”  

Maintaining momentum 

Women’s sports are gaining serious traction with desirable audiences. And it’s done so by following its own playbook. When compared to men’s sports, the audiences are different, media consumption is different and fan expectations are different. This makes it a particularly exciting and vital time for everyone to tailor and sharpen their growth strategies 

To maintain and grow the momentum around women’s sports, there are four key things brands, leagues and rights holders should prioritize. 

1. Improve content access

There’s an industry idiom that says it’s hard to be a fan of women’s sports and it’s hard not to be a fan of men’s sports. Why? Because of content access, content discoverability and content volume. Women’s sports will never get a true shot at ubiquity if games are hidden away on obscure channels, if highlights aren’t shared across popular channels, and if publishers don’t create more spaces for women’s sports content.

Platforms can solve this by creating more content for fans to consume, easier paths for everyone to find it and embracing a test and learn mindset to identify what truly works for these unique audiences and channels.
Leagues, Teams and rights holders can solve this by expanding their understanding of who the fans are, why they love the sports and what kind of content they’re looking for now versus historically.
Brands can solve this by focusing their investment on growing and amplifying women’s sports stories and adding genuine value to the fan experience through consistent and authentic sponsorship.

2. Enhance event experiences

Despite growing enthusiasm for women’s sports, many marquee events are still housed in small and antiquated venues. Take the WSL for example. The 2023-2024 season enjoyed a 43% growth in attendance, with Arsenal breaking WSL attendance records three times and having a higher average attendance than 10 of the Men’s Premier League teams. Yet, only 38% of WSL matches were played at Premier League stadiums. This discrepancy stands in the way of everybody’s growth.

Leagues, teams, rights holders and brands can solve this by investing their activation and marketing spend towards women’s games being played on the biggest stages and delivering the packed and premium event experiences fans want and deserve.

3. Develop household names

There are three things that build leagues: Big sports moments, fierce competitions and household names. The athletes can handle the first two, but they need support to build their brands. Growing players into icons is increasingly critical to the fan experience and league visibility.

Leagues, teams and rights holders can solve this by making it easier to be a fan through broad distribution and cross-promotions, giving players the tools they need to create effective content and maintaining a deep understanding of what animates their specific fans.
Brands can solve this by partnering with young talent who have a natural connection to the brand. When done intentionally, these partnerships have the dual benefit of raising the athlete’s profile while deepening the brand’s credibility and status among fans.

4. Measure holistic performance

Budgets are under intense scrutiny and pressure is on to show results across every activation. Data is essential, and it must be comprehensive if you want a true picture of performance. Yes, reach and frequency are important but how effective was the creative? Are you tracking cross-channel engagement? Is overall awareness and consideration trending in the right direction?
You need data at every turn. What’s more, you need committed investment to understand what impact you’re delivering over time. One-and-done campaigns rarely succeed in capturing and optimizing all potential ROI.

Leagues, teams and rights holders can solve this by understanding the goals of your brand and broadcast partners, measure against the outcomes they want and deliver actionable results to fuel continued testing and learning.
Brands can solve this by outlining clear goals and objectives and remaining patient and committed to holistically measuring results. True connection and impact takes time and requires a measurement framework that captures the entire partnership across tangible and intangible values.

When everybody wins

In Nielsen’s Driving Value through Women’s Sports Webinar, WNBA Chief Growth Officer Colie Edison closed the conversation out with this: “[Women’s sports] is a microcosm of the broader experiences of women in the workplace: Men are judged by potential, and women are judged by performance. We need to break the cycle that has continued to undervalue women and women’s sports.” 

When women’s sports have the space to shine, support from brands and rights holders and measurement frameworks to capture holistic value, everybody wins. 

For even more insights, watch Nielsen’s full conversation with Google and the WNBA on driving value in women’s sports. 

The post What’s next for women’s sports: Fueling growth by proving value appeared first on Nielsen.

But what does authentic, inclusive brand engagement look like? 

According to Nielsen 2024 Annual Marketing Report, 70% of marketers reported planning to prioritize performance marketing over brand-building initiatives this year. With marketing dollars at a premium, brands need to understand where and how to invest to earn the good will of the LGBTQ+ community and demonstrate inclusivity well beyond June. 

Investing in inclusive advertising and content

Not surprisingly, audiences like to see themselves in the content and ads they watch. In fact, Nielsen research shows that 42% of U.S. adults say it makes them more likely to buy from a brand when they are represented in a campaign¹. But among LGBTQ+ audiences, 63% feel their identity group is misrepresented in media.

And the feeling of misrepresentation can be even higher among intersectional identities like the Black queer community, with seven in 10 often feeling misrepresented.

There’s reason behind this sentiment. A recent GLAAD study found that 36% of LGBTQ+ scripted characters across broadcast, cable and streaming won’t be returning. For brands, supporting representative content through their advertising can be both an opportunity to demonstrate support of the LGBTQ+ community and resonate with this engaged audience. 

“We exist in all spaces in the real world, and so we should exist in all stories in all types of television and we know that inclusive content is a win for all audiences,” said Megan Townsend, Senior Director, Entertainment Research and Analysis at GLAAD, in a recent Nielsen webinar.

Understanding the inclusive ad landscape

To better understand how inclusive content is currently helping brands connect with LGBTQ+ consumers, we looked at four programs centering LGBTQ+ talent among their hosts or cast members and the brands that advertise within these programs. 

Karamo, a syndicated talk show distributed by local broadcast stations across the country, and Rachel Maddow, a cable news and commentary program, both feature LGBTQ+ talent on their programs and pharmaceutical companies as their top advertisers. Nielsen Scarborough research found that LGBTQ+ consumers are 62% more likely than the general population to request a specific drug be prescribed by their doctor as a result of a recent health care ad, and Black LGBTQ+ consumers are 59% more likely to make an appointment to see a doctor as a result of a recent health care ad.

But health care isn’t the only industry that is connecting with LGBTQ+ audiences. A home improvement brand is the top advertiser for My Lottery Dream Home—a good fit for the non-scripted real estate program featuring LGBTQ+ talent. More than a quarter (27.2%) of LGBTQ+ consumers report recently shopping for home improvement items online.

The next biggest advertiser for My Lottery Dream Home is a consumer packaged goods (CPG) brand. A CPG brand is also the biggest advertiser for RuPaul’s Drag Race, a reality competition program featuring drag queens. The CPG space is competitive. Nielsen Scarborough research found that 38% of LGBTQ+ consumers agreed they are willing to shop multiple stores to find the best deals. To improve ad campaigns and beat out the competition, advertisers need the right data. 

Optimizing campaigns to resonate with LGBTQ+ audiences

For brands looking to connect with LGBTQ+ consumers, it’s important to do more than just show up in the right place. They need to show up at the right time—and that means beyond a single month. Brand support for the LGBTQ+ community beyond Pride Month is crucial to avoid appearing gimmicky or doing more harm than good and alienting communities with “rainbow capitalism.” 

Brands also need to ensure their messages resonate. Ads need to authentically represent the diverse identities of LGBTQ+ community and avoid stereotypes and caricatures. Our research found that 50.5% of LGBTQ+ audiences agree that avoiding stereotyping individuals in advertising and programming will help improve inclusivity. But ensuring genuine representation requires accurate data to inform your strategy.

Effective measurement strategies include and go beyond inclusivity metrics to understand audience nuances and make advertising more seamless. Consumer insights, such as those from Nielsen Scarborough, are essential for understanding consumers’ mindsets and staying current with trends. And competitive data can help you understand how other brands are splitting their spend across channels or tailoring their creative to optimize your own media strategy. Nielsen’s Ad Intel solution monitors detailed ad spend from all the major players—industry by industry, program by program, month after month.

With the right data, brands can understand if they’re investing in the right place, at the right time and with the right messages to engage LGBTQ+ consumers throughout the year.  

Learn more about LGBTQ+ consumers in our recent webinar: Building brand loyalty with LGBTQ+ audiences.

Notes

¹Nielsen Attitudes on Representation on TV Study, 2022
²Nielsen Attitudes on Representation Study, 2023

The post Beyond Pride Month: Building your brand with LGBTQ+ consumers appeared first on Nielsen.

On the day of Cowboy Carter’s release, music video network Vevo reported a 38% increase in views of country music videos globally. 

From Rhiannon Giddenn’s banjo to Linda Martell’s pioneering EP, every country artist featured on the album has seen an increase in first-time or catalog listeners according to Spotify.

That digital audio engagement with country music has also translated to broadcast radio, with Nielsen measurement showing a +40% increase in audience share for the Country format among Black 18-34 year olds. ¹ The spike occurred across key markets in March 2024 compared to March of last year and continued into April with a +12% increase compared to 2023. 

Looking at the first quarter of 2024, country radio made up 9% of all streaming listening to AM/FM stations among Black people in the 18-34 age group—2.6x greater than adults spent streaming country stations overall. Black 18-34 year olds’ streaming of country stations was second only to the R&B and Hip-hop formats.² This engagement reiterates additional research from Nielsen about the connection between audio content and African American communities. 

Broadly, Black audiences average more than nine hours a week with radio, with an average monthly reach among Black 18-34 year olds specifically of 86%. Nielsen’s recent report, The global Black audience: Shaping the future of media, found that Black 18-34-year-olds in the U.S. are nearly 20% more likely than the general population to discover new music by listening to traditional radio. With the attention and engagement focused on today’s Black artists within Country Music, the uptick in this demographic’s engagement with these radio stations makes sense. 

As the spotlight continues to shine on country music’s African American roots and the talents of current voices, there are a few key takeaways to keep in mind.

• Measurement is critical to inform our strategies with data instead of preconceived notions. 
• There are still many African American trends and traditions that go untold, like the legacy of contributions to formats like country among others. Representation matters and when these stories get centered, audiences show up. 
• Rethink how and where you plan to connect with the diverse Black American population. With an average of over 81 hours a week spent with media, there are a multitude of opportunities for brands to connect with Black consumers in innovative and authentic ways.

Notes

¹Nielsen Audio PPM Black DST Markets Mo-Su 6A-12A

²Nielsen Audio PPM Cross-Market AQH Share. Mon-Sun 6a-Mid

The post The “Cowboy Carter Effect” — Increasing young Black listeners’ engagement with country music appeared first on Nielsen.

For nearly thirty years, third-party cookies have played a critical role in online advertising, content design and analytics, enabling advertisers to serve relevant ads and personalized experiences to consumers—and measurement companies like Nielsen to provide valuable campaign and content viewership data.

Today, 75% of marketers across all major industries still rely on cookies to run their campaigns, and 45% spend at least half of their marketing budgets on cookie-based activations. This adds up to a lot of money. Programmatic display, for instance, is a $160 billion business in the U.S. alone, and the vast majority of it is still based on third-party cookies. 

Even though Google has pushed out its cookie depreciation plans into 2025, their end will inevitably come. But what comes after cookies doesn’t need to be bleak. In fact, moving past cookies might usher in not just a more privacy-compliant digital future but a more effective advertising ecosystem, too.

An ID for an ID

When the prospect of cookie deprecation first hit the industry, most of the thinking went to finding a direct replacement—an ID for an ID—that would satisfy privacy regulators and leave the adtech infrastructure mostly untouched.

Many candidates emerged over time, including ID5, RampID, UID2 (and its European counterpart, EUID); device IDs from smartphones and CTV devices; IP addresses, despite the growing adoption of VPNs; and hashed emails (HEMs), a particularly attractive alternative considering the widespread use of email for app and website authentication today.

The consensus among industry observers is that there won’t be a dominant replacement for third-party cookies anytime soon, and most large publishers and advertisers are testing as many of those alternatives as possible to gain a better understanding of their strengths and limitations. We’re doing the same thing at Nielsen, sourcing a broad range of identifier types and putting them to the test.

Person-level graphs

Another recent development has been the rush by publishers and advertisers to collect first-party data in order to “feed the machine,” as one agency executive put it recently. Capturing first-party data can be very useful not just to collect data signals, but to create rich customer profiles that marketers can use to personalize offerings and target advanced audiences.

Consumer data comes from many different places, and it’s not always easy to make sense of it. It’s prone to errors, missing data, and it gets quickly out of date too. Even if your own first-party data is in a good place, there’s no guarantee that your media partners will be able to ingest it and sync it up in their systems without a universal ID to connect the dots.

That’s why many large publishers and advertisers are partnering with identity providers or developing their own identity graphs. Some players, like Amazon, are using AI in their DSP to connect first-party and third-party signals. At Nielsen, we’re leading the charge with a proprietary measurement grade graph that fundamentally shifts away from cookie and device-centric methods. This includes being an evangelist in the ecosystem and working with our clients and partners to evolve from passing cookie and device identifiers to HEMs, UIDs, and other resilient identifiers.

By integrating with audience segment data platforms (Like Liveramp and Experian) and mapping identifiers and devices to individual persons, Nielsen’s identity system maintains ID-agnostic audience assignment and measurement capabilities. This lets brands and publishers measure real people, not devices, and build on-the-fly audiences at scale for smarter, more durable cross-media planning and measurement.

ID-less solutions

Of course, not all advertising needs to be at the person level. And with so many changes underway in the digital landscape, marketers are making more room in their media budget for ID-less solutions like contextual and location-based advertising.

Harking back to the pre-digital era (when print, linear TV and radio dominated the advertising marketplace), these approaches are immune to privacy-related concerns. And with modern advances in third-party data quality, analytics and adtech infrastructure, they can deliver robust audience engagement just as fast as any ID-based or person-based targeting—often at a lower cost.

At Nielsen, we know from decades in the media business that the right context can make or break a campaign, and we have deep roots in local markets, too. So it is only natural that the evolution of our digital activation and measurement solutions would extend to context and location.

How are we doing it? We’re using Nielsen’s highly curated datasets to correlate audience attributes with an exhaustive range of keywords and sentiments for our contextual solution and with granular geographical units (like zip codes) for our location-based solution. This lets us provide advertisers with nuanced and privacy-compliant audience segments beyond other contextual and location-based solutions on the market today.

Chaos is a ladder

The uncertainty over what comes after cookies has many marketers waiting things out: hanging onto cookies until a clear alternative wins out. We think that’s a mistake. There’s no guarantee that Google won’t delay again, or that the industry will coalesce around a single alternative identifier once cookies are gone.

Instead, today’s chaos is the right time for you to audit your existing advertising ecosystem, assess your cookie-related vulnerabilities, and start experimenting with alternatives to see which ones perform the best for your needs. You’re likely to find that opening up your advertising infrastructure to accommodate more solutions will unlock more targeting opportunities for your company, not fewer.

Start learning now so that you can switch on your own terms.

The post What comes after cookies? appeared first on Nielsen.

Retail media networks are all about seizing the moment, so let’s jump right in.

What are retail media networks?

According to eMarketer, a retail media network is “an asset owned and operated by a retailer that publishes advertisements, or a third-party publisher with ads that leverage a retailer’s first-party shopper data.”

Retailers collect data about your shopping behavior and use it to personalize your experience, including the ads you see. They can use your shopping profile—and anything else they learn about you from your interactions with them—to influence the ads you see (or hear) on social media, CTV and digital radio. And on top of that, retail media networks are able to seamlessly tie impressions to sales on a platform, something that was not widely available before. 

How did retail media start?

For most industry observers, the birth of retail media was the release of Amazon’s programmatic advertising solution, Amazon Ads Platform (AAP), in 2012.

Learning from people’s shopping behavior, presenting them with relevant offers and reaching them at the point of purchase wasn’t exactly a new idea. Direct to consumer (DTC) brands, and brands with loyalty programs before them, had long used first-party shopper data to target consumers. And grocery chains and big box retailers have always featured in-store displays and promotions. But the scale and automation offered by Amazon were unprecedented.

From about $600 million that first year to $45 billion in 2023, the rise of Amazon’s ad business has been meteoric—and that was before the launch of its ad-supported Prime Video tier in early 2024. Over time, its success has drawn hundreds of other retailers into the media business. Walmart, Target, Kroger, Instacart, The Home Depot and others are fueling a sector that’s growing at twice the pace of social media (16.3% vs. 8.7% in 2023, according to the IAB) and is expected to overtake linear TV over the next couple of years.

Why is there so much enthusiasm?

Retail media networks are a win-win-win for retailers, brands and consumers.

For large retailers, scale and specialized audiences can represent a whole new revenue stream—with much stronger margins than their core retail business to boot. BCG estimates retail media margins in the 70% to 90% range for onsite ads and 20% to 40% for offsite ads, at a time when inflation, supply-chain issues and other macroeconomic conditions are putting intense pressure on retailers’ standard lines of business.

For brands, retail media networks offer a chance to create audiences based on recent shopping behavior and reach those audiences with finely tuned messages at a time when they’re likely to be more receptive to those messages. Relevant ads to the right people and in the right context is a great combination, especially now that third-party cookies and other legacy identifiers are (slowly) being deprecated. And retail media networks aren’t limited to lower-funnel campaigns either. No wonder 70% of global marketers say retail media networks are more important to their 2024 media plan than the previous year.

Consumers win too because they don’t see ads for snow jackets or cruises to Alaska when they’re shopping for board shorts and snorkeling lessons in Hawaii.

Important media mix considerations

While retail media is undoubtedly an exciting new channel for advertisers, you should only invest in it for the right reasons. Is the audience worth the higher cost? Can you reach not just existing customers but also attractive new prospects? How does it fit with the rest of your media mix? Do you have consistent reporting to compare performance across other retail networks?

Too many marketers add retail media to their mix out of fear of missing out or out of concern that retailers might retaliate with inferior ‘shelf’ placement if they don’t buy advertising on the platform—something Forrester described as a form of hidden tax. Some advertisers are also under the impression that retail media networks solve the attribution puzzle with their closed-loop measurement because they’re so close to the moment of purchase. But last touch attribution isn’t any more reliable just because it’s on retail media.

Treating retail media like just another channel

With hundreds of options on the market, over two-thirds of ad buyers (69%) are overwhelmed by the complexity of the current retail media buying process. While there are calls for standardization, it’s still largely siloed from other media transactions—to say nothing of the process of reconciling retail media buying with the rest of the media ecosystem. Four in ten ad buyers have only enough bandwidth to work with at most three retail media networks at a time.

In a sign that retail media is maturing, the IAB just proposed new standards in Europe to tear down silos between players and harmonize their offerings. At Nielsen, we think that’s a good first step. Brands need consistent, transparent and outcomes-minded measurement across all of their media partners to get a full picture and build confidence in their overall media spend.

That confidence factor is essential to unlocking real spend. While advertisers are fine to shift some budget because of the measurable sales lift, there’s still uncertainty around the incremental value retail media can provide.  The best thing that can happen to retail media is to be treated as just any other channel. And moving real budgets at scale will require comparability across all measurement metrics. 

This is the right time for standards. Online and offline retail media are merging thanks to the rise of digital “smart” shelves, in-store mobile experiences and loyalty programs that connect in-store and online data to build holistic consumer profiles.  And retail media is already growing beyond lower-funnel activities and even retail, for that matter, with market leaders like Lyft, Marriott and Chase showing the way. It’s also crossing over into the CTV space, with trailblazing partnerships between Instacart and Roku, Walmart and Peacock, and of course Amazon and Prime Video. 

The post Need to Know: What are retail media networks, and why is everybody talking about them? appeared first on Nielsen.

According to APIA Vote, 83% of Asian American Native Hawaiian Pacific Islanders (AANHPIs) have concerns about misinformation in the U.S. election, among Democrats and Republicans alike. At the same time, 78% of Asian Americans consume news at least once a day and are also 34% more likely to trust in the accuracy of news than the general U.S. population, creating opportunities for news media and brands to connect with the fast-growing segment of the U.S. population with $1.3 trillion in buying power¹. Doing so effectively requires a deeper understanding of the relationship between Asian Americans and the news.

Where do Asian Americans get their news?

Asian Americans are more likely than the general population to report turning to social media (Instagram, LinkedIn and Threads) and news aggregator sites as their top source for news. They are also 69% more likely to rely on friends and family, going to the people in their tightly-knit community who can break down headlines with the right context and relevant information.

When it comes to newspaper content, Nielsen’s research found that Asian audiences are most likely to turn to free newspaper websites. For marketers hoping to engage AANHPI audiences this year, tapping into reliable content on non-subscription news sites and social media platforms to help educate the AANHPI voter could be a valuable connection point.

Building trust through representation

With the always-on connectivity of smartphone apps and sites that Asians prefer, how can brands tap into them to create lasting engagement? Platforms with authentic, representative content is key, as 41% of AANHPI audiences are more likely to buy from brands that advertise with news outlets they trust². 

And here’s where the influence of journalists who are representative of the community comes in. For example, ABC’s World News Tonight with co-anchor Juju Chang and MSNBC’s Morning Joe with frequent reporter Richard Lui are in the top most-watched broadcast news programs for AANHPI viewers.³ And in the 2023 Asian American Journalist Association awards, an Axios project led by three Asian journalists was a winner. Their piece Everything You Need to Know to Vote in the 2022 Midterm Election drove tremendous audience engagement in two of the top sources of news for Asian Americans, Instagram Reels (30% more than previous) and news aggregator site Flipboard (double URL open rates). Stories told about the Asian American community by members of the community create connections with audiences while providing necessary and critical information to drive change and action.

The value of in-language media

TV news programming plays a much less significant role in AANHPI news engagement compared to other audience populations, but Asian Americans are 57% more likely to get news from international television. Asians make up the fastest-growing ethnic group in the U.S. today, coming from more than 20 countries around the world and speaking more than 50 different languages. 

Connecting with the diverse AANHPI community requires more than a one-size fits all approach. In a 2023 report, Nielsen explored the attitudes and media consumption preferences of Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese language speakers—representing about 40% of the Asian American population and three of the Asian languages most spoken at home.

More than 40% of total respondents ‘strongly agreed/agreed’ that Asian media offers programs and perspectives they trust. Furthermore, the study shows that more than 50% of Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese respondents prefer to buy brands that advertise on programs reflecting their culture. Opportunities exist for brands that invest part of their advertising spend in in-language media platforms.

Adjusting media plans in an election year

As ad prices rise with political campaigns buying up valuable ad inventory, advertisers can benefit from rethinking their media plans during this election year and connect with Asian audiences through the social media, aggregator sites and ad-supported newspaper sites they gravitate toward. One benefit of these channels is that they present a more addressable option—giving marketers improved measurement of ROI. 

Learn more about reaching Asian American consumers in Nielsen’s latest Diverse Intelligence Series report.

Notes

¹U.S. Census Projections 2023 and Selig Center for Economic Growth 2022

²2024 Nielsen Survey on Trust in Media

³Nielsen National TV Panel, 2023

The post The power of news media: An important platform to reach Asian Americans in an election year appeared first on Nielsen.