The State of Viewership – the Latest Effectv Research Report

The past 18 months have seen dramatic shifts in media usage as evidenced by the latest TV Viewership Report, which examines the first half of 2021 versus one year ago. We appear to be entering a new era where viewership behaviors continue to be shaped by a range of tumultuous events, and as a result, as the report revealed, "Live viewing grew as a percentage of total time spent with TV. Shifting restrictions on travel and public gatherings likely contribute to both the continuing strength of live TV and shifts in where that content gets consumed." As in previous studies, the data used in this analysis is from first-party anonymized, aggregated viewership data collected within the Comcast footprint of some 17 million U.S. households. Click here to download the 1H 2021 report.

Among the key findings from the latest study:

• TV Reigns Supreme. The TV screen is still the preferred choice of device for viewers.

"We've seen content consumption patterns ebb and flow over the last few years of recorded data. What we have consistently found is that audiences largely have a desire to watch premium video programing on the largest screen available, despite the amount of choice in terms of devices and apps available to stream content." -- John Brauer, Vice President, Insights & Analytics, Effectv

• Streaming Is Important. In fact, according to the aggregated ad exposure data, 76% of streaming consumption is happening on the big screen and can be considered the perfect complement to a TV advertising campaign because of the hard-to-reach audience it attracts. The study revealed that streaming impressions are +209% more likely to be viewed by light or no-TV viewing HHs.
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• Cable Is the Top Choice. Overall, Comcast households are spending on average 6 hours and 2 minutes with TV daily while cable TV's share of TV viewing remains strong at 70% compared to broadcast and premium.
• TV Keeps It Live. Interestingly, the study also found that 88% of all TV viewing happened live throughout the first half of 2021, slightly higher than the same time period last year.
• More Dayparts and More Networks. In terms of dayparts, about 70% of live viewing occurred outside of primetime. The top five networks accounted for only 31% of all viewing in 1H 2021. Overall, Comcast households watched an average of 30 different networks during this period, with 304 different networks achieving "most-watched" status.

"Simply put, when you have more networks in your campaign, you get higher reach among your target audience. Campaigns that are spread across 20 or more networks are optimal and just as the 'top networks' in my household are likely Bravo, HGTV and DIY network, another household's may be completely different. As a result, there are more than 300 'most-watched' networks across measured households." -- Heather Coghill, Senior Director, Audience Insights, Effectv.

Year-to-Year Comparisons

As the nation becomes vaccinated and people yearn to return to a form of normal, it's not surprising that time spent viewing television naturally would decline. The data supports this, as 1H 2021 had the first year-over-year declines in time spent viewing since data recording began. These declines began in March 2021 and can be attributed to comparisons to 2020 when stay-at-home orders were in place. Interestingly, with viewing still over six hours a day on average, the share of live viewing remains strong and continues to lead against time-shifted viewing throughout the day.

Cable TV continued to command the majority percentage of viewing, increasing its dominance from last year. In 1H 2021, the share of viewing for cable networks gained from 67% share in 1H 2020 to 70% share in 1H 2021 and 71% in 2Q 2021.

Platform Usage Differs by Genre

Consumers also view content differently depending on the platform. Traditional TV is favored for live genres like sports and news, while streaming is favored for young adult, family and entertainment.

However, streaming delivers hard to reach audiences such as cord-cutters and light TV viewers, enabling advertisers to leverage the best of both worlds. In examining more than 20,000 Effectv advertising campaigns in 1H 2021 that included both traditional TV and streaming, it was found that streaming serves as a strong complement to any traditional TV campaign. Notably, more than half (57%) of Effectv streaming reach was incremental to the TV portion of the campaign.

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Performance also varied by market. "What this means for advertisers," the report noted, "is that households watch in different ways in different markets. Investment allocation decisions about traditional TV and streaming must weigh multiple factors including viewing habits, audience segments and geography."

Conclusion

With each successive viewership report, it is becoming clear that while viewership patterns have shifted and will continue to evolve, there are highly strategic ways that advertisers can use television in all of it various forms. Audiences are in charge and are taking advantage of all the available choices of platforms and devices so they can watch what they want, where and how they want to watch it.

"The latest TV Viewership Report demonstrates linear TV's ability to reach audiences effectively and efficiently, but it also reinforces the need for advertisers and marketers to utilize streaming to expand reach incrementally." -- John Brauer

Click here to download the 1H 2021 report.

 

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

 

Heather Coghill Reveals New Insights From Comcast’s 2020 Effectv TV Viewership Report.

If you wanted to get a full sense of TV viewing habits, there is no better dataset than Comcast’s granular internal set top box data from over 17 million households across their footprint. It is, according to Heather Coghill, Senior Director of Audience Insights, “a treasure trove of data,” which is used to gain insights for their twice a year Effectv TV Viewership Report.

“We started the study back in 2019 with one report in first quarter. Last year we released a report in first and second quarter. Now we are releasing a year-end report for third and fourth quarter 2020. Going forward we are hoping to do it twice a year. Our next is in the summer with first and second quarter 2021 findings,” she explained. This most recent release of the full 2020 year contains a wealth of fascinating takeaways which Coghill shared with MediaVillage.

Admittedly, 2020 was an incredibly unusual year with a pandemic, Black Lives Matter, a shift to working from home and a heated political environment all impacting various aspects of our lives. But Coghill believes that the trends discerned in this full year report are, in fact, the harbingers for future media consumption, especially as she sees the trends evolving through the full year.

Live Linear TV is Alive and Thriving

The data shows that there has been a great change in viewing behavior from previous years. “We saw a rise of live TV viewing in the latter half of 2020,” Coghill explained, “Eighty-nine percent of all viewing in Comcast households in fourth quarter was done live, which was the largest we’ve seen, and the average Comcast household spent +16 more minutes a day with live TV in third quarter and +10 more minutes a day with live TV in fourth quarter (compared to the same time in 2019). She predicts linear will continue to grow because of the pent up demand for fresh content. Much of the production was halted in 202 because of Covid-19. And while there is obviously more streaming and digital viewing taking place now, this consumption is, “being done in conjunction and not necessarily as a replacement (to linear). There is so much content out there for viewers to find and they have all of the control,” she said.

Cable Drove Viewership

The year also saw a huge rise in cable TV viewing overall. Coghill noted that, “Cable networks were a driver of the growth in live TV, 71% of all viewing was to cable networks – the highest share we’ve seen we began tracking three years ago.” Compared to broadcast and premium, cable viewing was by far, the biggest winner in terms of growth, a surprising takeaway for Coghill. Impressive growth occurred in several genres for different reasons.

News and Lifestyle Programming Drove Cable Viewing

Understandably in this news-heavy year, cable news networks were the main driver of cable gains. “There was huge growth in cable news viewing specifically,” she stated and added, “In the same period in 2019, cable news viewing accounted for 16% of all viewing. In the latter half of last year, it accounted for a quarter of all TV viewing. These networks saw a +63% increase in gross hours viewed compared to 2019.”

Notably, lifestyle and family programming also experienced growth of +9% year to year as viewers spent more time at home, spending more time with their children and contemplating improvements to make their domestic surroundings more comfortable and functional.

An Unusual Year for Sports

Because of the disruption of certain sports seasons, “the viewing shifted along with that,” she said, “But the growth we saw in news points to the fact that there is clearly a demand for live content and sports is always has a strong viewership. I think that as the seasons come back to normal, viewership will follow.”  While people missed their favorite sports, once seasons started to come back, viewership followed and certain sports gained new viewers and the potential for new fans. “Sports fans who were not necessarily golf (or racing) fans were watching PGA and NASCAR because that were all of the sports they could get,” she noted. It will be interesting to see if any of these other sports will continue to attract viewers in 2021.

New Normal?

Will there is a post pandemic new normal? “We have been trending in this direction already,” she admitted, “Television is no longer about the top networks in primetime. Even though live viewing was up it wasn’t up because of the major top networks or an increase in prime viewing. What we are seeing is that households are watching all day, every day. There is growth across dayparts, especially with people being home … and households are watching different types of content.” Interestingly, she revealed that while the average household watches 33 different networks, if you add up all of the different networks viewed across all Comcast homes, the number of networks is a staggering 311 different networks.

But, she concluded, there is really no normal, “Everyone is doing what works for them and watching at different times of day and different networks and there is content now to allow for that.” In other words, stay tuned…

 

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

 

 

 

 

The Surprising Sports Trends Revealed By Heather Coghill in Comcast’s TV Viewership Report

When it comes to tracking television viewing, one of the best data sources to use is from Comcast’s internal set top box information which is, according to Senior Director of Audience Insights, Heather Coghill, “a treasure trove of data with access to viewing data from over 17 million households across the Comcast footprint.” 

Twice a year, the company examines their subscribers’ viewing trends in aggregate, compiling them into an extensive TV Viewership Report. The most recent study was just released and contains a wealth of takeaways. There are even a few surprises, especially (spoiler alert) about Sports. Coghill, shared the results with MediaVillage.

TV Viewership Report Takeaways

The report highlights, according to Coghill, “big picture viewing trends.” These big picture trends revealed some surprises. For one, after monitoring the data, she scoffs at those who predict the demise of linear TV. “There is a narrative out in the press that television viewing is dying, and what we’ve seen in the two years we have been tracking this internal viewing data is that viewing has actually increased every quarter year over year for the past eight quarters.”

This continued growth is, “a positive,” she affirmed, “We are seeing TV viewing remaining strong. In Second Quarter specifically, we saw that there was 15 minutes more per household per day being spent with the television compared to Second Quarter last year. That equates to about 17 more hours over the course of the quarter.”

There is great confidence in these findings. Because the data is so granular, “we are not limited by sample size,” she explained, “We can see super-niche viewing that maybe in a panel-type measurement would get cut off because they are not meeting reporting standards.”

Somewhat less surprising, at least to me, is the impact of the pandemic on viewing. As people shelter-in-place, Comcast found that households are spending even more time viewing television – about 32 minutes more in the first half of the year over the same time last year. In fact, total hours of TV consumed in second quarter 2020 reached 8.5 billion hours which was an increase of over 200 million hours year over year.

Breaking it down by daypart, Coghill found that, “Seventy-one percent of all viewing happens outside of prime.” On a market by market level, she reported that, “around the pandemic, we looked at (viewing) regionally and it was interesting. On the west coast where the coronavirus hit earlier, they saw an uptick in viewership earlier than what we saw in the rest of the country and then it leveled out before the viewing for the rest of the country leveled out.”

Even day to day comparisons showed a shift in recent usage. “Cable’s share increased substantially from weekday to weekend from 62% during the weekday to 68% on the weekend,” she stated and added, “That’s significant considering share between the two are typically consistent.” 

Feeling the Absence of Sports

Cable’s dominance in weekend viewing, “is different from what we have seen in the past,” Coghill explained, “We think that, because sports aren’t happening, there is less viewing going to the broadcast networks on the weekends.”

Certainly sports’ absence has been looming large in any discussion of television viewing during the pandemic. Even today, there is uncertainty about which sports are coming back and in what format and schedule. Viewers want their sports programming and that desire is born out in the data and trends. “Sports returned in Summer 2020 with the MLB season openers and the first NHL and NBA restart games averaging a viewership increase of 71% over last year,” she noted.

“Sports fans are hungry for that type of content,” so much so that she discovered, “People who are sports fans, they are not just a sports fan of one sport. Fifty-five percent of heavy viewers of one sport watch three or more sports heavily. If certain sports aren’t happening or are delayed or postponed, it’s not that those people aren’t tuning in. We can find them wherever they are watching.”

To that end, Coghill is able to advise advertisers as to how to reach those fans whose favorite sport might not be available at this time. As part of the study, Comcast data was placed in a viewing matrix that shows what other programming viewers of one sport are watching. Take for example a college football fan. “Who knows what is going to happen with college football – it might not come back. We can tell you where else you can reach those college football viewers,” she said.

Since sports fans are sampling other types of sports while they wait for their favorite to return, there is, according to Coghill, anecdotal evidence to suggest that fan bases of these secondary sports choices might increase. “When the PGA was one of the first sports to resume, a lot of us at work were tuning into golf. Not because we are golf fans but just because we are so hungry for live events,” she explained.

The data also showed an increase in viewing fragmentation partially attributed to the lack of sports tent pole events. But, “viewing has increased,” she stated, “Advertisers need to move beyond being content focused and using content as a proxy to reach audiences. (They should) follow those audiences everywhere they may be going. So maybe it’s more spots across lesser rated networks or dayparts. But if you aggregate all of those together we can still reach that audience.”

Looking Ahead

Are we seeing these new viewing habits holding for the long term? “I think there are some things that will level out,” she admitted, “but I think some shifts are here to stay. The one thing that we’ve seen that is pretty consistent since the pandemic started in March is that there has been an increase in daytime viewing. So as more people are home and kids are home from school more people are available to watch television during the day. Until we resume some sort of normalcy, that will be here to stay,” she concluded.

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

Surprising TV Trends From Comcast STB Data. An Interview with Heather Coghill

Heather Coghill, Senior Director Audience Insights, Comcast Spotlight has been a fan of set top box data for years. And now, with the recent announcement of a new television insights study based on Comcast Spotlight’s footprint, she has more than enough data to discern both national and local market trends.  

But in a media market that offers a choice of many television performance reports, why release another one now? “When we first unlocked our set top box data, we saw that it was uncovering new insights which we publicized internally,” she explained. “We shared the results with our clients. Now we want to release the results to a wider audience.” Indeed, the insights gleaned from the set top box data dispels many myths regarding consumer preferences and gives greater clarity to both advertisers and programmers on viewer behaviors.

The Data

The report culls insights from over 17 million Comcast households across 65 markets. This is, “based on approximately nine billion hours of viewing data captured in Q1 2019. To put that number in perspective, it would take over 100,000 years to watch one billion hours of content,” she noted.  All of this data is managed by an analytics team. “We have data scientists and people who are used to working with big data and they cultivated it for us.”

For Coghill, time spent per day was an important metric. “The press reports that TV is dying, but in fact people are spending a lot of time with TV daily – over 6 hours – and it was up year to year.” The data shows that “TV is as strong as ever.”

A New Television Landscape

However, “TV viewing has changed,” she stated. “It’s not just about watching the four broadcast networks in primetime anymore. We found that 68% of time spent with linear TV is spent outside of primetime. The sheer number of networks that households are watching total over 34 per month. And the networks vary by household with cable accounting for 65% of all viewing.” The amount of networks viewed per month surprised both Coghill and me and is higher than other analyses based on much smaller samples. “If you just took the most watched network across all of our households, it is 308 different networks,” she added, which means that, “it’s getting harder and harder for advertisers to reach audiences at scale.” For Coghill, all of this speaks to the degree of fragmentation, “which we knew to be true but I was surprised as to how much fragmentation there actually is.”

The report found that primetime is not necessarily the highest viewing daypart, Sunday is not necessarily the highest viewing day of the week and the share of live and time-shifted viewing remained constant throughout the week. These insights hold great implications for programmers, schedulers, marketers and advertisers.

According to the report results, there was a significant uptick in viewing 1Q18 to 1Q19 with viewing on cable networks and Video on Demand (VOD) driving a large part of this growth. Notably, VOD viewership in Comcast homes doubled since 2016. 

Local Market Insights

“The data becomes especially valuable when you look at the local market level, especially when you get into niche audience segments,” because of the ample sample size that the Comcast data offers. “We can look at tens of thousands of households in many markets,” she stated. I found that there were fairly consistent viewing patterns across markets. Examples: The number of networks watched on a market-by-market level ranged from 30-37 and the amount of time viewing outside of prime ranged from 66% to 70%.

In comparing year to year trends, Coghill explained that, “While the big picture trends remain consistent across markets, there are definitely some nuances – households in Pittsburgh spend 6 hours 27 minutes with live linear television daily, while households in Salt Lake City spend 4 hours 41 minutes with live linear television daily. Households in Sacramento spend 1 hour 8 minutes with time-shifted viewing daily (DVR/VOD), while households in Miami only spend 35 minutes a day. When we get into the network level viewing, these differences become even more apparent.”

Stay Tuned

With all of this available data, there will be added analyses in future reports. “We are going to take a deeper look at viewing by market and by audience segments in an upcoming edition,” Coghill shared, “and these reports will come out quarterly going forward.”

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com