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Measurement Capabilities|December 14, 2023

Time Spent Well

An Analysis of How Viewers Spend Time and How Advertisers (Should) Spend Money

two hands, one with time, one with money

Media expert Evan Shapiro's fascinating analysis reveals how viewers spend time across today's media landscape. He shows why Daily Time Spent is the key performance indicator for marketers seeking premium engagement.

  • The renewed value of live, linear CTV
  • Why traditional TV and streaming should be unified
  • How media buying transformed in 2023

 

This research is a must-read for understanding evolving viewer behavior and optimizing your media spend for persistent audience attention.

Download the full Insights deck to learn why time spent signals the future of effective advertising.

Time Spent Well Presentation

Key Takeaways

The entire TV ecosystem is in search of a measurement metric for the new era of consumption. This has become increasingly important, as advertising once again takes center stage in the economy. This deck makes the case for the primacy of daily and quality time spent.

As attention, audiences and ad dollars shift to CTV and Social video, it’s important to understand that not all impressions are equal. Whether your ads are seen and the environment where they are seen are crucial to the waste or success of an ad campaign.1

SVOD with ads is growing, but churn presents enormous challenges for ongoing messaging. Linear environments can help guarantee ads cannot be skipped, while repeated, continual, daily usage helps ensure that you can reinforce messages with valuable audiences. And while FAST is growing fast, the viewership is thin and fleeting. Social video has massive reach, but is also massively fragmented, presents safety issues, and is laden with fraud.2

The linear environment of vMVPDs is the fastest-growing CTV environment and boasts some of the highest share of daily time spent in the ecosystem. When married with traditional MVPD viewing – still more than half of TV viewing time – the combination offers daily, recurring, urgent, and local viewing with valuable audiences, in a safe, premium environment.3

While YouTube TV gets a lot of buzz, Charter has a larger subscriber base. The various vMVPD services all offer highly engaged audiences with consistent reach. However, only Charter offers the one-two punch of digital consumers on vMVPD and homeowners watching linear on MVPD. What’s more, audiences who watch on both streaming and linear MVPD are higher income than those who only do one or the other.4

Ad buyers no longer buy for reach, they buy for efficacy, for performance. Action is the new CPM.5

Over the course of the next 36 months, utility will become the most important facet of major streaming video services. Those who super-serve their audiences, with new, daily content (and services) they need, will keep their users. Those who do not… will stay stuck in a revolving door of watch and switch, burn and churn.6

Live TV is now the most premium environment in video. In streaming, vMVPDs punch above their weight in time-spent, because their audiences come back every darned day, and spend hours watching, across numerous channels.7

2023 changed media buying. Effective marketing is no longer about the lowest cost per eyeball, but the highest return on investment. In a universe of nearly unlimited video impressions, daily utility and live content will be even more rare and valuable to anyone looking for measurable return on an advertising spend. There is less excuse than ever to waste half your ad money.

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