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Media Matters goes beyond simply reporting on current trends and hot topics to get to the heart of media, advertising and marketing issues with insightful analyses and critiques that help create a perspective on industry buzz throughout the year. It's a must-read supplement to our research annuals.

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June 15, 2021

Applying Critical Thinking to Promotional Media Research  

On an almost daily basis, reports pass our desks that purport to show how a particular medium is “the best” or “beats” another medium handily in one aspect or another. They often contain useful information, but it’s crucial to apply critical thinking to separate facts from promotional hype. A case in point is a report released this month from the Global Video Measurement Alliance (GVMA) using data from Nielsen and Tubular Labs on how social video can build reach among audiences not reached as well by linear TV. The report, Discovering Audiences on Social Video: How Brands Can Leverage New Reach in the Changing Media Landscape, explored how social video reach compares to linear TV across key genres and demographics. For example, it found a great deal of variation for reach by genre between the two platforms as follows:

 


Here we see that the report claims social video reach equals—or approaches—linear TV in entertainment and news/politics, but lags behind linear for sports and films/movies. On the other hand, that social video reach far exceeds linear when it comes to kid’s programming, music and dance, home/DIY, people/blogs, and education. The main takeaway here is that social video’s strength is in areas where linear TV has a relative paucity of content, while the situation is reversed when it comes to sports in particular, where linear TV dominates in content delivery.

But beyond this, what does this reach data tell us? When it comes to entertainment, for example, 62% of linear TV’s potential audience saw entertainment programming on linear TV in February 2021, while the same proportion of social video’s potential audience saw entertainment programming in the same time period. That’s all. It doesn’t tell us how much or how often people watched. And based on Nielsen’s Total Audience Reports (not covered in the GMVA analysis), we can safely say that linear TV far exceeds social video in share of time spent viewing.

Rather than looking at the two platforms from this perspective, the report emphasizes the audience composition of social video, showing that its audience has a much larger proportion of younger viewers of both sexes, compared to linear TV. Specifically, looking at the combined categories of entertainment, news/politics and sports, this analysis found that 8% of linear TV’s total consumption of these categories was by those aged 18-34, compared to 53% on social video.  In addition, the report showed on an index basis that in terms of composition, social video skews much younger than the national norms:


 


Here again, the data gets slippery. What the index tells us, for example, is that across all genres, the social video composition of 18–24-year-old women was 77% greater than their age group’s representation in the total U.S. population. Interesting, yes. But it doesn’t tell us anything more than that when it comes to the relative strengths of linear versus social video as advertising vehicles. We can’t assume anything about this, based on the data in this report. What percent of Nielsen's "average commercial minute audience" actually watches an average commercial? What percentage of social media's average "impression" audience actually watches the message?

Lest we sound overly critical, we will say that this report is a step in the right direction in an area where a great deal of research is needed. Linear TV has a large body of research on reach, composition, attentiveness, ad impact and more. For social video—and all digital media—to compete, they must show their strengths in ways that marketers, who are already comfortable with linear TV, understand. The GMVA report shows that social video’s audience skews younger and has particular strengths among genres that are less often covered on linear TV. But as our deeper dive into this report shows, we must be cautious about drawing conclusions beyond what the data is really telling us.

In Brief: Who Are the Real Casualties in the Linear Vs. Digital Battle?

In its latest survey of media buyers, the IAB reports that both linear TV and digital video will benefit from increased ad spending in the remaining quarters of 2021, with share increases up 20% and 53% respectively. On the other hand, “all other” traditional media (radio, print, OOH and direct mail) is expected to see its share of the budget decline by 29%. All other forms of digital media will also experience declines in the double digits.

While this type of survey is hardly definitive when it comes to planned media budgets, it is noteworthy that neither linear TV nor digital video are losing out in their ongoing battle for ad dollars. TV and digital video presentations remain the favored venues, but rather than poaching from each other’s share of budget, their increased share is coming from cuts in the long-suffering print media and from audio formats of all types. Despite the trade press’s portrayal of linear in decline as digital gains ascendancy, it’s clear—at least from this survey—that the real casualties in this battle are the other traditional media and non-video digital formats.















































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