Commentary Nielsen, We Need a Gauge with a True Ad-Supported View

 Here's a little more research on TV media marketing that serves greater potential for consumer engagement and purchase experience according to Nielsen: Philip Jay LeNoble, Ph.D.

Commentary

Nielsen, We Need a Gauge With a True Ad-Supported View

• by Dave Morgan , Featured Contributor, 7 hours ago

First things first. Nielsen, thank you for creating a new view of The Gauge that breaks out the viewing of content that is ad-supported. Previously, the report didn’t differentiate the portions of U.S. TV viewing that were on ad-free streaming and whose audiences, therefore, weren’t available to advertisers.

It shows, for example, that “[i]n Q1 of 2025, 72.4% of TV viewing was on ad-supported platforms, compared to 27.6% for ad-free platforms. Traditional TV (cable and broadcast) are tied at about 29% to account for 58% of total ad-supported TV.”

The idea is to give advertisers an idea of where they can connect to their desired audiences.

While I laud the new release, I would like it to go further. Nielsen, how about making it a gauge of the number of ad exposures and multiple-time reach available across broadcast, cable and streaming channels?

Why is a true ad-exposure Gauge important? Because the vast majority of streaming services are “ad-light,” carrying far fewer ads and ad time than their linear brethren. Plus, streaming viewership tends to have a very strong skew toward heavy-streaming viewers. That's one of the reasons that we see the same ads over and over again when we’re watching popular streaming programming.

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Is it hard to make a true ad-exposure Gauge? Of course not. Nielsen has all of the data to do it, as do many ad platform companies that work across both linear and streaming. In fact, in October of last year, comScore released a report with media analyst Evan Shapiro called “Setting the Score” that did exactly that. It showed that while streaming might command more than 45% of all content viewing time in the U.S., it commanded well under 14% of ad-viewing time.

But Nielsen can take this even further for us, and make the Gauge really valuable. How about including a simple graph to show the curve of the declination of reach with the increase of frequency? This is the biggest problem today for CTV advertisers, and it would be great for Nielsen to demonstrate leadership in presenting something that would be enormously beneficial for advertisers, agencies and publishers alike.

What do you think, folks? Should Nielsen lead the way with a true ad-exposure Gauge for TV?

Influenced Consumers Are More Valuable to Brands.

 For local-direct clients who use radio in addition to well-placed and affordable TV media marketing, below is a little boost for including radio advertising to up the response and engagement for a local business's media marketing: Philip Jay LeNoble, Ph.D.

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Katz: Radio-Ad Influenced Consumers Are More Valuable To Brands.

• May 9, 2025 Updated 2 mins ago
 

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How do you get someone to bet on sports, consider buying a car, or invest in a new mattress? It turns out the best answer in all three cases is… buy a radio ad. In an analysis of the latest Nielsen Scarborough data, Katz Radio Group says the numbers show that radio outperforms other media in several key consumer categories resulting in U.S. adults taking an action after they are exposed to the radio spot.

Overall, Katz says the data shows two-thirds of consumers say they have taken action as a result of an ad in the past three months. And one in four of those consumers report having taken an action based on radio ads.

Nielsen Scarborough doesn’t offer granular intel on what that action is, but it is typically doing things like recommending a product to others, posting or following on social media, visiting a website, going to a retail location, or actually making a purchase.

“While we do not know which advertisers’ messaging they responded to, we do know that these radio-influenced consumers are highly engaged across categories, making them advantageous to brands—and more valuable than ad-influenced adults in general,” says Katz in a blog post detailing its findings. “Radio-influenced consumers are more likely to be spending money on sports betting, vacations, cars, movies, and retail than the average adult, and even more than other ad-influenced adults,” it says.

Sports betting companies have invested tens of millions of dollars in audio ads during the past several years as they have seen a commercial during a radio show parlay into more betting action on their apps. The Nielsen Scarborough data reveals that sports betting is one of the categories where radio scores the best. After someone hears an ad on radio, they are 68% more likely than the average adult to engage in sports betting compared to the average ad-influenced consumer who may have consumed the ad on other media, including television, print, and outdoor.

The story is similar for luxury car buying, where radio delivers a 15-point advantage over other media. Radio does 11% better for motivating people into action regarding a compact car, and does even better for electric vehicles, as people who hear a radio ad for an EV are 117% more likely to take action compared to those who didn’t hear the commercial.

The Katz analysis shows similar advantages for radio on other activities, including going to see a movie on its opening weekend, buying fine jewelry, or planning a theme park vacation. In each case, radio ad exposure drives greater consideration that media overall. Katz concludes that makes radio listeners among the most profitable targets for brands. “With its mass reach and influence among consumers, radio ads have the potential to impact millions of brand decisions every day,” it says.

 Share this with your local-direct clients as it's another thought-provoking message for local-direct advertisers to consider before embarking on their own when it comes to their media marketing: Philip Jay LeNoble, Ph.D.

Commentary

Learning From Netflix: Why Your Next Ad Should Be a Story-World

• by Jennifer Barthe , May 5, 2025

Remember losing yourself in a TV series so completely that your overflowing inbox and that awkward meeting from earlier just... disappear? That kind of immersion isn't just enjoyable; it's increasingly valuable. According to Accenture, 61% of consumers are more likely to buy from brands offering immersive experiences.

As we enter the era of spatial computing with increasingly rich media opportunities, it's time to stop thinking in banner ads and start designing rabbit holes worth falling into.

Streaming platforms, naturally, play this game like pros. Making addictive TV shows means they're essentially professional world-builders. Netflix's Nextworld platform on Roblox now gives brands a glimpse of how we might evolve from interrupting linear storytelling to crafting universes worth getting lost in.

Three Secret Ingredients for Building Your Brand's Multiverse

A deeply motivated quest. Traditional advertising typically presents a simple problem-solution narrative: Have dandruff? Use this shampoo. But in an age where audiences can skip, block, or scroll past messages that feel transactional, brands need to transform everyday moments into meaningful chapters of a larger adventure.

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Walmart's new Unlimited Shoppable Game shows how brands can employ this principle. In the game, young characters chase dreams like getting off an inner city rooftop to become world-famous artists or fashion designers, battling internal "Silencers" like self-doubt. Beyond the usual purchase journeys portrayed in ads, these quests offer personal transformations that audiences want to engage in.

Characters with strategic flaws. Many brand characters feel hollow -- AI chatbots and focus-grouped mascots that only exist to sell. But the most binge-worthy TV characters -- from “Breaking Bad”’s Walter White to “Succession”’s Roy family -- grip us precisely because their flaws create dramatic tension. We watch because we want to see how their personality will further or derail the pursuit of their deepest darkest desires.

Netflix's Nextworld brings this principle to interactive spaces. For example, Wednesday Addams's pathological aversion to anything cheerful or social constantly derails her mission to solve Nevermore Academy's mysteries -- and that's exactly what makes stepping into her combat boots so irresistible. Her disdain for normal human interaction isn't a flaw to fix; it's the hook that keeps us coming back.

Similarly, Duolingo’s owl transformed passive aggression into a $7.7 billion business. These strategically flawed characters feel exciting enough to follow, bond with -- and even mourn, as proven by Duo's recent viral "death" stunt.

Worlds that whisper "welcome to wonderland." The brand guidelines of tomorrow won't just specify logo dimensions; they'll define the rules and rituals of entire universes.

In the realm of consumer brands, Gucci has created a distinct and powerful storyworld style. Its esthetic DNA mutates purposefully across touchpoints while remaining instantly recognizable: Runway shows erupt into fever dreams with models cradling dragons or busts of their own heads, and neo-romantic, maximalist virtual spaces transform brand signatures into coveted artifacts.

Brands’ new challenge is to create signature universes that feel familiar enough to trust, yet hold endless capacity for wonder. The goal isn't visual uniformity – it's emotional resonance that deepens with each new chapter.

Your challenge in this future media world isn't to find better ways to interrupt. It's to become irresistible.

Commentary

Sales Are Down -- Is it Marketing, Macroeconomics, Or Momentum?

• by Corinne Casagrande , 5 hours ago

We think consumers are tightening spend: People hear whispers of a downturn, pay higher interest rates, and they respond by slowly scaling back "just in case."

Yet we’re having more trouble than ever identifying clear pullbacks. Consumer spending and underlying U.S. macroeconomics remain strong.  Wage growth is outpacing inflation, inflation is easing, and consumer spend grew in March. It’s hard to tell your CEO that sales are down because of macroeconomic conditions when the economic situation looks pretty good in aggregate.

Some marketers think they’re feeling the impact anyway. Lower-income consumers are constrained. Though their confidence is low, we see few indicators of trouble for prime and wealthier consumers. Morgan Stanley did, however, find one sign of strain on prime consumers: a rise in delinquencies for mortgage or car loans. Even high-income households that secured one of these loans after 2022 pay a significantly larger portion of their income to housing costs, crowding out discretionary spending.

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What counts as “discretionary” now?

Maybe what we think are pullbacks are actually a realignment of spending priorities. After all, people save less than ever today. At 3.9%, the current saving rate is half the pre-2020 average.  Our “essentials” list got a lot longer in the last decade.  

New “essentials” are more resilient

People spend more time at home than ever (almost two hours more per day compared to 2019). This impacts different categories:

Wellness spending: In past recessions, gym memberships were an easy cut. The format and spending have changed; the monthly Peloton charges or GLP-1 subscription may hold outsized value. Spending on health and wellness is also up $3.6K - $6.7K per year per household, according to BLS.

Entertainment & Streaming Services:Consumers tell us they want fewer media subscriptions, yet they still splurge for multiple services. People may pare down, but not entirely pull back on their near-constant Netflix companions.

Where Value Messaging Should Begin

Travel: The classic discretionary spend category, and now big trips consistently get downsized or postponed. Domestic brands can expect less foreign visitors as the inbound has already slowed in Q1. The Conference Board confirmed in April that people intend to spend less on vacations this year.

Dining out and takeout: Grocery prices have provided their fair share of sticker shock in the past three years, but QSR, fast casual and restaurants were doing well -- not from volume, but because inflation created air cover to allow restaurants to raise prices. When people want to pull back, they say they will eat out less.

We often measure recessions by big headlines: a spike in unemployment, mass layoffs, plunging GDP. But by the time those show up, we’re already in a different economic situation.  Some consumers have been living in their own personal pullback for months. For marketers, industry and interest data (search, survey, competitive) can be more useful to benchmark spending behavior.

Commentary Want to Break Through the Noise? Don't Shout Louder -- Speak Smarter

 What local-direct businesses can do t help make their advertising message more respondent! Wehn it comes to TV reps to help local businesses to gain the much-needed benefits of branding or just improving the effectiveness of their media marketing, the article below may help you gain more trust from your local-direct clients: Philip Jay LeNoble, Ph.D.

Commentary

Want To Break Through the Noise? Don't Shout Louder -- Speak Smarter

• by Michael Baer , May 6, 2025

There’s never been more B2B content than there is right now, with one study showing 92% of marketers increased their content marketing budgets in 2024.

And the volume is only going to continue to increase: articles, blog posts, white papers, all coming more frequently than ever. In another study, almost half of all marketers said they expect to add more content marketing again this year.

So how do you break through when everyone’s shouting louder and more often?

Don’t try to shout louder. Instead, speak smarter. Here are some important approaches you should take.

Be more purposeful in your content.  Too much brand content is created piecemeal, without a clear purpose in mind. To effectively cut through the noise, it's essential to have a well-thought-out content strategy. This includes:

• Being clear about your content objectives and mission.
• Purposefully creating personas that document your audiences’ key challenges, pain points, and goals.
• Identifying your audience's content needs and preferences to tailor your content around.
• Defining content pillars that establish your content’s key themes that align with your brand and resonate with your audience.

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Hold the sales pitch. Modern buyers are seeking content that provides clarity, insight, or help, and they have fine-tuned BS meters that identify and tune out overt sales messages. In fact, trying to pitch too soon is the fastest way to lose your audience.

Instead, focus first on providing insights and information they are looking for. Being useful now fosters the credibility and trust that earns you the right to sell later.

Deliver value, not volume. Much brand content is created to fill calendars, check boxes, and fill out spreadsheets, not to deliver real value.

Consider rising above the content chaos. You don’t need to post daily, publish multiple blog posts a week, or be active on all social platforms. Instead of saying more, focus your energy on fewer, better assets.This bit of restraint can be your competitive advantage -- and allows you to put in the amount of effort necessary to create something really worth reading.

Have a point of view. Most B2B content plays it safe. But playing it safe is what makes most content invisible.

If you want to stand out, don’t be afraid to challenge conventional wisdom or offer a take that’s counter to the dominant narrative -- especially if it’s rooted in real-world experience. Audiences gravitate toward content that makes them think, not just nod.

Make it easy to read and hard to ignore. Your audience is busier than ever and pulled in a million directions. Because of this, they likely appreciate concise and clear content over long-form, jargon-laden tomes. Use straightforward language, break up text with headings and bullet points, and get to the point quickly.

Simplicity doesn’t suggest lack of depth. It projects empathy.

Play the long game. The goal of content isn’t to get a quick, one-off action; it’s to get someone to care about your brand. That requires nurturing the relationship over time.

So instead of focusing on hail-Marys or transactional efforts:

• Stay focused on customers and their needs
• Deliver value over time
• Build credibility, not just visibility
• Nurture interest with additional content

In today’s massive content clutter, you don’t need to be louder to get your customer’s attention. You need to be smarter. That means content that addresses real paint points, delivers value consistently, and earns and builds trust over time. That’s what ultimately translates into winning customers and building loyalt

 

Commentary

Google/Apple Search News: Are We at A 'Cord Cutting' TV Moment'?

• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, Yesterday

Google could be seeing some massive disruption to its search business. This has parallels to the transformative industry-shaking moves when TV cord-cutting reared its ugly head.

Apple is considering dropping Google as the default search option because search usage has dropped in April -- for the first time ever, according to testimony of Eddie Cue, senior vice president of services of Apple, in court on Wednesday.

Why? Analysts say this is about consumers increasingly turning to artificial intelligence (AI).

That is not good news. Apple gets Google essentially for free -- a savings of a whopping $20 billion a year -- a benefit of Apple’s revenue share deal with Google.

This comes as the U.S. Department of Justice is pushing to break up Google’s business. For Google, it could yield a much bigger outcome. Search revenue is 57% of Alphabet revenue.

Google could lose a billion iPhone users who use their phones for search perhaps a dozen times a day if Apple shifts to non Google third-party AI search platforms.

For many, this is akin to the massive industry shift back in August 2015 -- at least as it was mulled over on CNBC’s “Halftime Report” on Wednesday.

About ten years ago, Disney disclosed for the first time that there was some cord-cutting with its cable TV networks -- especially ESPN, the biggest cable TV channel, which these days pulled in about $16 billion a year from all revenue sources, including advertising and cable carriage fees.

From that moment on, everything changed in the legacy, linear TV business, not just for Disney but for all legacy TV-networks.

Disney stock has not been the same since. The business continues to deal with major pain due to cord-cutting, as Disney's stock performance can attest to since that time.

This comes as Google stands to lose its dominance -- some would say virtual monopoly -- of the search business due to the Federal government's efforts to break up the company.

Now we might see those rapidly growing AI platforms -- including Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, Nvidia, Claude, DeepSeek and Grok -- taking over.

Are those companies and platforms on the same trajectory as the streamer where the likes of Netflix, Prime Video, Roku, Tubi, and Apple TV+ and other streaming or CTV-related services are now?

More importantly, where will Apple and Google then go from here?

 

Commentary

Movie Tariffs - For an Industry with Too Much Drama Already?

• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, May 6, 2025

The movie industry thought they were in the clear -- from tariff land. But maybe not.

The Trump Administration now says too many U.S. filmmakers are all over the world -- getting tax breaks from many countries -- to make movies.

They don’t like it, and they are starting up a 100% tariff on films produced in part or entirely outside the U.S. The Trump Administration wants movies to be made in San Francisco, not Singapore.

But what does this do to a hard-pressed movie industry struggling to get back to its pre-pandemic business level? What do you think?

Movie executives must rolling their eyes, thinking they have been slowly building back to business since that disastrous spring of 2020 after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic -- the beginning of widespread theatrical closings for the better part of that entire year.

This was all compounded by the rise of a competitive premium streaming business.

But that does not mean U.S.-based movie studios should be put on the same plane as those based in China, Vietnam or India, sending low-priced products to the U.S. Nor are they on the same level as thriving technology companies like Apple that manufacture iPhones overseas.

The movie industry has been fragile -- both for movie studios and movie theater owners who have been under attack from all kinds of entertainment options giving an entertainment consumer lots of choice.

Right now, movies are priced around $10 to $15 a ticket -- and  movie studio executives and movie theater owners say that is a bargain.

But what if the price goes up to $15 to $20? What happens then?

Those crazy prices will come when movie studios need to spend much more to make films.

The average cost of making a feature film is between $100 million and $150 million. The broader range is between $80 million and more than $200 million to produce.

Top-level summer movie productions are between $150 million and $200 million in production costs -- so these movies may then not get made. It is also possible that new franchise editions of films like “Avengers,” “Avatar,” “Star Wars” or “John Wick” won't get made.

Big movies like the very expensive “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning,” to be released on May 23 were shot all over the world, which is one of the key selling points for consumers.

And what of the premium streaming platforms -- many of those sister companies to those U.S. movie production studios? Those big titles then would not be used to pull in consumers to re-up their streaming subscriptions.

For the movie industry, how much more is impossible now?