2022 Frost Radar™: Television Viewership Data
TV advertising has more tools than ever to reach viewers more accurately, yet the industry is still catching up to measuring the changing viewership landscape. The proliferation of streaming services and devices, in addition to linear broadcast and pay TV, has given viewers a staggering array of content options. Measuring television viewership was once the province of a single company, Nielsen, using a people meter-based methodology. While this made pricing advertising simpler, it was a coarse representative sample and the industry felt it began to undercount viewers.
Recent shifts in the TV viewership data landscape
The television viewership data market significantly changed in late 2021 when the Media Rating Council (MRC) suspended Nielsen’s TV ratings accreditation, causing media companies and advertisers to seek new vendors, methodologies, and workflows to gauge their viewership and help set advertising rates. Disney expanded its multi-year relationship with Samba TV and announced measurement tests with Comscore and Nielsen. Paramount (as ViacomCBS) began viewership data trials with Comscore and VideoAmp. Warner Bros Discovery (as WarnerMedia) began investigating Comscore, VideoAmp, and iSpot.tv in early 2022 as viewership data alternatives. Also, Comcast (as NBCUniversal) chose iSpot.tv as its first alternative in TV viewership measurement and is publicly working on its comprehensive measurement framework for the entire media and advertising industry.
These changes were made predominantly because new technologies, such as automatic content recognition (ACR), now make it possible to track viewing down to the household, show, and advertisement. ACR in 2022 has a much larger sample size than typical survey-based viewership measurement, therefore the industry considers it a finer, more representative sample of the entire viewing population. However, ACR is implemented by different technology vendors across a range of TV manufacturers, and careful consideration must be paid to the reach and capabilities of those vendors to achieve satisfactory accuracy and to serve the data needs of advertisers.
The TV viewership data providers
To help advertisers assess the changing TV viewership data landscape, the 2022 Frost Radar™: Television Viewership Data compares Inscape, iSpot.tv, LG Ads, Nielsen, Roku, Samba TV, Samsung Ads, and VideoAmp according to their TV data reach and capabilities. Inscape, LG Ads, and Samsung Ads all rely on their own TV manufacturing divisions to incorporate ACR. While LG, Samsung, and Vizio are among the top smart TV vendors worldwide, their datasets are skewed toward consumers that purchase their brand of smart TV. Roku and Samba TV have worked with a variety of TV OEM partners for years, giving them a wider demographic sample. Of all providers measured, Samba TV has the largest and widest array of TV OEM partners using its ACR technology.
What to consider when selecting a TV viewership data provider
Inscape, LG Ads, Roku, Samba TV, and Samsung Ads all control their ACR technology, making them first-party data recipients. iSpot.tv, Nielsen, and VideoAmp license data from vendors, making them third-party data recipients, and thus subject to changing arrangements and industry conditions.
A consequence of all of these vendors collecting ACR data is that many of them have become walled gardens, keeping their data only for their advertising customers, attempting vendor lock-in. LG Ads and Samsung Ads predominantly keep their data in-house, though LG Ads began licensing its data to iSpot.tv in late 2021. Nielsen licenses its data from Inscape and through Roku after Nielsen sold its ACR technology to Roku in early 2021. Inscape and Samba TV are the only viewership data providers that openly license to third parties. Only LG, with 8 partners, Roku, with 15 partners, and Samba TV, with 24 partners, generate data from multiple smart TV manufacturers.
Big data from smart TVs is changing the face of both addressable TV advertising and media measurement. Each TV viewership data source has a statistically significant sample of millions of devices and some have a diverse base that is representative of the US and various global markets. More data enables finer segmentation of demographic groups for targeting purposes. As it relates to measurement, smart TV brand diversity helps address hidden biases associated with TV brand preference. Relying on data gathered from any one brand of devices makes it difficult to determine if that buying preference correlates with other biases, such as price sensitivity.
With all these considerations, comparing the various reach and capability attributes of Inscape, iSpot.tv, LG Ads, Nielsen, Roku, Samba TV, Samsung Ads, and VideoAmp yielded the 2022 Frost Radar™: Television Viewership Data illustrated below. Overall, Samba TV provides more capabilities than the seven other market participants, while Samsung and iSpot.tv provide the widest reach in terms of devices and regions.
2022 Frost Radar™: Television Viewership Data
Key takeaway
With TV viewership and the advertising industry in a state of flux, it’s a prime opportunity for content providers and advertisers to re-evaluate all aspects of their workflows, particularly TV viewership data. TV viewership data is the foundation upon which advertising rates are set, TV shows continue or not, the right advertisements get to the right viewers, and most importantly, everyone in the TV advertising supply chain is compensated appropriately. To learn more, download the 2022 Frost Radar™: Television Viewership Data.