On the day of Cowboy Carter’s release, music video network Vevo reported a 38% increase in views of country music videos globally. 

From Rhiannon Giddenn’s banjo to Linda Martell’s pioneering EP, every country artist featured on the album has seen an increase in first-time or catalog listeners according to Spotify.

That digital audio engagement with country music has also translated to broadcast radio, with Nielsen measurement showing a +40% increase in audience share for the Country format among Black 18-34 year olds. ¹ The spike occurred across key markets in March 2024 compared to March of last year and continued into April with a +12% increase compared to 2023. 

Looking at the first quarter of 2024, country radio made up 9% of all streaming listening to AM/FM stations among Black people in the 18-34 age group—2.6x greater than adults spent streaming country stations overall. Black 18-34 year olds’ streaming of country stations was second only to the R&B and Hip-hop formats.² This engagement reiterates additional research from Nielsen about the connection between audio content and African American communities. 

Broadly, Black audiences average more than nine hours a week with radio, with an average monthly reach among Black 18-34 year olds specifically of 86%. Nielsen’s recent report, The global Black audience: Shaping the future of media, found that Black 18-34-year-olds in the U.S. are nearly 20% more likely than the general population to discover new music by listening to traditional radio. With the attention and engagement focused on today’s Black artists within Country Music, the uptick in this demographic’s engagement with these radio stations makes sense. 

As the spotlight continues to shine on country music’s African American roots and the talents of current voices, there are a few key takeaways to keep in mind.

• Measurement is critical to inform our strategies with data instead of preconceived notions. 
• There are still many African American trends and traditions that go untold, like the legacy of contributions to formats like country among others. Representation matters and when these stories get centered, audiences show up. 
• Rethink how and where you plan to connect with the diverse Black American population. With an average of over 81 hours a week spent with media, there are a multitude of opportunities for brands to connect with Black consumers in innovative and authentic ways.

Notes

¹Nielsen Audio PPM Black DST Markets Mo-Su 6A-12A

²Nielsen Audio PPM Cross-Market AQH Share. Mon-Sun 6a-Mid

The post The “Cowboy Carter Effect” — Increasing young Black listeners’ engagement with country music appeared first on Nielsen.

For nearly thirty years, third-party cookies have played a critical role in online advertising, content design and analytics, enabling advertisers to serve relevant ads and personalized experiences to consumers—and measurement companies like Nielsen to provide valuable campaign and content viewership data.

Today, 75% of marketers across all major industries still rely on cookies to run their campaigns, and 45% spend at least half of their marketing budgets on cookie-based activations. This adds up to a lot of money. Programmatic display, for instance, is a $160 billion business in the U.S. alone, and the vast majority of it is still based on third-party cookies. 

Even though Google has pushed out its cookie depreciation plans into 2025, their end will inevitably come. But what comes after cookies doesn’t need to be bleak. In fact, moving past cookies might usher in not just a more privacy-compliant digital future but a more effective advertising ecosystem, too.

An ID for an ID

When the prospect of cookie deprecation first hit the industry, most of the thinking went to finding a direct replacement—an ID for an ID—that would satisfy privacy regulators and leave the adtech infrastructure mostly untouched.

Many candidates emerged over time, including ID5, RampID, UID2 (and its European counterpart, EUID); device IDs from smartphones and CTV devices; IP addresses, despite the growing adoption of VPNs; and hashed emails (HEMs), a particularly attractive alternative considering the widespread use of email for app and website authentication today.

The consensus among industry observers is that there won’t be a dominant replacement for third-party cookies anytime soon, and most large publishers and advertisers are testing as many of those alternatives as possible to gain a better understanding of their strengths and limitations. We’re doing the same thing at Nielsen, sourcing a broad range of identifier types and putting them to the test.

Person-level graphs

Another recent development has been the rush by publishers and advertisers to collect first-party data in order to “feed the machine,” as one agency executive put it recently. Capturing first-party data can be very useful not just to collect data signals, but to create rich customer profiles that marketers can use to personalize offerings and target advanced audiences.

Consumer data comes from many different places, and it’s not always easy to make sense of it. It’s prone to errors, missing data, and it gets quickly out of date too. Even if your own first-party data is in a good place, there’s no guarantee that your media partners will be able to ingest it and sync it up in their systems without a universal ID to connect the dots.

That’s why many large publishers and advertisers are partnering with identity providers or developing their own identity graphs. Some players, like Amazon, are using AI in their DSP to connect first-party and third-party signals. At Nielsen, we’re leading the charge with a proprietary measurement grade graph that fundamentally shifts away from cookie and device-centric methods. This includes being an evangelist in the ecosystem and working with our clients and partners to evolve from passing cookie and device identifiers to HEMs, UIDs, and other resilient identifiers.

By integrating with audience segment data platforms (Like Liveramp and Experian) and mapping identifiers and devices to individual persons, Nielsen’s identity system maintains ID-agnostic audience assignment and measurement capabilities. This lets brands and publishers measure real people, not devices, and build on-the-fly audiences at scale for smarter, more durable cross-media planning and measurement.

ID-less solutions

Of course, not all advertising needs to be at the person level. And with so many changes underway in the digital landscape, marketers are making more room in their media budget for ID-less solutions like contextual and location-based advertising.

Harking back to the pre-digital era (when print, linear TV and radio dominated the advertising marketplace), these approaches are immune to privacy-related concerns. And with modern advances in third-party data quality, analytics and adtech infrastructure, they can deliver robust audience engagement just as fast as any ID-based or person-based targeting—often at a lower cost.

At Nielsen, we know from decades in the media business that the right context can make or break a campaign, and we have deep roots in local markets, too. So it is only natural that the evolution of our digital activation and measurement solutions would extend to context and location.

How are we doing it? We’re using Nielsen’s highly curated datasets to correlate audience attributes with an exhaustive range of keywords and sentiments for our contextual solution and with granular geographical units (like zip codes) for our location-based solution. This lets us provide advertisers with nuanced and privacy-compliant audience segments beyond other contextual and location-based solutions on the market today.

Chaos is a ladder

The uncertainty over what comes after cookies has many marketers waiting things out: hanging onto cookies until a clear alternative wins out. We think that’s a mistake. There’s no guarantee that Google won’t delay again, or that the industry will coalesce around a single alternative identifier once cookies are gone.

Instead, today’s chaos is the right time for you to audit your existing advertising ecosystem, assess your cookie-related vulnerabilities, and start experimenting with alternatives to see which ones perform the best for your needs. You’re likely to find that opening up your advertising infrastructure to accommodate more solutions will unlock more targeting opportunities for your company, not fewer.

Start learning now so that you can switch on your own terms.

The post What comes after cookies? appeared first on Nielsen.

Retail media networks are all about seizing the moment, so let’s jump right in.

What are retail media networks

According to eMarketer, a retail media network is “an asset owned and operated by a retailer that publishes advertisements, or a third-party publisher with ads that leverage a retailer’s first-party shopper data”.

Retailers collect data about your shopping behavior and use it to personalize your experience, including the ads you see. They can use your shopping profile—and anything else they learn about you from your interactions with them—to influence the ads you see (or hear) on social media, CTV and digital radio. And on top of that, retail media networks are able to seamlessly tie impressions to sales on a platform, something that was not widely available before. 

How did retail media start

For most industry observers, the birth of retail media was the release of Amazon’s programmatic advertising solution, Amazon Ads Platform (AAP), in 2012.

Learning from people’s shopping behavior, presenting them with relevant offers and reaching them at the point of purchase wasn’t exactly a new idea. Direct to consumer (DTC) brands, and brands with loyalty programs before them, had long used first-party shopper data to target consumers. And grocery chains and big box retailers have always featured in-store displays and promotions. But the scale and automation offered by Amazon were unprecedented.

From about $600 million that first year to $45 billion in 2023, the rise of Amazon’s ad business has been meteoric—and that was before the launch of its ad-supported Prime Video tier in early 2024. Over time, its success has drawn hundreds of other retailers into the media business. Walmart, Target, Kroger, Instacart, The Home Depot and others are fueling a sector that’s growing at twice the pace of social media (16.3% vs. 8.7% in 2023, according to the IAB) and is expected to overtake linear TV over the next couple of years.

Why is there so much enthusiasm

Retail media networks are a win-win-win for retailers, brands and consumers.

For large retailers, scale and specialized audiences can represent a whole new revenue stream—with much stronger margins than their core retail business to boot. BCG estimates retail media margins in the 70% to 90% range for onsite ads and 20% to 40% for offsite ads, at a time when inflation, supply-chain issues and other macroeconomic conditions are putting intense pressure on retailers’ standard lines of business.

For brands, retail media networks offer a chance to create audiences based on recent shopping behavior and reach those audiences with finely tuned messages at a time when they’re likely to be more receptive to those messages. Relevant ads to the right people and in the right context is a great combination, especially now that third-party cookies and other legacy identifiers are (slowly) being deprecated. And retail media networks aren’t limited to lower-funnel campaigns either. No wonder 70% of global marketers say retail media networks are more important to their 2024 media plan than the previous year.

Consumers win too because they don’t see ads for snow jackets or cruises to Alaska when they’re shopping for board shorts and snorkeling lessons in Hawaii.

Important media mix considerations

Is the audience worth the higher cost? Can you reach not just existing customers but also attractive new prospects? How does it fit with the rest of your media mix? Do you have consistent reporting to compare performance across other retail networks?

Too many marketers add retail media to their mix out of fear of missing out or out of concern that retailers might retaliate with inferior ‘shelf’ placement if they don’t buy advertising on the platform—something Forrester described as a form of hidden tax. Some advertisers are also under the impression that retail media networks solve the attribution puzzle with their closed-loop measurement because they’re so close to the moment of purchase. But last touch attribution isn’t any more reliable just because it’s on retail media.

Treating retail media like just another channel

With hundreds of options on the market, over two-thirds of ad buyers (69%) are overwhelmed by the complexity of the current retail media buying process. While there are calls for standardization, it’s still largely siloed from other media transactions—to say nothing of the process of reconciling retail media buying with the rest of the media ecosystem. Four in ten ad buyers have only enough bandwidth to work with at most three retail media networks at a time.

In a sign that retail media is maturing, the IAB just proposed new standards in Europe to tear down silos between players and harmonize their offerings. At Nielsen, we think that’s a good first step.

That confidence factor is essential to unlocking real spend. While advertisers are fine to shift some budget because of the measurable sales lift, there’s still uncertainty around the incremental value retail media can provide.  The best thing that can happen to retail media is to be treated as just any other channel. And moving real budgets at scale will require comparability across all measurement metrics. 

This is the right time for standards. Online and offline retail media are merging thanks to the rise of digital “smart” shelves, in-store mobile experiences and loyalty programs that connect in-store and online data to build holistic consumer profiles.  And retail media is already growing beyond lower-funnel activities and even retail, for that matter, with market leaders like Lyft, Marriott and Chase showing the way. It’s also crossing over into the CTV space, with trailblazing partnerships between Instacart and Roku, Walmart and Peacock, and of course Amazon and Prime Video. 

The post Need to Know: What are retail media networks, and why is everybody talking about them? appeared first on Nielsen.

According to APIA Vote, 83% of Asian American Native Hawaiian Pacific Islanders (AANHPIs) have concerns about misinformation in the U.S. election, among Democrats and Republicans alike. At the same time, 78% of Asian Americans consume news at least once a day and are also 34% more likely to trust in the accuracy of news than the general U.S. population, creating opportunities for news media and brands to connect with the fast-growing segment of the U.S. population with $1.3 trillion in buying power¹. Doing so effectively requires a deeper understanding of the relationship between Asian Americans and the news.

Where do Asian Americans get their news?

Asian Americans are more likely than the general population to report turning to social media (Instagram, LinkedIn and Threads) and news aggregator sites as their top source for news. They are also 69% more likely to rely on friends and family, going to the people in their tightly-knit community who can break down headlines with the right context and relevant information.

When it comes to newspaper content, Nielsen’s research found that Asian audiences are most likely to turn to free newspaper websites. For marketers hoping to engage AANHPI audiences this year, tapping into reliable content on non-subscription news sites and social media platforms to help educate the AANHPI voter could be a valuable connection point.

Building trust through representation

With the always-on connectivity of smartphone apps and sites that Asians prefer, how can brands tap into them to create lasting engagement? Platforms with authentic, representative content is key, as 41% of AANHPI audiences are more likely to buy from brands that advertise with news outlets they trust². 

And here’s where the influence of journalists who are representative of the community comes in. For example, ABC’s World News Tonight with co-anchor Juju Chang and MSNBC’s Morning Joe with frequent reporter Richard Lui are in the top most-watched broadcast news programs for AANHPI viewers.³ And in the 2023 Asian American Journalist Association awards, an Axios project led by three Asian journalists was a winner. Their piece Everything You Need to Know to Vote in the 2022 Midterm Election drove tremendous audience engagement in two of the top sources of news for Asian Americans, Instagram Reels (30% more than previous) and news aggregator site Flipboard (double URL open rates). Stories told about the Asian American community by members of the community create connections with audiences while providing necessary and critical information to drive change and action.

The value of in-language media

TV news programming plays a much less significant role in AANHPI news engagement compared to other audience populations, but Asian Americans are 57% more likely to get news from international television. Asians make up the fastest-growing ethnic group in the U.S. today, coming from more than 20 countries around the world and speaking more than 50 different languages. 

Connecting with the diverse AANHPI community requires more than a one-size fits all approach. In a 2023 report, Nielsen explored the attitudes and media consumption preferences of Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese language speakers—representing about 40% of the Asian American population and three of the Asian languages most spoken at home.

More than 40% of total respondents ‘strongly agreed/agreed’ that Asian media offers programs and perspectives they trust. Furthermore, the study shows that more than 50% of Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese respondents prefer to buy brands that advertise on programs reflecting their culture. Opportunities exist for brands that invest part of their advertising spend in in-language media platforms.

Adjusting media plans in an election year

As ad prices rise with political campaigns buying up valuable ad inventory, advertisers can benefit from rethinking their media plans during this election year and connect with Asian audiences through the social media, aggregator sites and ad-supported newspaper sites they gravitate toward. One benefit of these channels is that they present a more addressable option—giving marketers improved measurement of ROI. 

Learn more about reaching Asian American consumers in Nielsen’s latest Diverse Intelligence Series report.

Notes

¹U.S. Census Projections 2023 and Selig Center for Economic Growth 2022

²2024 Nielsen Survey on Trust in Media

³Nielsen National TV Panel, 2023

The post The power of news media: An important platform to reach Asian Americans in an election year appeared first on Nielsen.

The media buying playing field

It’s simple enough on paper: a network, TV station, streaming platform or other TV distributor has advertising inventory for sale alongside its programming; a brand (or an agency on its behalf) wants to use some of that inventory to reach customers and prospects;  if the seller’s audience is a good fit for the buyer’s intended target—and the price is right—then the deal goes through and everyone’s happy.

But in practice, media buying can get very complicated very quickly. What exactly are media buyers buying? How much inventory is there? What’s a good rate? Do all ad types perform the same? Who defines target audiences? Are there any guarantees?

Before any of those questions can be answered, the first step in the media buying journey is to understand what TV is. It’s not a disingenuous question. The TV landscape has changed a lot in recent years. From broadcast to cable, satellite, FAST TV and AVOD, viewers today have dozens of options to watch TV on their own terms. That’s great for viewers, and it gives media buyers more options, too. But every new platform comes with its own idiosyncrasies and adds another layer of complexity to the media buying equation.

Upfront and scatter

The first TV programs were sponsored by single advertisers. Campbell’s Soup sponsored Lassie; Johnson & Johnson: The Adventures of Robin Hood; Beech-Nut Gum: The Dick Clark Show; Philip Morris: I Love Lucy. It wasn’t long before the commercial pod emerged, greatly expanding the ad inventory on TV and setting the stage for media buying as we know it today.

In the U.S., TV media buyers buy advertising at the Upfronts—a weeklong event in the spring each year where networks and other distributors introduce upcoming shows—and in the scatter (or remnant) market. Doing business at the Upfronts 6 to 12 months before new shows are aired allows sellers to secure funding well ahead of a new TV season, and buyers to lock-in guaranteed placements on coveted time slots and at a fair price.

These days, around USD$20 billion worth of advertising money changes hands at the Upfronts for primetime broadcast and cable, and about the same amount for other dayparts and CTV. Another USD$20-30 billion goes to the scatter market throughout the year, giving buyers the flexibility to bid for ad placements much closer to air time.

But what does ‘air time’ mean in a world where broadcast and cable represent just half of total TV viewing, as we noted in our recent report The Next Frontier: Your guide to the 2024-25 upfronts/newfronts planning season? The convergence of linear and streaming is quickly redefining media buying.

Where is the audience?

Nielsen’s Head of Global Marketing Alison Gensheimer pointed out that “TV isn’t going anywhere, it’s going everywhere. Definitions change depending on who you talk to, and I’m starting to wonder if it even matters. For advertisers, the important question—now and forever—is where the audience is.”

Media buying negotiations have long been tied to specific network, daypart, day-of-the-week combinations because that was the only way to reach audiences loyal to specific programs. Everyone in the mid-90s wanted to buy primetime on Thursdays nights on NBC because that was when Friends and Seinfeld would air, and those shows attracted the most young adults. 

But if the ultimate objective is to reach a particular audience—whether it’s young adults, foodies, outdoor enthusiasts or new parents—a TV lineup isn’t a requirement anymore. Thanks to CTV and other data and infrastructure breakthroughs like measurement-grade identity graphs, there are ways today to reach advanced audiences on TV that don’t involve using a niche program as a surrogate.

Media buying on TV is starting to look a lot like media buying on digital platforms, doesn’t it?

How is measurement evolving at Nielsen?

At Nielsen, we’ve been reporting C3 (live + 3 days) and C7 (live + 7 days) average commercial minutes for over 15 years, and those panel-based metrics have provided and continue to provide a very robust currency for media buyers and sellers. There’s tremendous value in having a consistent metric year after year, but the level of fragmentation in the industry has reached a tipping point. 

We’re now transitioning to a big data + panel measurement methodology where the scale of big data is brought to bear to measure a wider variety of programs and get a more comprehensive view of audience behavior, and where panel data is used for validation and calibration. We’re also deploying technology capable of reporting commercials at the subminute level, making it possible for advertisers to understand the performance of a much wider selection of ad formats.

What does it mean for media buying on television?

At the moment, TV media buying is a complicated mix of tradition and modernity. Media buyers are being asked to combine the scale of linear TV with the addressability of CTV to meet brand and performance objectives. It’s no small ask, especially when media budgets are under pressure. But new measurement solutions on the horizon will bring more structure, consistency and granular insights to the negotiating table—and unlock more opportunities for both buyers and sellers.

The post Need to Know: The basic of TV media buying appeared first on Nielsen.

Consider that it was barely ten years ago that Binet and Field published The Long and the Short of it and proposed their famous 60:40 rule—that is, to maximize marketing effects and returns over time, 60% of a media budget should be allocated to brand marketing and 40% to performance marketing. Yet according to results from our 2024 Annual Marketing Report, 70% of marketers plan to increase performance marketing spend this year at the expense of brand building. What gives?

Short-term pressures

Companies today are under enormous pressure to deliver short-term results. Market conditions can change on a dime: a nimble new competitor entering the market; a new spike in inflation; geopolitical uncertainties; issues with the supply chain; or simply modern consumers being modern consumers and latching onto a new trend. It’s only natural for marketing leaders to want to capitalize on the opportunity right in front of them.

The logical choice then is to focus their efforts on the bottom of the funnel. There, they can target consumers near the moment of purchase, tailor their messages for immediate action and quickly see if their media spend is paying off. Between search, display, social, retail media, podcasts or even CTV, advertisers now have many more options to trigger short-term conversions than ever before. 

But there are two major pitfalls to watch out for:

1. The first is to forget that when a shopper clicks on a Buy Now button, it’s the result of a long string of touchpoints with the brand, not just the last impression. Too many marketers still attribute sales to that last impression, for simplicity’s sake. This leads to a vicious circle where brands end up neglecting top-funnel activities to build their brand, and spending more to convert fewer prospects at the bottom of the funnel.
2. The second is to assume that the long-term health of the company will take care of itself. In Binet and Field’s words, “Long-term effects are not simply an accumulation of short-term effects.” The same applies to outcomes. You won’t see long-term results by amassing short-term wins. What’s more, short-term pressure will only get more intense over time for companies that don’t invest in long-term effects.

Perceived effectiveness

There’s another possibility to consider: That today’s enthusiasm for performance marketing comes from the perception that channels typically used for it are inherently more effective.

Nielsen’s Annual Marketing Report shows that marketers deem social media, search and online display and video to be the most effective digital channels in their quiver. Nearly 80% of them perceive social media to be extremely or very effective, for instance, and 72% give the same appreciation to search. Marketers don’t typically associate TV with performance marketing. Yet, when we analyze how TV fares across hundreds of marketing mix modeling studies, we find that it’s one of the only channels that performs equally well at the top and bottom of the funnel.

The point is not to cast doubt on this or that channel or to put any of them on a pedestal. All campaigns and brands are different and every channel has its strengths and weaknesses. But it is important to recognize that there can be a wide gap between the perception of performance and actual performance. The fact that a channel is addressable, relatively easy to measure and perceived to be effective doesn’t automatically make it good for performance marketing.

Measurement drives strategy

When asking if you’re investing in performance marketing for the right reasons, you want to make sure budget decisions are informed by strategic considerations and not by what is feasible, or what you believe might be feasible.

That’s why holistic measurement is so critical. Most channels are strong in either performance or brand messaging, but rarely in both. And you can only determine the right mix of brand and performance for your marketing needs if you have a clear picture of your media effectiveness across the entire funnel. In today’s complex media ecosystem, cross-channel KPIs and measurement capabilities should be a top priority, yet only 38% of marketers measure traditional and digital marketing together. There’s clearly a lot of room for improvement.

An encouraging sign is that 77% of marketers interviewed for our 2024 Global Annual Marketing Survey are planning to increase spend on newer channels (like CTV and influencer marketing) this year. Experimenting with new channels is a great way to add new marketing capabilities and keep up with consumers—as long as they’re measured consistently with the rest of the marketing mix.

There’s a right mix of brand and performance for your business. Just make sure you base your decision on hard data and not just perceptions.

For more insights into how to maximize campaign spend across the marketing funnel, read Nielsen’s 2024 Annual Marketing Report. 

The post Are you investing in performance marketing for the right reasons? appeared first on Nielsen.

Advanced audience targeting has been around for a long time for many digital channels. But in today’s complex multichannel world, targeting one channel at a time doesn’t cut it anymore. Modern marketers expect to define their custom audiences one time and activate them uniformly across media—from the open web to social, retail media, FAST, CTV and addressable linear. They also expect their measurement solutions to keep up and measure performance with enough granularity to capture those audiences. 

Building high-performing advanced audiences has never been more urgent, especially in the context of the on-again, off-again deprecation of cookie-based targeting systems. 

Thankfully, the industry is responding with exciting new data solutions. At Nielsen, we’ve developed a measurement-grade identity graph and a comprehensive digital ID system to help marketers like you quickly onboard their first-party data, cross-check the quality of their data records, and enrich those records with highly-relevant new attributes.

Let’s examine the benefits of advanced audiences with a few examples connected to CTV.

Cats, kids and touchdowns

Imagine you’re looking to reach Gen Z cat owners (perhaps you’re a pet food company interested in reaching consumers in U.S. college towns); Millennials with young kids (great for toys, food delivery or theme park vacations); or Baby Boomers who are NFL superfans (think beer, cars or banking). Is CTV a good investment for your media spend?

According to data analyzed through Nielsen Media Impact (NMI), advanced audiences don’t necessarily spend more time on CTV devices and platforms than the norm. On average, Gen Z, Millennials and Boomers spend about the same amount of time every day with CTV—a little more than two hours—and owning a cat (for Gen Zers) or being an NFL superfan (for Boomers) doesn’t really make a difference. 

But the story is very different for Millennials with young kids who spend over seven hours a day streaming CTV content, more than 3X as much as their peers without young kids at home.

That doesn’t mean, however, that all CTV platforms will perform equally well for brands looking to capitalize on that opportunity. And, conversely, that there’s not a single CTV platform that can move the needle for the other two groups, Gen Z cat owners and NFL superfan Boomers. 

Finding a home on CTV

None of the top CTV platforms in the U.S. show a big bias for one generation or another.  They don’t all have the same reach, of course, as the NMI data below clearly illustrate. But if a platform reaches 30% of the Gen Z population in a given month, it also reaches 30% of the Millennial population, with Gen Xers (not shown) and Boomers only slightly behind.

But the story changes when we examine reach for the three advanced audiences in our planning tool. HBO Max, for instance, reached 26.4% of Gen Z cat owners in October 2023, compared with 20.6% for all Gen Z. Disney+ reached 56.4% of all Millennials with young kids, compared to 32.6% among all Millennials. The chart below shows those gaps in index form (56.4/32.6 = 173 index, for example), clearly highlighting what platforms would be good candidates to reach each of those advanced audiences.

One word about NFL superfan Boomers. They’re harder to reach on CTV than other Boomers because they’re spending a lot of their TV time on linear TV. But we can already see a number of platforms faring well thanks to their relationship with rights-holding broadcast networks or other exclusive and non-exclusive NFL streaming agreements.

So many choices, so little time

To keep up with consumers and fast-changing market conditions, marketers today need media planning solutions that are rich, consistent, comprehensive and comparable across platforms, not point solutions with vastly different audience definitions and media buying systems.

There’s no time to waste. We’ve assembled custom and syndicated advanced audiences for you to kickstart your media planning, whether you’re working in auto, CPG, retail or dozens of other industries. And since you never want to buy media you can’t measure, we’ve embedded our advanced audiences into Nielsen ONE, our industry-leading cross-media measurement solution.

The post A look at how CTV reach and viewership trends shift across generations appeared first on Nielsen.

Marketing metrics must reflect business impact

This is not the first time in history that marketers have been pressed to prove the impact of their work, far from it. The increase in the amount of data, growing number of sources of data, rise in synthetic data, and expectations around your ability to show the business relevance of data have skyrocketed. 

This means going beyond ‘data-driven’ decisions when building your ROI strategy. You must have the right data at every step of the customer journey. And just because metrics are easy to capture, that does not mean they are the right metrics to use. Instead, they should be those that are tied to market performance and are incrementally valuable to one another. 

Bridge the gap between outcomes and tactics

Nielsen’s latest Annual Marketing Report found that global marketers’ top priorities for 2024 are long-term and full-funnel ROI. However, 70% of these same marketers said they plan to increase their performance marketing spend and reduce their brand-building investments. 

There is a clear gap in the goals marketers have and the tactics they’re using to get there. I believe a misunderstanding of metrics is at the heart of it. If you are measuring ROI only by what’s happening to the bottom line, you may be missing the bigger picture. Being too focused on short-term returns is proven to hurt your ability to improve revenue numbers down the road. Because just as consumers and users have a path they follow, your ROI has a journey, too. 

Map your ROI journey

You can get to a destination without directions, but it takes a lot more time and effort. The same is true with outcomes; they’re consistently successful when you have a comprehensive plan. But the plan is changing. 

For much of the last decade, performance has been tracked at the channel level. Did we hit our impression targets? Did we shrink the costs per click? Did we improve our bounce rate? 

This approach fails on two fronts: 

1. It confuses engagement for impact
2. It doesn’t reflect the consumer journey

ROI can’t be tracked by a range of data points at the channel level. True full-funnel ROI starts by aligning on objectives, defining KPIs from the outset, mirroring the paths consumers take and understanding how everything works together to achieve an outcome. 

From the first point of contact to refining the reach and frequency strategy and on through the point of purchase and beyond, you have to map not only the consumer actions but the impact along the way in order to see what’s genuinely working at every touchpoint. 

For example, top of funnel and bottom of funnel KPIs can often appear to be at odds. Perhaps the keyword search volume is high, but it’s not translating to pageviews. This is too narrow of a view. Instead, look at the bigger, cross-platform picture. Is the lead volume up? How are those leads contributing to the pipeline? By zooming out to look at the bigger picture, a more consistent story should emerge. 

Plotting your ROI journey must happen before anything else, because you can’t always retroactively measure outcomes. If you don’t plan to measure KPIs like Brand Lift and Sales from the beginning, you won’t be able to measure them at all. And even when you can do retroactive-looking metrics, it can be a prohibitively large effort for most teams. 

Know and report the right metrics

When trying to determine what metrics reveal impact, I’ve found this question to be a helpful litmus test: Will the results be compelling to your CFO?  

It’s not uncommon for marketers to stay focused on metrics like impressions, frequency, clicks and downloads. While valuable, they rarely translate for CFOs. Relevancy is what matters to Finance, and it’s up to marketers to draw the connecting line for them. 

This doesn’t mean you need to stop tracking things like likes, clicks and listens;  they’re a valuable gut check. But they shouldn’t be the foundation for strategic reporting. 

This has been a particularly challenging season for the advertising industry. We’ve all had to contend with change coming from every possible direction. As paths to purchase continue to fork, impact continues to be a guiding light. As long as you know where to find it.  

For more insights on how to sharpen your ROI strategy, download the Nielsen’s 2024 Annual Marketing Report. 

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To them, impressions and engagement metrics are a means to an end. What they really want to know is whether their marketing investments are making a difference at the cash register. Of course, not everything has to be a sale or acquisition, but there should always be impact. 

Here are five CFO-approved key performance indicators (KPI) that will show impact, unlock budget and impress everyone at the next board meeting.

Cost per lead

Divide your marketing spend by the total number of leads you received. This can be done at the campaign level or for a set period of time, like a month, quarter or year. 

It’s a great metric because it draws a direct connection between marketing and purchase interest, and it’s very easy to understand for non-marketers. It’s also very healthy for the rest of your measurement efforts because it requires you to pay special attention to attribution: What platforms exactly contributed to your leads? In what proportions? At what cost?

Lead conversions

How many of your leads actually converted? It can be expressed as a rate (conversions / leads), a raw total over a given time period, or by extension as sales per lead. 

It forces you to give some thought to what lead time is reasonable for your industry (a conversion three months after an initial lead might be reasonable for auto or insurance brands, but perhaps not for snacks or pizza delivery) and how it might differ by channel and brand messaging, which is an important consideration for media allocation.

Return on ad spend (ROAS)

ROAS is the revenue brought in by a campaign divided by its cost. It’s a crucial metric because it goes to the heart of the ROI question: How much of your sales can be attributed to your marketing efforts, versus business as usual? 

Many consumers would have purchased from you without advertising. External factors like seasonality, weather, or macroeconomic variables might have played a role too, positively or negatively. ROAS is an invitation to look into media mix modeling.

Long-term ROI

Where is the cutoff between short-term and  long-term effects for your company’s products and services? Don’t blindly accept the 2X multiplier you might have seen in industry publications, or fall victim to the myth that performance campaigns only have short-term effects, and branding campaigns long-term effects. 

Every campaign follows a different curve of diminishing returns, based on factors like product category, messaging, competitors, target audiences, or the mix of platforms and ad formats you used. You can only optimize your campaigns if you understand their full effect over the long term.

Brand equity

This is a broad name for metrics like brand awareness, consideration, attitudes, favorability and relevance. It is also a KPI that needs qualifying. While not directly tied to sales outcomes, brand equity can have a positive impact on several things CFOs care about deeply. 

We’ve studied thousands of campaigns over the years, across dozens of industries, and we’ve found that the correlation between upper funnel brand metrics and marketing efficiency can be very strong: overall, we found that a 1-point gain in brand metrics like awareness and consideration typically drives a 1% increase in sales. Additionally, brand equity can influence your ability to retain clients, grow prospects and drive shareholder value. 

For more insights on how to sharpen your ROI strategy, download Nielsen’s 2024 Annual Marketing Report. 

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The AANHPHI audience brings $1.3 trillion buying power and is the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. population. With more media platforms available than ever before, understanding how and where AANHPI audiences are consuming content is critical for brands and businesses.  While Asian Americans spend less total time with media than any other segment of the U.S. population, they are heavy users of digital media, including streaming. For marketers figuring out how to incorporate streaming into their media plans, Asian Americans could be a key audience to focus on.

Streaming gains share with Asian American TV use

As reported in Nielsen’s most recent Diverse Intelligence Series report, Asian audiences 18 and older in the U.S. spend 17.5 hours with TV in a given week. While this is less than the 32 hours spent weekly by the general population, AANHPI audiences spend a larger percentage of their overall TV time with streaming. In January 2024, streaming made up 45.4% of Asian Americans’ TV usage, compared with 36.0% for the general U.S. population, according to Nielsen’s The Gauge^TM.  

Year over year, Asian Americans’ use of streaming grew 5.6% from January 2023. And streaming continues to gain ground. In March 2024, streaming rose to 48.2% of AANHPI audiences’ total TV time. 

The good news for advertisers is that Asian Americans are leaning into ad-supported video-on-demand (AVOD) viewing, which made up 31% of their streaming as of January 2024, compared with 27% for the total population. 

AANHPI streaming use stretches across devices

Beyond TV, AANHPI viewers spend 17 hours per week with their smartphones–which is in line with the total population. However, AANHPI audiences’ level of engagement with mobile devices represents more than a third of their total media time.

On smartphones, Asians outpace other viewers for using streaming platform apps—especially ad-supported ones. In an average month, YouTube’s mobile app reaches 85% of AANHPI adults. Sling TV is also particularly appealing with its international TV content, especially in South Asian and East Asian languages. AANHPI viewers are 37% more likely to use the app than the general population.

Incorporating streaming into your media plans

The reality is that audiences of ad-supported streaming platforms continue to grow. For example, in February 2024, YouTube captured 9.3% of TV usage, a platform-best. But not all audiences are adopting at the same pace. While age and gender have traditionally been the focus driving media buys, advanced audience segments can help marketers better plan to reach audiences that are leaning in. 

The media consumption behaviors of the AANHPI audiences don’t follow traditional norms. For example, Asians 50+ spend the most time on connected TV devices compared to other groups who tend to watch more linear TV. Given that Asian Americans are heavy streamers, advertisers can focus on engaging this audience across ad-supported streaming platforms as part of their cross-media campaigns.

Learn more about the value of streaming within a cross-media campaign in Nielsen’s 2024 Annual Marketing Report.

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