An analysis of ads run on NBCUniversal brands by iSpot.tv indicated that "advertisers today are underinvesting in streaming" and missing out on valuable audiences, iSpot.tv CEO Sean Muller told B+C business editor Jon Lafayette in a keynote at the recent Advanced Advertising Summit in Los Angeles.
The measurement firm's "test and learn" experiment with NBCU found that streaming outlets got about 10% of a campaign's ads on average, when a more optimal level would be 30%-40%, Muller said at the June 7 event. "You get a lot more reach against younger demographics and at lower frequencies," Muller said.
Also: NBCU Says 30%-40% of Campaigns Should be OTT Based on iSpot.tv Data
Separately, Comcast recently estimated that the optimal portion of the ad spend on streaming was 20%-30%, and said returns declined beyond a 40% share.
Muller also read out some stats from iSpot.tv's measurement of Olympics, Super Bowl and March Madness college basketball that showed the importance of cross-screen measurement of viewing of big events. For the Beijing Winter Olympics, for example, iSpot.tv measured 27.4 million viewers on streaming, and 65.9% of them only watched the games on streaming. Super Bowl LVI in February had 10.4 million average viewer minutes, and 70% of them were cord cutters. March Madness drew 12.3% of its audience from streaming (68% of those only watched on streaming).
"It's important to get cross screen right and it's important to [deduplicate] these audiences," Muller said.
There were 31.7 million out of home viewers for the Beijing games, 12.5 million for the Super Bowl and 40.6 million for March Madness, he said.
Putting in a plug for measuring ad ratings separately, as iSpot.tv does, Muller said the most watched ad in the Super Bowl (an NFL ad during halftime) had a 22% bigger audience than the least watched ad, which is a big swing during a game that has a fairly steady audience throughout.
Muller also noted that iSpot.tv was the first to report an audience figure for the Super Bowl (150 million) and didn't revise the number later, while Nielsen revised its number twice as more data became available. The iSpot.tv database is smart-TV centric, bolstered with panel data, census data and set-top box data, he said.
Muller said iSpot.tv was able to attract a recent $325-million investment from Goldman Sachs Asset Management because the audience measurement field is a $10 billion industry and is in flux with new developing technologies and changing viewer dynamics. Those conditions also led to private equity interests buying industry Nielsen for $16 billion, he said.
"This space is great," Muller said, unlike the music business where he started his career.
The Advanced Advertising Summit was part of L.A. TV Week. The next Advanced Advertising Summit will be held in September in New York City as part of Fall TV Week. ■
