The evolution of television over the past few years has been exhilarating for viewers who now have infinite content at their fingertips and the freedom to watch it all on their own schedule. But it’s also made it incredibly difficult for advertisers to keep track of all the moving pieces and keep their TV advertising campaigns on target.
Can it be done?
Media planning in the digital age
Media planning requires four key ingredients: a clear definition of your target audience, a thorough understanding of where that audience is consuming media, a suitable budget to reach it, and accurate measurement to support your media spending decisions. But with audiences as fractured as they are today, deeper audience insights—beyond age and gender—are critical to building well defined media plans.
Budgets are tight, and marketing teams under pressure from the CFO office want to make sure they don’t waste money on consumers with zero chance to purchase their products. Similar to what they’re already doing with digital channels, they want to optimize their TV buys to reach finely-tuned audiences (e.g., gamers, pet lovers, recent movers, new moms, outdoor enthusiasts, or prospective electric car buyers) with highly targeted messages.
Thankfully, we now have reliable data in the industry to understand how those specialized audiences—advanced audiences—are watching media.
Let’s use a quick example to illustrate key benefits.
New Moms are not like every young woman
Many consumer brands are interested in reaching mothers with young children (age 2 and under) at home. They’re not a big segment—they represent just under 4% of the total adult population in the U.S.—but they have very unique spending habits: baby care products like diapers and formula, of course, but also baby clothing, furniture, and health and wellness products. They might be shopping for bigger cars too (and car seats to go with them), better insurance, or 529 savings plans to give their newborns a head start.
Traditionally, brands have reached New Moms by targeting young women between the ages of 18 and 44. It’s not a bad calculation, as figure 1 shows. Like News Moms at 65%, young women today spend most of their TV time with streaming content.
But that’s where the similarities end. The chart below shows that New Moms spend much more of their TV time watching kids shows and feature films—many of them kids movies, no doubt. In fact, New Moms split their TV hours pretty evenly between movies, dramas and kids shows, with very little time left for any other type of programming.
For advertisers, understanding how New Moms are co-viewing content with their young kids can provide key insights to help guide decisions around TV advertising campaigns. At Nielsen, we’ve been studying co-viewing for a long time. With our people-based measurement, we’ve always had a reliable source of truth to size up co-viewing. And while over the top (OTT) platforms historically saw lower co-viewing, today 47% of linear and connected TV (CTV) is consumed by more than one person at a time.
While limited CTV ad inventories remain an obstacle, there are other ways to connect with New Moms on streaming platforms: brand sponsorships, for instance, or partnerships with celebrities. And while many platforms seem less attractive to New Moms at the moment, some are in the process of investing in children programming to fill the gap and may already offer interesting advertising opportunities at the program level.
Unlock the value of advanced audiences for your business
We’re sharing many more insights about New Moms and other select advanced audiences in our new The 2025 On-Target Report. We invite you to check it out to learn more about how these attractive audiences watch TV, how their viewing changes across genres and media sources and how some of the top brands on the market are allocating their media budgets to reach them.
Think about your own target consumers. Are they watching media differently than the rest of the population? Are you doing everything you can to reach them? Please contact us or get in touch with your Nielsen representative to unlock the value of advanced audiences for your business and take your cross-channel advertising campaigns to new heights.
