How does Simulmedia’s data science make TV more predictable?

Television has carried a paradoxical reputation: it’s both the most powerful storytelling medium and the least predictable marketing investment. Everyone agrees TV builds brands and delivers cultural impact, but many marketers still see it as a black box for performance. Even in 2025, TV can feel like an art, not a science: inspiring but hard to measure, and nearly impossible to forecast.

But what if we tell you that TV is the most measurable storytelling medium brands can buy. Let’s find out how this happened.

Why Marketers Still Fear TV?

That perception stems from an older system built on averages, ratings, demographics, and delayed reporting. Campaigns once ran on historical assumptions, not real-time insight. Marketers bought reach, crossed their fingers, and waited weeks to find out if it worked. Compared to the immediate feedback of digital platforms, traditional TV seemed slow and unclear.

But that unpredictability isn’t inherent to the medium; it’s a data problem. Today, the gap between TV and digital has closed. As outlined in Simulmedia’s “Why TV Still Wins” e-book, modern television now rivals digital media for accountability, targeting, and measurement. Using second-by-second viewing data from smart TVs and set-top boxes, advertisers can forecast reach and frequency at the household level, attribute exposures to site visits or sales, and de-duplicate performance across CTV, linear, and even digital channels.

This means that TV becomes finally measurable, and, more importantly, predictable. Linear TV still commands the majority of ad-supported impressions (over 80%) and remains the most cost-effective way to build mass reach. When paired with advanced data science, those structural strengths turn what once felt uncertain into a statistically grounded growth channel.

When you replace guesswork with proven data science, TV stops being a gamble. It becomes the most predictable growth driver in your marketing mix.

Predicting Audiences Before a Campaign Starts

Marketers often focus on “optimizing in flight,” but true predictability starts before a campaign begins. Traditional TV planning relied on assumptions: buying shows that seemed right for a demographic and trusting averages to deliver the results. It worked for scale, not precision.

Simulmedia’s TV+ reverses that model. Instead of guessing where audiences might be, our data science identifies where they actually watch, using billions of second-by-second ACR and set-top-box events to model real viewing behavior. Continuously refreshed, this dataset predicts where specific audience segments will appear across linear and streaming inventory prior to a campaign launch.

This audience-first approach replaces static demographics with dynamic probability. Suppose a brand wants to reach Millennial and Gen X parents, for example. In that case, TV+ pinpoints the networks, dayparts, and programs that index highest, forecasting reach and frequency with statistical confidence, not “we think,” but “we know.”

Understanding Audience Behavior Before You Buy

Let’s take an example. Suppose a pharma brand wants to reach Adults 65+, one of TV’s most loyal but often generalized audiences.

Data from TV+ Platform

Reaching Adults 65+ has long meant defaulting to news or daytime TV. TV+ replaces that guesswork with behavioral modeling grounded in real viewing data.

Simulmedia’s analysis shows that U.S. adults spend approximately 4 hours and 48 minutes daily with ad-supported TV - 74% on linear TV and 26% on streaming. For 65+, linear still dominates, but streaming is growing as part of their routine.

More than half of U.S. households now watch both linear and streaming. Without predictive modeling, that overlap can lead to waste and over-frequency. TV+ forecasts duplication in advance to deliver unique reach efficiently across channels.

Among viewers aged 65 and above, linear favorites like ABC, CBS, FOX News, and HGTV account for over 30% of viewership, while streaming engagement is increasing on platforms such as Tubi, Peacock, and Paramount+. TV+ quantifies this crossover to pinpoint where incremental reach costs least.

Viewership peaks between 6 PM and 10 PM, a key window for engagement and cost-effective impressions. By mapping these patterns, TV+ turns broad demographic buys into precision-modeled investments, so marketers know where, when, and how their audience watches before a single ad airs.

Planning with TV+ feels less like trial and error, more like an equation. Brands know in advance who they’ll reach, how often, and at what cost. That’s the foundation of predictable growth marketing - transforming TV from a reactive channel into a proactive system that begins with a forecast and ends with measurable, verifiable results.

Using Live Data to Keep Campaigns on Course

Predicting audience behavior is one thing. Keeping a campaign aligned with that prediction is another key aspect. In traditional TV, insights arrived weeks after airtime, long after optimization was possible. Simulmedia’s TV+ changes that.

By combining deterministic exposure data with live reporting, marketers can monitor delivery, frequency, and performance as they happen. The platform ingests impression data from both linear and streaming, reconciles it against forecasts, and identifies where adjustments, across networks, dayparts, or creative weights, will improve outcomes.

This agility is essential in a converged ecosystem where most households watch both linear and CTV. Without deduplication, impressions become a waste of time. TV+ continuously reallocates exposures to ensure each impression contributes to incremental reach, not repetition.

Transparency goes beyond delivery. Privacy-safe attribution connects exposures to measurable actions such as site visits, app engagement, and retail sales.

Each campaign begins with a predictive reach curve and a modeled cost per outcome. As new data becomes available, TV+ automatically validates or refines those projections, transforming static reports into actionable guidance.

For years, TV reporting stopped at impressions. Marketers knew what aired but not what worked. That lack of linkage between exposure and outcome made TV feel less accountable than digital. Simulmedia closes that gap.

On TV+, every campaign connects exposure to outcome through privacy-safe identity resolution, tying ad views to actions such as site visits, app installs, or in-store sales. Using first-party, retail, and media data, Simulmedia’s models measure incremental lift, showing what growth came from TV, not other channels.

With real-time dashboards, advertisers no longer wait for post-campaign reports; they can see how each impression contributes to business impact as it happens. TV+ makes accountability continuous, turning measurement from a recap into an optimization engine.