Not All Reach Is Equal: How to Optimize for Impact, Not Impressions

Impressions remain the default currency in TV and streaming, but they reveal little about the impact on real audiences. They are abundant, inexpensive, and easy to display on dashboards that reward volume over value. Yet impressions only document where ads appeared. They don’t show who actually saw the message, how many new households were reached, or whether a campaign expanded a brand’s penetration in the category. Counting impressions often creates the illusion of scale, even when ads are repeatedly shown to the same viewers.

Why Impressions Don’t Equal Impact

Real brand growth comes from reach, not volume. As outlined in Simulmedia’s “Why Reach Matters” e-book, decades of evidence from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute demonstrate that brands grow by expanding penetration, not by extracting more value from their heavy buyers. Light buyers, those who purchase infrequently and often forget about the brand, represent the biggest source of future growth. Reaching them requires broad exposure and consistent mental availability, not tactical bursts of impressions delivered to the same small audience.

A recent campaign on our TV+ platform illustrates this gap clearly. One of the pharma brands ran a campaign, and you can clearly see the gap between impression volume and actual reach.

The campaign generated over 245 million impressions in a single flight, yet it reached only 35.9 million unique individuals. This imbalance reflects a structural reality across TV and streaming: impressions accumulate disproportionately among heavy viewers, while light viewers — the ones most critical for growth — remain underexposed. High frequency on a small audience may look efficient on a CPM dashboard, but it does little to shift outcomes.

Impact doesn’t come from increasing frequency within the same households. It comes from expanding the pool of people who know, remember, and consider the brand. Put simply, advertisers don’t need more impressions; they need better reach.

The Hidden Problem: Duplicated Reach in CTV & Linear

Advertisers assume that buying linear TV and CTV separately automatically expands reach. In practice, cross-channel duplication silently erodes budgets. Without household-level measurement, campaigns often pay twice to reach the same viewers, once on linear and then again on streaming, creating the illusion of incremental impact.

TV+ platform data makes this clear.

In one pharma campaign, 55 percent of ad-supported households overlapped across linear and CTV. Only 26 percent were CTV-only and 18 percent linear-only. Most streaming impressions reached households already exposed. The reach breakdown is even more telling: linear delivered 96.1 percent of all unique reach, while CTV contributed only 2.8 percent incremental reach, despite CPMs that were 10–15 times higher.

We hear these concerns across our customer conversations. Brands are frustrated when CTV buys generate high impression counts but little true expansion. Some agencies raise concerns about low-quality inventory that appears efficient in terms of CPM but fails to deliver meaningful reach. When deduplication isn’t measured, CTV becomes expensive, stacking impressions on households already saturated by linear.

The takeaway is direct: if it’s not incremental, it’s not valuable. An effective cross-channel strategy requires proving that each dollar reaches new households and drives measurable growth, not repeated exposure on a different screen.

Not All Reach Is Equal: Why Audience-Based Planning Wins

Traditional TV planning concentrates spend across the same 10-15 major networks and a primetime-first mindset. It’s familiar, but it’s also inefficient. This approach drives up CPMs inflates frequency among heavy viewers, and leaves large portions of the target audience unreached. The plan may look premium on paper, but it produces shallow, repetitive reach in practice.

Audience-based planning changes this model. Instead of forcing viewers through a narrow set of networks and dayparts, it identifies where the audience actually watches. In TV+ data, the most efficient reach did not come from prestige primetime. It came from a diversified mix of 40–60 networks and a broad range of dayparts, from early morning to late night, where audience concentration remains high, and advertiser demand is low.

This shift exposes a long-tail opportunity: networks such as Hallmark, MeTV, Newsmax, and GSN delivered millions of impressions at CPMs in the $3–$5 range, compared with CTV CPMs that often climb into the $20–$30 range.

Data from TV+ Platform

These results align with the reach curves from the "Why Reach Matters" e-book. The first 300 GRPs deliver the majority of reach; beyond that, the curve flattens. Staying confined to major networks accelerates the plateau. Expanding into the long tail bends the curve back, unlocking incremental reach at a lower cost. Data-driven planning spreads frequency more evenly, reduces duplication, and extends campaigns deeper into the population of light and medium viewers who drive real growth.

In short, reach grows when planners stop buying what’s popular and start buying where the audience is. The long tail is not filler; it’s often where the most valuable and cost-efficient reach lives.

Impressions are easy to tally, but rarely signal real impact. The evidence is clear: brands grow by reaching more people, not by accumulating more volume. Audience-based buying outperforms traditional planning because it follows where viewers actually are, not where the industry assumes they should be. It broadens network mix, stretches budgets, reduces waste, and expands reach into the light and medium buyers who drive penetration.

When advertisers prioritize meaningful metrics, such as incremental reach, frequency distribution, and unduplicated households, they achieve stronger outcomes than those focused on impression totals or low CPMs. The path forward isn’t more volume; it’s smarter reach. And audience-based planning is the most reliable way to deliver it.