What are audiences in TV advertising?

Without a defined and well targeted audience, any TV advertisement can fall on deaf ears. Defining and reaching the correct audiences can make or break the success of your strategy.

In the TV universe, audiences are defined as any group of viewers that have been segmented by a set of characteristics, such as geographic location, purchasing history, or annual household income, for example. These audiences are TV consumers who are targeted based on a single or several identifiers that place them as ideal candidates for engagement with and conversion from an advertisement.

Do you want your audience to see an advertisement for baby food, for example, and then buy that product? You’ll need to make sure your advertising agency defines which audiences are most likely to need the product, and act on their desire to follow-through with a purchase. TV attribution is used to identify these conversion pathways.

How do advertisers measure the audience reach of television?

In OTT (over-the-top) advertising, connecting with a media server, such as an IP (internet protocol), extracts audience information which advertisers can then collect for targeting and reporting purposes.

In linear TV advertising, advertisers connect with national networks to gather audience information. The more national networks an advertiser has access to, the greater the chance the ad has of reaching the largest number of households and targeting with more precision and clarity.

Any cross-channel TV buying platform should have partnerships with top-of-the-line data partners who can extract this audience information with ease and efficiency. One industry leader is Nielsen, who uses proprietary electronic measuring devices and software to capture what advertisements viewers are exposed to across devices.

How are TV audiences measured?

Audiences who view an advertisement are measured in relation to the entire viewership of linear TV or connected TV (CTV) in any given time frame. Audience measurement is typically further segmented by media markets, which are defined by the size of a metropolitan area.

In linear TV advertising, gross rating points (GRPs) or target rating points (TRPs) are the standard unit of measurement. A data-driven and automated workflow from your TV buying platform is crucial for speedy measurement reporting. With accurate and timely reports, re-targeting audiences, expanding reach, and increasing frequency is exponentially simpler when you’re looking to scale your campaign.

Every TV advertising campaign should be run with a set target audience, which can be built out, re-built as lookalike audiences, and re-targeted as the campaign’s success is measured and goes to scale.

Here at Simulmedia, we partner with audience data providers to build out these target audiences using high quality first and third party data sets based on observed behavior captured by automatic content recognition technology (ACR). Our expansive list of data partners offer a 360-degree view of user data, so your audience is based on a wide panel of data, leaving no room for gaps or guesswork in getting granular with your targeting. The larger the panel of data, the more accurate your targeting can be.

Our TV+® platform considers audience behaviors and inventory-supply parameters across CTV and linear like budget, timeframe and network restrictions to recommend the most optimized plan for your goals. The platform then provides real-time cross channel reporting at a granular level, by network/publisher, program, depart and day of the week. Our data partnerships enable complete transparency into key performance metrics, such as how your advertising is driving web visits, app installs, and more essential KPIs.

Working with a Simulmedia account manager, we can identify a strategy that either prioritizes reach or frequency in targeting the households that match your model buyer personas, increasing the likelihood of converting viewers in buyers and therefore a profitable return on investment from your ad campaign.