• by Dan Ackerman , Op-Ed Contributor, April 10, 2014

Havas Media’s head of research, Joe Abruzzo, recently posted a really great analysis of broadcast and cable audiences. In it, he puts a new spin on the value of first-run programming in primetime television in relation to reruns that air across cable networks:

“An alternative perspective takes into account the hundreds of opportunities to view a show on cable that originally aired in broadcast prime. Over a typical week or quarter, audiences accumulate to deliver many times the viewership achieved by the same program airing each week in broadcast prime. And, combined with a prime time broadcast buy, cable telecasts offer significant opportunities for incremental reach.”

In general, what he’s talking about is a great example of the fragmentation of audiences across networks. While there are still relatively large audiences for TV shows that air for the first time on broadcast networks (not to mention live, tent pole award and sporting events), people are becoming less and less beholden to broadcast schedules, day parts or specific networks. They are viewing that programming across dozens of different cable channels, and not necessarily racing home every Thursday to watch The Big Bang Theory on CBS at 8pm ET.

The numbers Mr. Abruzzo looked at supports this postulation:

"Despite each cable telecast delivering about one-sixth the audience of the average broadcast prime telecast, the more than 300 cable telecasts combine to deliver four times as many rating points as [The Big Bang Theory] in broadcast prime."

People, and a lot more of them, are watching episodic TV outside of the first-run environment. He analyzed cable networks specifically, but you can see that playing out in VOD, Web and mobile as well. Further, these additional audiences were found to be incremental – nearly half of the cable telecast audience was new to the show.

For marketers, this presents a unique opportunity to extend the value of their primetime broadcast buy with very cost effective strategic buys in the cable market. Additional viewing and consumer data, from set-top boxes and other sources, can also aid in not just segmenting out incremental audiences by age and gender, but also by specific business targets (think males, aged 18 to 49 with a household income of more than $50k, owns a Ford F-150 and has an A credit rating).

Through the automation of this process, advertisers not only can uncover these new reach opportunities, but more easily acquire them across the hundreds of cable networks existing today. Technology can pull in first- and third-party data to identify more precisely where ad spend should be allocated in order to accomplish the marketing goal of specific campaigns – a huge leap forward from how TV was bought and sold even a decade ago. These data layers can also extend to the Web, allowing for marketers to find these incremental, like viewing audiences across online and offline media.

As the technologies get better and the partnerships fall into place, fragmented viewing audiences will be viewed less as the overwhelming issue it is today, and more as a real opportunity to make advertising dollars work even harder.