• by Wayne Friedman , January 20, 2016

Brian Wieser, senior research analyst for Pivotal Research Group, says this was due to range of factors, including new ad categories with high media spending from daily fantasy sports marketers, as well as pent-up demand from budgets not allocated earlier in the year -- from last year’s upfront and scatter markets.

Wieser also believes traditional national TV advertising probably benefited from “frustration with issues in digital advertising around ad quality (fraud, viewability, etc).” This helped national advertising sellers.

“These general underlying trends appear set to continue as 2016 progresses,” Wieser says.

TV viewing through 2015, including seven days of time-shifting-programming, yielded improving trends -- “decelerating declines in general for traditional TV-related viewing,” he says.

In December, Wieser says, time spent with TV among adults 18-49 fell by 2.0%. For the fourth quarter of 2015, there was a small 1.6% drop -- better than the weaker results for other quarters during the year.

At the same time, there was significant growth in content not associated with traditional TV networks, which did not receive Nielsen ratings credit. But he says “they should have limited effects on the amount of money spent on TV-related advertising.”

Internet-connected device-based viewing is the most significant new source of change in TV viewing, he says, with consumption up by 84.5% in the quarter for adults 18-49 on a total day basis.

In total, Internet-connected devices accounted for 5.5% of total day TV consumption for adults 18-49 during the month and 5.2% during the quarter.