Pivotal's Wieser Estimates 2% Growth For Q4 National TV Advertising

by Wayne Friedman , January 20, 2016

After several periods of declines, national TV advertising has been estimated to have grown 2% during the last quarter of 2015, according to one analyst.

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.

ad spending, advertising, connected tv, forecast, tv

2 comments about "Pivotal's Wieser Estimates 2% Growth For Q4 National TV Advertising".

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Ed Papazian from Media Dynamics Inc, January 20, 2016 at 5:14 p.m.
Which is why the TV networks and some of the cable programmers want to "monetize" their non-measured viewing, which, for primetime fare may account for upwards of 10% of their measured audiences. One wonders what the totality of TV/video usage would look like if Nielsen figured a way to measure it. As more and more TV/video platforms appear, rating fragmentation---even for Netflix----will accelerate, but, at the same time, a typical consumer will consume more, not less, content.
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Peter Losh from Undisclosed , January 23, 2016 at 2:20 p.m.

Does this mean a projection of 2% more TV advertising (quantity), or 2% more spending on advertising -- even as more and more Americans cut the cord? These are optimistic estimates indeed. I for one won't be watching all those commercials, as I've moved to ad-free streaming content... As have a number of people I know, regardless of age group.

They must be expect increased spending. There's no possible way to cram in more ads.