Canoe Ventures says the number of advertising impressions grew 21% to nearly 5 billion in the first quarter for network TV programmers running video-on-demand platforms on traditional pay TV providers: cable, satellite, and telco.
Canoe provides ad technology -- dynamic ad insertion -- for advertisers to run those campaigns on big cable TV operators.
Nearly 2,300 campaigns ran in the first quarter of 2017 -- 75% from paid client ad campaigns and 25% from network TV promos. The biggest days of the week for advertising impressions were Saturday (805.6 million) and Sunday (816.9 million).
For the full year ended in 2016, advertising impressions were at 17.9 billion compared to 11.8 billion in 2015 and 6.3 billion in 2014.
Virtually all of the advertising on these VOD platforms occurs mid-roll -- during the TV program. Over 4.2 billion impressions ran this way, with 732.7 million impressions occurring pre-roll, before the TV show starts; and 95.0 million impressions running post-run after the TV show has ended.
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Mid-roll campaigns averaged 3.84 commercials per break, while pre-roll was at 1.13; and post-roll, 1.05.
TV network executives put high hopes in growing advertising VOD services because TV consumers can’t fast forward through commercials.
Canoe Ventures covers 35 million U.S. TV homes via cable systems on Comcast, Cox, and Charter’s Spectrum.
Whenever they talk in billions of "impressions" not percent reach or average frequency, there's a reason. In this case we have 5 billion "impressions during the first quarter. That means set usage not viewing "impressions", folks. So the viewer impressions are probably about half the number cited. Divide that by the total populatuion and you get about 8 "impressions per person in the U.S. in a quarter---or less than one every 11 days. Reduce that by actual ad exposure---like paying some attention to the ad--- and you get one actual ad viewing every 20 days for the entire country. Of course, if only a third of the population is covered, the figure rises to one ad seen every 6-7 days or so, compared to 590 "linearTV" ads seen during the same time frame.
Ed, help me with that distillation of 5 Billion set top impressions to "about half" ....Couldnt we assume 1.2 viwers watching, isnt the actual OTS number higher moving from boxes to viewers...??
Mark, whenever you get an audience estiate that is based on set usage, anyone in a household could be watching either all by themselves---about two- thirds of all viewing is done this way---or with someone else. Since an average TV home has about 2.5 residents, if only 1,2 of them are watching during an average set usage period, that means that the percent of people living in the home who are viewing per minute is a bit less than half as high as the household rating implies. Hence, if you have a 5.0 set usage rating, your corresponding persons rating is less than half of that. If you want proof of this just visit the Nielsen website and compare the hours of household tuning versus viewing for any age demo. It's in their quarterly Total Audience Reports. You will see that where TV homes use their sets, say 68 hours per week , the corresponding firgure for a typical adult TV home resident is around 33 hours.
I would guess that the average Netflix subscribing home is younger and more affluent than the norm, and probably has 3.0 or slightly more residents. So when streaming info---which we are assuming---probably not correctly---gives us an indicator of 2.2 hours per day per Netflix using home, I'm reducing that to around one hour per person living in the home. The rest is simply a calculation, translating the figures to all subscribers, including those who did not tune in at all that month and, finally, to the total population. The only way you would get 2.2 hours a day of consumption per Netflix resident would be if every time Netflix content was streamed all 3.0 members of the family were watching---a most unlikely proposition.