While national TV linear advertising rose 9% in the first six months of the year versus a year ago, to an estimated $21.4 billion, impressions headed the other direction, down 6.1% to 3.8 trillion, according to iSpot.tv.
Much of the ad dollar gain in the first half of this year was due to the return of big sports TV programming, absent a year ago due the pandemic, according to the research company.
This included the return of the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, Major League Baseball and the NBA -- content which disappeared after the pandemic began in mid-March 2020.
This year, in part due to some of these events, there was a strong return of ad categories, including: Quick service restaurants/food delivery, up 17% year over year to $1.6 billion; automotive marketers, 41% more to $1.5 billion; and retail rising 21% to $955 million.
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A resurgence of the marketplace -- slowly returning to normal after a long nine-month pandemic-disruption period of 2020 -- fueled more advertising growth. iSpot.tv says there was a 25% gain in total creatives airing in the first six months of 2021 versus a year ago -- 57,900 pieces of advertising creative content.
Ad category laggards include wireless communications companies, inching up only 1.9% to $854.1 million; travel, down 17% to $224.8 million; and e-commerce, off 1.7% to $319.8 million.
While highly targeted addressable advertising impressions in the U.S. grew 14.6%, it comprised a tiny share of total impression delivered: 1.6%.
Addressable ad impressions here includes data from set-top-boxes across all major pay TV providers; premium streaming apps, such as Hulu and Peacock; virtual pay TV providers, including Sling TV and YouTube; and streaming set-top boxes/sticks, such as Roku and Amazon Fire Stick.
Overall advertising and impression data for iSpot.tv comes from 23 million smart TV and set-top boxes, analyzing 35,000 brands, and 155 TV networks in 210 DMAs. Data also comes from more the 300 streaming platforms and DSPs.
Wayne, where does iSpot.tv get its ad costs data from? Certainly it's not from its panel of smart sets. And the "impressions" are another issue. I assume that these are set usage figures projected against the total TV universe based on a sample of about 6-7% of all TV sets. ( 23 million vs 300+ million ). Perhaps someone at iSpot.tv could provide an explanation of the methodology.