Commentary
'Frequency Imbalance' Issues Continue For Political Marketers On CTV: Analysis
- by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, June 26, 2024
Refuting current thinking that using connected TV (CTV) platforms can help resolve issues with the frequency of linear TV messaging, video programmatic operator MiQ says a massive imbalance with messaging on both platforms -- especially for political marketers -- continues to be a problem.
For example, on CTV platforms, recent analysis revealed that 20% of CTV households' exposure to political ad campaign messaging got 81% of targeted impressions -- with an average frequency of 77 times that messages were seen in a home.
On the flip side, MiQ says, 80% of targeted households received only 19% of ”tracked impressions,” with an average frequency of 4.5 times.
When looking at linear TV, 80% of households receiving political ad campaigns on linear TV accounted for only 20% of tracked impressions -- for an average frequency of 18 times that those messages were aired in those homes.
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In even worse results for the remaining homes, 20% of households receiving 80% of impressions had an average frequency of 301.
MiQ says this refutes current thinking about CTV platforms generally being a better place to trim down frequency of messages -- a longtime concern for brands.
“Our analysis clearly demonstrates that the frequency skew on CTV is just as problematic as it is on linear TV today,” says Jesse Contario, senior vice president of political for MiQ. “Simply buying streaming does not inherently solve the challenge; how you buy streaming is what matters most.”
This MiQ data came from 100 million CTV and 288 million linear TV impressions across 9.2 million devices between January 1, 2024 and May 29, 2024.
MiQ's programmatic political platform data comes from automated content recognition (ACR) data of over 50 million households and 70 million devices. More than 250 political advertisers have used its platform.
Wayne Friedman is West Coast Editor of MediaPost. You can reach Wayne at wayne@mediapost.com.
Actually, it appears that the imbalance of viewing that we hear so much about re linear TV 20% of the viewers do 50- 55% of the viewing----also exists for streaming---only a bit more so.
That's hardly a surprise as the average person still devotes more time to linear TV than streaming and there are only so many people who are streaming-only's--about 20%.
Frankly, there isn't much that can be done about this as very few services cater mostly to very light or infrequent viewers as these would genrate viewing levels that are so low that the services wouldn't be viable. However one can mix and match servces ---based on their reach and demo appeal and redress the imbalance somewhat, though I wonder how a programmatic buying system would accomplish this unless it had third party audience duplication data for all sellers to evaluate.