Linear TV Ad Campaigns Can Achieve 62% Reach By Buying 40-45 Networks
- by Wayne Friedman , December 1, 2022
Advertising for cable TV works best when a media campaign is running on 40 to 45 linear TV networks where it can deliver a reach of 62%, according to Effectv.
The Comcast Cable advertising-sales division says this result comes from an analysis of 165,000 campaigns that ran in the first …
Wayne, as indicated in the table, these are monthly (? ) or quarterly ( ? ) household reach figures not persons reach levels. The latter will be lower as all a home needs to be counted as "reached" is if any set is tuned in when a commercial appears on the TV screen. Also, I gather that it's only about cable. If that is correct one would ask about the use of broadcast TV, which has considerably more coverage than cable due to homes that get over-the-air reception ( about 15% of all TV homes ). In other words, if I include two or three broadcast TV networks in the mix---even if their CPMs are higher----how many cable "networks" are also needed to attain a certain level of people reach? In such a case, I doubt that you need to buy time on 45-50 cable channels to attain a 60% people reach.
As for streaming being added, why not? But a serious media planner would have to weigh the cost of attaining extra reach points with the added cost to determine if this made sense. This applies to any add-on, including broadcast TV. It all depends on what you start with. If your base buy is cable----at its very low CPMs, your next add-on will probably be brodcast---but not necessarily prime time---followed by streaming. But if you start with broadcast---as is often how it goes down---- cable is a far more efficient reach builder than streamning with its high CPMs. As always, there are other factors to be considered---like what demos you are most interested in, commercial attentiveness levels, ad clutter ratios, etc.