Making Time for Time-Spent Measurement

OK, I’ll grant you: This is not the first time I’ve quoted this legendary line from more than a century ago, delivered by marketing pioneer John Wanamaker. But boy, is it ever relevant in the context of today’s column!

eMarketer recently published a report that we found highly interesting – maybe even somewhat startling in parts – addressing what can fairly be called the misalignment of media spend with actual time-spent with media.

In fact, in their recent report, eMarketer researchers wrote, “Our analysis reveals significant—and sometimes extreme—imbalances between where consumers spend their media time and where marketers put their ad dollars.”

Per the report, “US Ad Spending vs. Time Spent 2024,” marketers will spend almost $390 billion on ads in the US this year, with more than half going to media and entertainment platforms “that are constantly competing for consumers’ time and attention.” US adults will spend an average of 12 hours, 37 minutes per day with those platforms, it notes.

Let’s look at some of the platforms expected to benefit from that spending, and how that lines up with the time consumers spend on these platforms.

Spending on connected TV (CTV) is projected to increase 18.8% this year—one of the highest rates of any medium eMarketer tracks. “Yet the gap between CTV’s share of consumer attention and its share of total ad spending continues to widen,” the report asserts.

Perhaps counterintuitively, eMarketer researchers find that linear TV will claim just 15.1% of all 2024 US ad spending, though US adults will spend “almost a quarter” of their daily media time with “old fashioned cable, satellite, and broadcast TV services.” As eMarketer observes, “Traditional TV is more popular than advertisers seem to think it is.”

The irony here, actually, is that CTV’s growth this year will owe much to the rapid growth of political spending on that format – and yet, at the same time, the lion’s share of political will continue to go to linear TV, primarily leading local broadcast TV stations and, secondarily, targeted spot cable.

And yet despite the predictably heavy concentration of political spending on these linear and CTV platforms, social media, by contrast, commands north of 20% of total ad spending.

Which takes us to where the disparity appears in the other direction. eMarketer finds time spent with social media is “stagnating,” yet ad spending on those platforms – led by Facebook and Instagram, collectively receiving 75% of social ad money -- is still rising. Social time has “peaked,” eMarketer forecasts, and will start to decline next year. “Nonetheless,” the report notes, “social network ad spending will increase by 16.0% this year and 11.4% next year.”

In fact, among beneficiaries of misalignment between time-spent and ad dollars received, Facebook and Instagram parent Meta is King. “The adult population will spend 36 minutes per day with Meta properties this year, roughly the same as with YouTube or Netflix,” the report notes. “But Meta will turn those minutes into $64.63 billion in ad revenues, nearly four times YouTube’s gross revenues.”

And in terms of audience reach, YouTube is certainly on a roll. It vaulted into the lead among media distributors in the July 2024 Media Distributor Gauge report, Nielsen’s monthly view of total TV consumption by media company. Time spent watching YouTube on television sets was up 7% compared to June, and it accounted for 10.4% of total TV in July – actually surpassing Disney, whose collection of linear networks and streaming services was second with a 9.9% share!

Which leads me to another observation: What do we mean today by the term “primetime”? When the leading aggregator of “TV” audience is YouTube, is the traditional “primetime” window of 8-to-10pm Eastern on weeknights even relevant? As regards linear TV, one could argue the actual “primetime” today is 1-to-7pm Sundays.

But to look at it more broadly, “primetime” today is whatever time the most people are consuming video across all platforms and devices – and, as measurement firms get increasingly sophisticated in their ability to track this comprehensively, we might find some surprising data.

While the full eMarketer report is available to its clients, there is a free-of-charge avenue to additional insights in the form of this August 29 episode of eMarketer’s “Behind the Numbers” podcast.

Let’s face it, social media has long been an attractive draw to marketers; on the surface, it’s a relatively inexpensive buy with eye-catching ROI in terms of the metrics social platforms provide clients. But is all the disproportionate spending on the platforms truly moving the needle for marketers?

In recent columns we’ve a discussed a diverse array of emerging marketing platforms –including Free, Ad-Supported Streaming Television (FAST) channels and digital-out-of-home (DOOH) displays. Each platform has merit and offers opportunities for marketers – and, depending on their objectives, we encourage clients to utilize a diverse mix of options that may include these and/or others … yes, depending on the circumstances, even social media.

The key is reaching the target consumers where they are, and when they are viewing screens -- on platforms proven to command a substantial portion of their ever-fleeting attention.

Planning where, when and how to spend advertising budgets is highly time- and labor-intensive. These new eMarketer findings underscore the complexity and intricacy of the process. Marketers have enough on their plates managing internal tasks and processes and they need expert partners to help them navigate this ever-shifting media landscape.

Media-consumption and leisure-time habits are ever evolving, and marketing plans must evolve accordingly. To fail to do so simply puts the marketer in the same position as John Wanamaker found himself…. more than a century ago….

Posted at MediaVillage through the Thought Leadership self-publishing platform.

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The opinions expressed here are the author's views and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillage.org/MyersBizNet.