Month: March 2022

February TV engagement always lags January, which shines as the heaviest viewing month of the year. This year was no exception, despite the trifecta of the Super Bowl, the Winter Olympics and the increased demand for news of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine late in the month. January 2022 was a five-week month, including the heavy usage week right after Christmas, which amplified its TV viewing prowess, resulting in an even bigger dip in February 2022 TV viewing than average: viewing was down 5.7% from January, below the 5% average over the past five years.

January 2022 set the bar very high, as streaming surged and broadcast boomed to provide an 8% bump in total viewership. But February wasn’t without its high points, as the Super Bowl gave broadcast a leg up over the streamers enjoying its highest weekly share of viewing (28.7%) since October 2021. As is typical when global news breaks, cable and broadcast news viewing spiked in late February when Russia invaded Ukraine. Cable viewing increased 54% in week 4, helping cable news gain one-fourth of all cable viewing (up from 16%-17%). Comparatively, broadcast news increased by 6.3% to 15.3% in the final week of the month, elevating the genre to second-largest behind drama. 

While the Winter Olympics certainly boosted sports viewing in the month, a look at week-by-week broadcast viewing in the sports events genre highlights the impact of Super Bowl LVI.

The sports-heavy month was also a boost for streaming, as Peacock usage hit all-time highs, as it carried both the big game and the winter games. Peacock usage peaked during Super Bowl week, while remaining robust during the Olympics. Outside of sports, however, streaming’s share of viewing was largely flat month-over-month.

February was big for video gaming, as the “other” category gained almost a full share point due to increased time consumers spent video gaming during the President’s Day holiday, and other winter breaks around the nation, amplified by the highly anticipated release of games like Elden Ring, Horizon Forbidden West and Destiny 2.

Take me to the methodology details below.

Watch the video to hear Brian Fuhrer, SVP, Product Strategy at Nielsen provide a behind the scenes look at some of the viewing changes underpinning The Gauge.

Between rapid news cycles, ever-changing consumer behaviors, and an unclear future as the pandemic continues, adaptability is key for marketing success. To help achieve brand goals, marketers should conduct ongoing media planning throughout the year, versus only once at the start, that puts key audiences at the center of marketing efforts. By establishing always-on, consumer-focused measurement practices, marketers can then leverage outcomes to continuously optimize marketing strategies and tactics. 

To operate with this level of agility, marketers should practice the following:

Center planning around people

We all are aware of how quickly consumer behaviors and needs evolve, so it’s critical marketers listen to their audiences’ needs and respond appropriately. Forrester predicts comfort and sustainability to trump consumers’ shopping priorities in 2022, giving marketers a high-level direction on how to start appealing to prospects.

Understanding key audiences on a more granular level, however, can feel like chasing a moving target. For example, more media platforms and channels means that consumers now have more options than ever to consume content. Especially as populations continue to diversify, marketers need to establish ways to secure up-to-date insights into the brand’s target audiences. First-party data is especially powerful because it allows marketers to follow consumer behaviors across all interactions with the brand, which establishes a deeper level of understanding than traditional third-party data sources could offer.

Instead of devoting marketing bandwidth to sourcing audience data, brands can leverage martech tools to keep a pulse of key audiences’ behaviors and interests for them. Using this technology allows marketers to check on consumers whenever they need to, so that marketers can develop campaigns rooted in the timely needs of consumers.

Practice nonstop media planning

Marketers should adopt a mindset of continuous planning to avoid locking themselves into outdated tactics. By analyzing the information sourced through their data collection practices, marketers can observe how consumer trends are evolving in real time so that the brand stays in touch with its audiences. Moreover, the more often marketers record and assess campaign results, the more opportunities they have to see which tactics are truly effective.Marketers can couple these insights with past findings to inform future campaigns and reallocate marketing spend to only the tactics proven to work–and with up-to-date insights, even adjust campaigns currently in flight. This way, marketing teams don’t waste time or spend promoting campaigns that don’t resonate with consumers.

With continuous planning, brands can experiment with new campaign ideas and media buys in the short term with the comfort that they can scrap the campaign quickly if it doesn’t meet expectations. Likewise, if the campaign shows positive returns, marketers can integrate the concept into its usual marketing mix.

Brands also need to know how their competitors are performing. Analyzing competitive spend reveals how competitors are encroaching on target audiences, and if competitor spend is thereby hurting marketers’ own sales goals. This way, marketers will be able to attribute impact on ROI to competitor spend versus their own campaigns falling short.

Align planning efforts to increase marketing efficiency

Marketers have an opportunity to make campaign planning even smarter through connected planning, where marketers use historical data and the same audience profiles across each of its software solutions to ensure that planning and buying align. Marketers tend to use different target definitions across media channels, which leads marketers to measure their efforts in siloes. For example, if different platforms use different data sets (e.g., online platforms sync with the brand’s first-party data while offline systems are fed third-party data), marketers do not have a unified target to work towards. By consequence, their measurements will not add up.

This challenge is compounded by the fact that marketers often use an average of 28 different vendors, which makes coherent measurement and planning challenging. A fragmented approach isn’t only inconvenient; it’s detrimental to effectiveness. Nielsen research found that brands of all sizes and industries have very little confidence in their existing martech capabilities, with nearly half (47%) of marketers at large organizations considering data quality an obstacle.

There is a need to prioritize consistency between data, software, and partners to maximize marketing success. By using uniform target definitions across channels and campaigns, marketers can secure actionable feedback on campaign success in relation to the original marketing plan. This way, marketers can see how campaigns are delivering on goals. Fortunately, marketing technology is improving to better communicate between tools, making consistent measurement across systems, from planning tools to buying platforms, possible. Marketers now even have access to all-in-one solutions that streamline their techstack; with all their marketing insights in one place, marketers can act faster and more accurately than if they were switching between disparate systems. 

With the pandemic’s effects on consumer behavior and media consumption forecasted to linger long past its grip on public health, marketers need to maintain the flexibility and sensitivity they employed over the past two years as part of their permanent planning strategy. Importantly, marketers should use these three keys in unison to see the greatest impact on marketing effectiveness. By coupling a growth mindset with updated planning and measurement practices, marketers can operate confidently no matter the media landscape before them.

This article first appeared on MarTech Series.

The universal breadth and appeal of sports continues to present brand sponsors with significant upside, both through exposure and how well consumers regard brands’ involvement. Combined, sports activations are doing more than boosting brand awareness—they’re leading to higher conversion rates. 

The higher conversion rates reflect:

• Increased brand sponsorships following the global ad pullback in 2020
• A high level of trust among fans with respect to sponsorships

Brand advertising increased throughout 2021, with an increased focus on traditional, mass reach mediums like TV and radio. Along those lines, Nielsen Sports tracked a 107% increase in sponsorship spending globally in the early part of 2021, with activations increasing as global sports continued to rebound throughout the year.
From a fan perspective, the increased investment is likely money well spent, as consumers view brand sponsorships in sporting events as very trustworthy. According to our recent Trust in Advertising Study, only recommendations from people and branded websites rank higher in consumer trust.

Combine the high level of trust with the strong correlation between visible sponsorship messaging and purchase behavior, and brands have plenty to gain. In a recent analysis of 100 sponsorships between 2020 and 2021 in seven markets across 20 industries, Nielsen found that the sponsorships drove an average 10% lift in purchase intent among the exposed fanbase.

The transition from building awareness to conversion speaks to the growing importance of sponsorships throughout the full marketing funnel, and this trend will continue. Nielsen’s experience base shows that on average, a 1-point gain in brand metrics such as awareness and consideration drives a 1% increase in sales. Upper-funnel efforts also generate an array of ancillary benefits that can drive the efficiency of sales activations.

In the sports industry, sponsorship activations have transitioned from simply raising brand awareness to actually converting consumers into customers. Across 13 industries Nielsen measured during the pandemic, the increase in purchase intent is greater than brand familiarity among fans exposed to the sponsorship. As brands return to more balanced marketing efforts in many industries, Nielsen expects the pace of this trend to decelerate, but sponsors and rights holders have structurally improved their ability to generate call-to-action from fans.

In looking across the landscape, the cryptocurrency industry has amplified its sponsorship presence more than any other industry over the past two years, mirroring its increased exposure in other areas of the media landscape, such as TV and social media.

Crypto, despite its recent proliferation into consumers’ lives, has some ground to gain before becoming ubiquitous with consumers and their finances. To extend their efforts beyond brand awareness through stadium naming rights and logo patches, the time will come to transition consumers from awareness to intent. Again, the sports industry is ideally positioned for this, as awareness and intent are typically higher among sports fans than the general population.

Crypto brands will, just as any brand would need to, solidify their unique value propositions and evolve their relationships with fans from one-way to two-way conversations backed by education and trust-building.

For additional insight, download our 2022 Global Sports Marketing report.