According to APIA Vote, 83% of Asian American Native Hawaiian Pacific Islanders (AANHPIs) have concerns about misinformation in the U.S. election, among Democrats and Republicans alike. At the same time, 78% of Asian Americans consume news at least once a day and are also 34% more likely to trust in the accuracy of news than the general U.S. population, creating opportunities for news media and brands to connect with the fast-growing segment of the U.S. population with $1.3 trillion in buying power¹. Doing so effectively requires a deeper understanding of the relationship between Asian Americans and the news.

Where do Asian Americans get their news?

Asian Americans are more likely than the general population to report turning to social media (Instagram, LinkedIn and Threads) and news aggregator sites as their top source for news. They are also 69% more likely to rely on friends and family, going to the people in their tightly-knit community who can break down headlines with the right context and relevant information.

When it comes to newspaper content, Nielsen’s research found that Asian audiences are most likely to turn to free newspaper websites. For marketers hoping to engage AANHPI audiences this year, tapping into reliable content on non-subscription news sites and social media platforms to help educate the AANHPI voter could be a valuable connection point.

Building trust through representation

With the always-on connectivity of smartphone apps and sites that Asians prefer, how can brands tap into them to create lasting engagement? Platforms with authentic, representative content is key, as 41% of AANHPI audiences are more likely to buy from brands that advertise with news outlets they trust². 

And here’s where the influence of journalists who are representative of the community comes in. For example, ABC’s World News Tonight with co-anchor Juju Chang and MSNBC’s Morning Joe with frequent reporter Richard Lui are in the top most-watched broadcast news programs for AANHPI viewers.³ And in the 2023 Asian American Journalist Association awards, an Axios project led by three Asian journalists was a winner. Their piece Everything You Need to Know to Vote in the 2022 Midterm Election drove tremendous audience engagement in two of the top sources of news for Asian Americans, Instagram Reels (30% more than previous) and news aggregator site Flipboard (double URL open rates). Stories told about the Asian American community by members of the community create connections with audiences while providing necessary and critical information to drive change and action.

The value of in-language media

TV news programming plays a much less significant role in AANHPI news engagement compared to other audience populations, but Asian Americans are 57% more likely to get news from international television. Asians make up the fastest-growing ethnic group in the U.S. today, coming from more than 20 countries around the world and speaking more than 50 different languages. 

Connecting with the diverse AANHPI community requires more than a one-size fits all approach. In a 2023 report, Nielsen explored the attitudes and media consumption preferences of Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese language speakers—representing about 40% of the Asian American population and three of the Asian languages most spoken at home.

More than 40% of total respondents ‘strongly agreed/agreed’ that Asian media offers programs and perspectives they trust. Furthermore, the study shows that more than 50% of Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese respondents prefer to buy brands that advertise on programs reflecting their culture. Opportunities exist for brands that invest part of their advertising spend in in-language media platforms.

Adjusting media plans in an election year

As ad prices rise with political campaigns buying up valuable ad inventory, advertisers can benefit from rethinking their media plans during this election year and connect with Asian audiences through the social media, aggregator sites and ad-supported newspaper sites they gravitate toward. One benefit of these channels is that they present a more addressable option—giving marketers improved measurement of ROI. 

Learn more about reaching Asian American consumers in Nielsen’s latest Diverse Intelligence Series report.

Notes

¹U.S. Census Projections 2023 and Selig Center for Economic Growth 2022

²2024 Nielsen Survey on Trust in Media

³Nielsen National TV Panel, 2023

The post The power of news media: An important platform to reach Asian Americans in an election year appeared first on Nielsen.

The media buying playing field

It’s simple enough on paper: a network, TV station, streaming platform or other TV distributor has advertising inventory for sale alongside its programming; a brand (or an agency on its behalf) wants to use some of that inventory to reach customers and prospects;  if the seller’s audience is a good fit for the buyer’s intended target—and the price is right—then the deal goes through and everyone’s happy.

But in practice, media buying can get very complicated very quickly. What exactly are media buyers buying? How much inventory is there? What’s a good rate? Do all ad types perform the same? Who defines target audiences? Are there any guarantees?

Before any of those questions can be answered, the first step in the media buying journey is to understand what TV is. It’s not a disingenuous question. The TV landscape has changed a lot in recent years. From broadcast to cable, satellite, FAST TV and AVOD, viewers today have dozens of options to watch TV on their own terms. That’s great for viewers, and it gives media buyers more options, too. But every new platform comes with its own idiosyncrasies and adds another layer of complexity to the media buying equation.

Upfront and scatter

The first TV programs were sponsored by single advertisers. Campbell’s Soup sponsored Lassie; Johnson & Johnson: The Adventures of Robin Hood; Beech-Nut Gum: The Dick Clark Show; Philip Morris: I Love Lucy. It wasn’t long before the commercial pod emerged, greatly expanding the ad inventory on TV and setting the stage for media buying as we know it today.

In the U.S., TV media buyers buy advertising at the Upfronts—a weeklong event in the spring each year where networks and other distributors introduce upcoming shows—and in the scatter (or remnant) market. Doing business at the Upfronts 6 to 12 months before new shows are aired allows sellers to secure funding well ahead of a new TV season, and buyers to lock-in guaranteed placements on coveted time slots and at a fair price.

These days, around USD$20 billion worth of advertising money changes hands at the Upfronts for primetime broadcast and cable, and about the same amount for other dayparts and CTV. Another USD$20-30 billion goes to the scatter market throughout the year, giving buyers the flexibility to bid for ad placements much closer to air time.

But what does ‘air time’ mean in a world where broadcast and cable represent just half of total TV viewing, as we noted in our recent report The Next Frontier: Your guide to the 2024-25 upfronts/newfronts planning season? The convergence of linear and streaming is quickly redefining media buying.

Where is the audience?

Nielsen’s Head of Global Marketing Alison Gensheimer pointed out that “TV isn’t going anywhere, it’s going everywhere. Definitions change depending on who you talk to, and I’m starting to wonder if it even matters. For advertisers, the important question—now and forever—is where the audience is.”

Media buying negotiations have long been tied to specific network, daypart, day-of-the-week combinations because that was the only way to reach audiences loyal to specific programs. Everyone in the mid-90s wanted to buy primetime on Thursdays nights on NBC because that was when Friends and Seinfeld would air, and those shows attracted the most young adults. 

But if the ultimate objective is to reach a particular audience—whether it’s young adults, foodies, outdoor enthusiasts or new parents—a TV lineup isn’t a requirement anymore. Thanks to CTV and other data and infrastructure breakthroughs like measurement-grade identity graphs, there are ways today to reach advanced audiences on TV that don’t involve using a niche program as a surrogate.

Media buying on TV is starting to look a lot like media buying on digital platforms, doesn’t it?

How is measurement evolving at Nielsen?

At Nielsen, we’ve been reporting C3 (live + 3 days) and C7 (live + 7 days) average commercial minutes for over 15 years, and those panel-based metrics have provided and continue to provide a very robust currency for media buyers and sellers. There’s tremendous value in having a consistent metric year after year, but the level of fragmentation in the industry has reached a tipping point. 

We’re now transitioning to a big data + panel measurement methodology where the scale of big data is brought to bear to measure a wider variety of programs and get a more comprehensive view of audience behavior, and where panel data is used for validation and calibration. We’re also deploying technology capable of reporting commercials at the subminute level, making it possible for advertisers to understand the performance of a much wider selection of ad formats.

What does it mean for media buying on television?

At the moment, TV media buying is a complicated mix of tradition and modernity. Media buyers are being asked to combine the scale of linear TV with the addressability of CTV to meet brand and performance objectives. It’s no small ask, especially when media budgets are under pressure. But new measurement solutions on the horizon will bring more structure, consistency and granular insights to the negotiating table—and unlock more opportunities for both buyers and sellers.

The post Need to Know: The basic of TV media buying appeared first on Nielsen.

Consider that it was barely ten years ago that Binet and Field published The Long and the Short of it and proposed their famous 60:40 rule—that is, to maximize marketing effects and returns over time, 60% of a media budget should be allocated to brand marketing and 40% to performance marketing. Yet according to results from our 2024 Annual Marketing Report, 70% of marketers plan to increase performance marketing spend this year at the expense of brand building. What gives?

Short-term pressures

Companies today are under enormous pressure to deliver short-term results. Market conditions can change on a dime: a nimble new competitor entering the market; a new spike in inflation; geopolitical uncertainties; issues with the supply chain; or simply modern consumers being modern consumers and latching onto a new trend. It’s only natural for marketing leaders to want to capitalize on the opportunity right in front of them.

The logical choice then is to focus their efforts on the bottom of the funnel. There, they can target consumers near the moment of purchase, tailor their messages for immediate action and quickly see if their media spend is paying off. Between search, display, social, retail media, podcasts or even CTV, advertisers now have many more options to trigger short-term conversions than ever before. 

But there are two major pitfalls to watch out for:

1. The first is to forget that when a shopper clicks on a Buy Now button, it’s the result of a long string of touchpoints with the brand, not just the last impression. Too many marketers still attribute sales to that last impression, for simplicity’s sake. This leads to a vicious circle where brands end up neglecting top-funnel activities to build their brand, and spending more to convert fewer prospects at the bottom of the funnel.
2. The second is to assume that the long-term health of the company will take care of itself. In Binet and Field’s words, “Long-term effects are not simply an accumulation of short-term effects.” The same applies to outcomes. You won’t see long-term results by amassing short-term wins. What’s more, short-term pressure will only get more intense over time for companies that don’t invest in long-term effects.

Perceived effectiveness

There’s another possibility to consider: That today’s enthusiasm for performance marketing comes from the perception that channels typically used for it are inherently more effective.

Nielsen’s Annual Marketing Report shows that marketers deem social media, search and online display and video to be the most effective digital channels in their quiver. Nearly 80% of them perceive social media to be extremely or very effective, for instance, and 72% give the same appreciation to search. Marketers don’t typically associate TV with performance marketing. Yet, when we analyze how TV fares across hundreds of marketing mix modeling studies, we find that it’s one of the only channels that performs equally well at the top and bottom of the funnel.

The point is not to cast doubt on this or that channel or to put any of them on a pedestal. All campaigns and brands are different and every channel has its strengths and weaknesses. But it is important to recognize that there can be a wide gap between the perception of performance and actual performance. The fact that a channel is addressable, relatively easy to measure and perceived to be effective doesn’t automatically make it good for performance marketing.

Measurement drives strategy

When asking if you’re investing in performance marketing for the right reasons, you want to make sure budget decisions are informed by strategic considerations and not by what is feasible, or what you believe might be feasible.

That’s why holistic measurement is so critical. Most channels are strong in either performance or brand messaging, but rarely in both. And you can only determine the right mix of brand and performance for your marketing needs if you have a clear picture of your media effectiveness across the entire funnel. In today’s complex media ecosystem, cross-channel KPIs and measurement capabilities should be a top priority, yet only 38% of marketers measure traditional and digital marketing together. There’s clearly a lot of room for improvement.

An encouraging sign is that 77% of marketers interviewed for our 2024 Global Annual Marketing Survey are planning to increase spend on newer channels (like CTV and influencer marketing) this year. Experimenting with new channels is a great way to add new marketing capabilities and keep up with consumers—as long as they’re measured consistently with the rest of the marketing mix.

There’s a right mix of brand and performance for your business. Just make sure you base your decision on hard data and not just perceptions.

For more insights into how to maximize campaign spend across the marketing funnel, read Nielsen’s 2024 Annual Marketing Report. 

The post Are you investing in performance marketing for the right reasons? appeared first on Nielsen.

Advanced audience targeting has been around for a long time for many digital channels. But in today’s complex multichannel world, targeting one channel at a time doesn’t cut it anymore. Modern marketers expect to define their custom audiences one time and activate them uniformly across media—from the open web to social, retail media, FAST, CTV and addressable linear. They also expect their measurement solutions to keep up and measure performance with enough granularity to capture those audiences. 

Building high-performing advanced audiences has never been more urgent, especially in the context of the on-again, off-again deprecation of cookie-based targeting systems. 

Thankfully, the industry is responding with exciting new data solutions. At Nielsen, we’ve developed a measurement-grade identity graph and a comprehensive digital ID system to help marketers like you quickly onboard their first-party data, cross-check the quality of their data records, and enrich those records with highly-relevant new attributes.

Let’s examine the benefits of advanced audiences with a few examples connected to CTV.

Cats, kids and touchdowns

Imagine you’re looking to reach Gen Z cat owners (perhaps you’re a pet food company interested in reaching consumers in U.S. college towns); Millennials with young kids (great for toys, food delivery or theme park vacations); or Baby Boomers who are NFL superfans (think beer, cars or banking). Is CTV a good investment for your media spend?

According to data analyzed through Nielsen Media Impact (NMI), advanced audiences don’t necessarily spend more time on CTV devices and platforms than the norm. On average, Gen Z, Millennials and Boomers spend about the same amount of time every day with CTV—a little more than two hours—and owning a cat (for Gen Zers) or being an NFL superfan (for Boomers) doesn’t really make a difference. 

But the story is very different for Millennials with young kids who spend over seven hours a day streaming CTV content, more than 3X as much as their peers without young kids at home.

That doesn’t mean, however, that all CTV platforms will perform equally well for brands looking to capitalize on that opportunity. And, conversely, that there’s not a single CTV platform that can move the needle for the other two groups, Gen Z cat owners and NFL superfan Boomers. 

Finding a home on CTV

None of the top CTV platforms in the U.S. show a big bias for one generation or another.  They don’t all have the same reach, of course, as the NMI data below clearly illustrate. But if a platform reaches 30% of the Gen Z population in a given month, it also reaches 30% of the Millennial population, with Gen Xers (not shown) and Boomers only slightly behind.

But the story changes when we examine reach for the three advanced audiences in our planning tool. HBO Max, for instance, reached 26.4% of Gen Z cat owners in October 2023, compared with 20.6% for all Gen Z. Disney+ reached 56.4% of all Millennials with young kids, compared to 32.6% among all Millennials. The chart below shows those gaps in index form (56.4/32.6 = 173 index, for example), clearly highlighting what platforms would be good candidates to reach each of those advanced audiences.

One word about NFL superfan Boomers. They’re harder to reach on CTV than other Boomers because they’re spending a lot of their TV time on linear TV. But we can already see a number of platforms faring well thanks to their relationship with rights-holding broadcast networks or other exclusive and non-exclusive NFL streaming agreements.

So many choices, so little time

To keep up with consumers and fast-changing market conditions, marketers today need media planning solutions that are rich, consistent, comprehensive and comparable across platforms, not point solutions with vastly different audience definitions and media buying systems.

There’s no time to waste. We’ve assembled custom and syndicated advanced audiences for you to kickstart your media planning, whether you’re working in auto, CPG, retail or dozens of other industries. And since you never want to buy media you can’t measure, we’ve embedded our advanced audiences into Nielsen ONE, our industry-leading cross-media measurement solution.

The post A look at how CTV reach and viewership trends shift across generations appeared first on Nielsen.

Marketing metrics must reflect business impact

This is not the first time in history that marketers have been pressed to prove the impact of their work, far from it. The increase in the amount of data, growing number of sources of data, rise in synthetic data, and expectations around your ability to show the business relevance of data have skyrocketed. 

This means going beyond ‘data-driven’ decisions when building your ROI strategy. You must have the right data at every step of the customer journey. And just because metrics are easy to capture, that does not mean they are the right metrics to use. Instead, they should be those that are tied to market performance and are incrementally valuable to one another. 

Bridge the gap between outcomes and tactics

Nielsen’s latest Annual Marketing Report found that global marketers’ top priorities for 2024 are long-term and full-funnel ROI. However, 70% of these same marketers said they plan to increase their performance marketing spend and reduce their brand-building investments. 

There is a clear gap in the goals marketers have and the tactics they’re using to get there. I believe a misunderstanding of metrics is at the heart of it. If you are measuring ROI only by what’s happening to the bottom line, you may be missing the bigger picture. Being too focused on short-term returns is proven to hurt your ability to improve revenue numbers down the road. Because just as consumers and users have a path they follow, your ROI has a journey, too. 

Map your ROI journey

You can get to a destination without directions, but it takes a lot more time and effort. The same is true with outcomes; they’re consistently successful when you have a comprehensive plan. But the plan is changing. 

For much of the last decade, performance has been tracked at the channel level. Did we hit our impression targets? Did we shrink the costs per click? Did we improve our bounce rate? 

This approach fails on two fronts: 

1. It confuses engagement for impact
2. It doesn’t reflect the consumer journey

ROI can’t be tracked by a range of data points at the channel level. True full-funnel ROI starts by aligning on objectives, defining KPIs from the outset, mirroring the paths consumers take and understanding how everything works together to achieve an outcome. 

From the first point of contact to refining the reach and frequency strategy and on through the point of purchase and beyond, you have to map not only the consumer actions but the impact along the way in order to see what’s genuinely working at every touchpoint. 

For example, top of funnel and bottom of funnel KPIs can often appear to be at odds. Perhaps the keyword search volume is high, but it’s not translating to pageviews. This is too narrow of a view. Instead, look at the bigger, cross-platform picture. Is the lead volume up? How are those leads contributing to the pipeline? By zooming out to look at the bigger picture, a more consistent story should emerge. 

Plotting your ROI journey must happen before anything else, because you can’t always retroactively measure outcomes. If you don’t plan to measure KPIs like Brand Lift and Sales from the beginning, you won’t be able to measure them at all. And even when you can do retroactive-looking metrics, it can be a prohibitively large effort for most teams. 

Know and report the right metrics

When trying to determine what metrics reveal impact, I’ve found this question to be a helpful litmus test: Will the results be compelling to your CFO?  

It’s not uncommon for marketers to stay focused on metrics like impressions, frequency, clicks and downloads. While valuable, they rarely translate for CFOs. Relevancy is what matters to Finance, and it’s up to marketers to draw the connecting line for them. 

This doesn’t mean you need to stop tracking things like likes, clicks and listens;  they’re a valuable gut check. But they shouldn’t be the foundation for strategic reporting. 

This has been a particularly challenging season for the advertising industry. We’ve all had to contend with change coming from every possible direction. As paths to purchase continue to fork, impact continues to be a guiding light. As long as you know where to find it.  

For more insights on how to sharpen your ROI strategy, download the Nielsen’s 2024 Annual Marketing Report. 

The post ‘Data driven’ is no longer enough for your ROI strategy appeared first on Nielsen.

To them, impressions and engagement metrics are a means to an end. What they really want to know is whether their marketing investments are making a difference at the cash register. Of course, not everything has to be a sale or acquisition, but there should always be impact. 

Here are five CFO-approved key performance indicators (KPI) that will show impact, unlock budget and impress everyone at the next board meeting.

Cost per lead

Divide your marketing spend by the total number of leads you received. This can be done at the campaign level or for a set period of time, like a month, quarter or year. 

It’s a great metric because it draws a direct connection between marketing and purchase interest, and it’s very easy to understand for non-marketers. It’s also very healthy for the rest of your measurement efforts because it requires you to pay special attention to attribution: What platforms exactly contributed to your leads? In what proportions? At what cost?

Lead conversions

How many of your leads actually converted? It can be expressed as a rate (conversions / leads), a raw total over a given time period, or by extension as sales per lead. 

It forces you to give some thought to what lead time is reasonable for your industry (a conversion three months after an initial lead might be reasonable for auto or insurance brands, but perhaps not for snacks or pizza delivery) and how it might differ by channel and brand messaging, which is an important consideration for media allocation.

Return on ad spend (ROAS)

ROAS is the revenue brought in by a campaign divided by its cost. It’s a crucial metric because it goes to the heart of the ROI question: How much of your sales can be attributed to your marketing efforts, versus business as usual? 

Many consumers would have purchased from you without advertising. External factors like seasonality, weather, or macroeconomic variables might have played a role too, positively or negatively. ROAS is an invitation to look into media mix modeling.

Long-term ROI

Where is the cutoff between short-term and  long-term effects for your company’s products and services? Don’t blindly accept the 2X multiplier you might have seen in industry publications, or fall victim to the myth that performance campaigns only have short-term effects, and branding campaigns long-term effects. 

Every campaign follows a different curve of diminishing returns, based on factors like product category, messaging, competitors, target audiences, or the mix of platforms and ad formats you used. You can only optimize your campaigns if you understand their full effect over the long term.

Brand equity

This is a broad name for metrics like brand awareness, consideration, attitudes, favorability and relevance. It is also a KPI that needs qualifying. While not directly tied to sales outcomes, brand equity can have a positive impact on several things CFOs care about deeply. 

We’ve studied thousands of campaigns over the years, across dozens of industries, and we’ve found that the correlation between upper funnel brand metrics and marketing efficiency can be very strong: overall, we found that a 1-point gain in brand metrics like awareness and consideration typically drives a 1% increase in sales. Additionally, brand equity can influence your ability to retain clients, grow prospects and drive shareholder value. 

For more insights on how to sharpen your ROI strategy, download Nielsen’s 2024 Annual Marketing Report. 

The post Outcomes-minded metrics: The marketing KPIs your CFO cares about appeared first on Nielsen.

The AANHPHI audience brings $1.3 trillion buying power and is the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. population. With more media platforms available than ever before, understanding how and where AANHPI audiences are consuming content is critical for brands and businesses.  While Asian Americans spend less total time with media than any other segment of the U.S. population, they are heavy users of digital media, including streaming. For marketers figuring out how to incorporate streaming into their media plans, Asian Americans could be a key audience to focus on.

Streaming gains share with Asian American TV use

As reported in Nielsen’s most recent Diverse Intelligence Series report, Asian audiences 18 and older in the U.S. spend 17.5 hours with TV in a given week. While this is less than the 32 hours spent weekly by the general population, AANHPI audiences spend a larger percentage of their overall TV time with streaming. In January 2024, streaming made up 45.4% of Asian Americans’ TV usage, compared with 36.0% for the general U.S. population, according to Nielsen’s The Gauge^TM.  

Year over year, Asian Americans’ use of streaming grew 5.6% from January 2023. And streaming continues to gain ground. In March 2024, streaming rose to 48.2% of AANHPI audiences’ total TV time. 

The good news for advertisers is that Asian Americans are leaning into ad-supported video-on-demand (AVOD) viewing, which made up 31% of their streaming as of January 2024, compared with 27% for the total population. 

AANHPI streaming use stretches across devices

Beyond TV, AANHPI viewers spend 17 hours per week with their smartphones–which is in line with the total population. However, AANHPI audiences’ level of engagement with mobile devices represents more than a third of their total media time.

On smartphones, Asians outpace other viewers for using streaming platform apps—especially ad-supported ones. In an average month, YouTube’s mobile app reaches 85% of AANHPI adults. Sling TV is also particularly appealing with its international TV content, especially in South Asian and East Asian languages. AANHPI viewers are 37% more likely to use the app than the general population.

Incorporating streaming into your media plans

The reality is that audiences of ad-supported streaming platforms continue to grow. For example, in February 2024, YouTube captured 9.3% of TV usage, a platform-best. But not all audiences are adopting at the same pace. While age and gender have traditionally been the focus driving media buys, advanced audience segments can help marketers better plan to reach audiences that are leaning in. 

The media consumption behaviors of the AANHPI audiences don’t follow traditional norms. For example, Asians 50+ spend the most time on connected TV devices compared to other groups who tend to watch more linear TV. Given that Asian Americans are heavy streamers, advertisers can focus on engaging this audience across ad-supported streaming platforms as part of their cross-media campaigns.

Learn more about the value of streaming within a cross-media campaign in Nielsen’s 2024 Annual Marketing Report.

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Marketers need to stay on top of these trends when developing cross-channel media strategies. That’s why we created The Record—a quarterly look at how U.S. audiences spend their time with audio. An important tool for advertisers, artists, broadcasters and podcasters alike, The Record offers a unique view of time spent with ad-supported content.

The total use of audio is significant—Americans spend more than four hours with audio every day¹—and it’s important to view it from multiple lenses. Consumers give nearly 70% of their daily ad-supported audio time to radio, 20% to podcasts and the rest to streaming audio (music services) or satellite radio (select channels).

The Record tracks the share of daily time spent with ad-supported audio, which represents the most important part of the audio landscape to advertisers.

A quarterly snapshot: Edison Research Share of Ear®

This chart shows how Americans spent their time with ad-supported audio in Q1 2024. 

Explore even more audio insights with the additional data tables here.

While Americans use radio throughout their day in many different settings, most listening happens outside of the home during daylight hours. And in the car, more than 80% of ad-supported audio time goes to radio. With radio offerings that spread news, culture, music, comedy, sports talk and companionship—there are meaningful ways to reach every corner of the population.  

The following tables detail how the share of audience changes by format, age, demographic and platform for the top 15 largest-reaching AM/FM radio formats. These differentiate between the share of all radio listening and the share of streaming listening specifically (those listening to the digital streams of the stations).

Tracking radio listening by format

This chart tracks which radio formats have the highest share of listening and how that differs between total radio (over-the-air and streaming combined) and the radio streaming universe.

Explore even more audio insights with the additional data tables here. 

The share of streaming listening to each format is also dynamic when sorted by age. The formats which have a higher share of audience for streaming are spoken word, which are inclusive of News and Sports, and rock-based formats, which include Alternative and Classic Rock. Conversely, Country and Spanish-Language music formats have significantly lower streaming shares compared to total listening.

Among younger listeners (18-34), there is much more balance between total share and streaming share which makes sense as these are the most avid audio streamers.

Explore even more audio insights with the additional data tables here.

Even with new channels emerging every year, audio remains a cornerstone of the American media diet. This is particularly true in 2024 with marquee sports and news events like the summer Olympics and presidential election.  As marketers look at where to best engage with audiences, The Record sheds light on audio’s reach and impact. 

The Record provides a quarterly analysis of audio listening behaviors across the total radio universe. The charts represent average daily usage and share of listening for U.S. audiences.

Source

¹ Source: Edison Research, “Share of Ear®” Q1 2024

For even more audio data and insights, connect with our team of experts.

Contact us

Contact us

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Nielsen’s 2024 Diverse Leadership Network graduates strike the #inspireinclusion pose for International Women’s Day

Nielsen is focused on creating a better media future for all people, and that starts inside our own company, with our people. One of our leadership development programs is the Diverse Leadership Network (DLN). Through the DLN, we are investing in the growth of our future diverse leaders, who live Nielsen’s values of Inclusion, Courage and Growth, and bring fresh thinking to deliver for the clients and markets we serve.

This transformative experience is an MBA-like development program for mid-career associates, coupled with mentoring and high-profile assignments to help them grow their capabilities, raise their visibility, and expand their network at Nielsen. Participants enjoy opportunities to learn new skills to bring their best selves to work, drive inclusion throughout our business, and help lead others to do the same. They also work with cross-functional teams on stretch projects. 

The DLN graduates spent the final week of the program engaged in executive courses at Emory University Goizueta Business School, focusing on leadership, leading through change, and fostering inclusive working environments for all Nielsen employees. 

2024 Diverse Leadership Network graduates with David Kenny, Nielsen Chairman 

In the words of some of our graduates:

“Being accepted into the DLN program was an honor, but right on the heels of that feeling came uncertainty, excitement, optimism, and panic. We had just signed up for 12 months of professional (sounds good) and personal (yikes!) development… I got comfortable with being uncomfortable by learning about other business areas and collaborating with various teams. The program structure gave me a new sense of focus and direction.”

Meilyng Wigney-Burmaka, Governance leader, Nielsen

The post Nurturing future leaders: Celebrating the graduates of Nielsen’s Diverse Leadership Network program appeared first on Nielsen.

Today as always, every company must carefully study its markets, decide where to allocate its media budget, and measure the performance of its campaigns. But the time window to do those things has compressed considerably. Consumers are more volatile. Competition is stiff. New channels keep emerging, and economic conditions change faster and are harder to predict. 

That’s why it’s so crucial for marketers to use the right data to guide their spending decisions. And one set of data that often gets overlooked in media planning is competitive advertising intelligence: reliable, granular data that comes from monitoring detailed ad spend from all the major players—industry by industry, country by country, month after month. The insights can be invaluable to inform strategy, identify new opportunities and outmaneuver rivals.

Let’s review ad spending trends across the five largest product categories around the world.

Ad spending trends by category

The holiday season is the busiest spending time for nearly all of the five largest. The data supports the general consensus that if there’s a time to advertise, it’s in November and December, when consumers do the bulk of their holiday shopping. But that doesn’t mean that they don’t run any advertising the rest of the year. 

There are sales to support throughout the year, of course, as well as long-term brand building efforts. Drafting off the heights of November and December, October is proving to be an equally valuable month. This is when spending was at its highest last year for internet service providers (like Netflix, Google, and Virgin Media), professional services (like law, accounting and  IT consulting), and the auto sector. 

Of the top five categories, the two with the largest investments shifts month to month are auto and multi-product retailers. Auto sector spend tends to be at its lowest in August and, in addition to the holiday season push, has a consistent bump in March. Whereas in the retail category, spend is relatively low with spikes during the holidays and between March and May. 

Now let’s explore how these trends shift when you drill down to the country level. 

Ad spending trends by country

When digging into investment trends at the country level, we see just how much product categories differ. For example, between 2021 and 2023,  Internet Service Providers spent considerably more in Mexico and a notably smaller amount in Italy, especially when compared to other European countries. Broadcasters, on the other hand, spent more in Indonesia, and the bulk of investment for the Calling Services and Networks category was in the U.K.  

Why is it important to know when spikes and drops in ad spending tend to occur in your industry and how it shifts across countries? Because you don’t want to ignore critical time periods when your consumers are out shopping, but also because you might be able to find off-peak opportunities to stand out, perhaps in a different market, on a different channel and at a better CPM. Whether you ultimately decide to go with or against the flow, you’re better armed with a full understanding of your competitors’ activity.

What these trends mean for marketers

There are two important takeaways. One is that media markets around the world are at various stages of development, and there’s no assurance that they will converge to a single picture anytime soon. Are you investing in the right markets at the right time? Are your campaigns set up to cut through the noise or capitalize on your competitor’s inactivity? There’s no need to make fatal assumptions when these insights (and more) are available.

The second is that with the right data intelligence partner, you can dive in and learn what your local competitors’ favorite channels are or what their creative sounds like, much like we showed across category spending peaks at the country level. This can help you find holes in their positions and optimize your own media strategy.

Learn more about our ad intel solutions and how they can help you stay ahead of the competition.

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