How to reach light TV viewers

Daily TV viewing times vary a lot between different users. While the top decile views on average 12 hours a day, the lowest decile watches only 20 minutes of TV per day.

Reaching the top 50% of the TV viewers is relatively easy – almost every campaign will be seen by these users that watch a lot of TV every day.

The problem starts when you want to reach the users from the lower viewing deciles – these users who do not watch a lot of TV are likely not to see most TV campaigns.

Common wisdom says that while these users watch less TV, they will use more social apps and VOD services. This means that brands need to use these channels in order to reach the low TV viewers and maximise the reach of their campaign.

Reality, however is more complex – when looking at the media behaviour of the lower TV viewing decile, we can see that not only these users watch less TV, they also use much less social and hardly view more VOD – e.g. this audience is just hard to reach because they consume less media across the board.

For example: When looking at the media consumption of all users who visited Experian.com in the past 6 months, we can see the following picture:

In other words, those in the lowest decile watch 184 minutes less linear TV and social and view only 10 more min of AVOD – leaving them with 174 min less of media time they can be reached.
So, what can we do in order to reach these users?

Sadly, there is no silver bullet here – brands need to use every shred of evidence they have in order to understand the behaviour of these users. Single-source data is uniquely positioned to help with this as you can easily isolate the part of your target audience that watches the least TV and see their behaviour in other media to understand where will it be easiest to find them.

If we continue with the Experian example, we can drill into the behaviour and media consumption of this group. By doing so, we can see that these users watch more Sky than other sales houses and specifically we can see them watching more films.
On social, we can see that out of the 64 min per day, 32 min are spent on FB, 9 min on Tiktok and 8 min on Instagram.

On the AVOD side, 39 out of the 47 minutes are spent on YouTube and the rest are spent on ITVX (5 min) and All4 (3 min)