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Navigating media’s complexity with audience planning

5 minute read | January 2025

Today’s media landscape is complex. Americans continue to spend a significant amount of time with media, devoting 70 hours a week (or 10 hours a day) across all devices in the first quarter of 2024. But with audiences spreading their time across linear TV, CTV, radio, smartphones, tablets and computers, how can advertisers and media companies navigate this complexity as they once again head into the 2025 planning season? 

The answer is simple—now and forever—follow the audience. But actually doing so can have its challenges. As audiences spread across devices and platforms, there’s no one channel brands should focus on, and each channel has its own metrics for success. 

To give the industry a holistic look at what audiences are watching through the television screen, Nielsen developed The Gauge™, a monthly snapshot of total broadcast, cable and streaming consumption. While this look at total U.S. viewing is helpful, brands need to understand how their unique audience spends their time. 

Measurement of real people amplified by large datasets is critical to check assumptions and lead with the facts. Nielsen’s recently accredited Big Data + Panel measurement enables cross-platform advanced audience segmentation at scale.

That’s great news for advertisers who can discover deeper audience insights and begin planning true cross-media campaigns to connect with their customers and prospects.

Embracing people-first media planning

For years, digital channels like search, social, or retail media have offered advertisers sophisticated data-driven capabilities (like targeting and advanced segmentation, first-party data onboarding, direct activations, or biddable private marketplaces) to make the most of their media budgets. Today, the same capabilities are available on TV, and it’s a game-changer.

Brands can put people first and capitalize on their customer data (either their own first-party data or trusted second- or third-party data) to build TV audiences that are not simply tangential but highly relevant to their business.

Let’s illustrate how crucial the distinction can be with a case study.

Checking your assumptions

Say a diaper brand wants to determine how much of its budget to allocate to streaming in 2025. 

In the past, brands in this category would likely turn to age and gender as the primary levers to make planning decisions, focusing on reaching women 18-44. This could lead them to buying national TV ads during daytime soaps (because women are the dominant audience), during morning news shows (because babies wake up early), and in primetime to build scale.

One step closer would be to build a plan to reach women 18-44 with at least one child under two years of age. As we saw in our On Target Report, these New Moms are heavy streamers, spending an even larger share of their TV time with these services than women 18-44. In fact, in September 2024, New Moms spent 71% of their total TV time with streaming and less on everything else, as figure 1 illustrates. The company could do well to allocate three-quarters of its TV budget to children’s programming across key streaming platforms, right?

As it turns out, when we onboarded existing buyers of a diaper brand with data provided by OpenAP and matched them to the 200MM+ profiles in the Nielsen identity graph to see how they split their TV time, we realized that this particular audience spent a significantly smaller share of their time streaming (38%) than women 18-44, with or without children under 2, and a lot more time with linear TV (25% with broadcast and 29% with cable). Dads buy diapers too, after all, as do friends and grandparents.

Getting the right mix for the business

This isn’t an isolated case. In today’s highly fragmented media landscape, age and gender remain foundational, but with the right tools and insights, media planners can let their customer data do the talking and build personalized, more effective ad campaigns that not only resonate but actively drive business outcomes.

But what business outcome, exactly? If the diaper brand’s objective is to acquire new customers and grab market share from its main competitors, investing the bulk of its TV budget with carefully-selected streaming media partners would be a wise move. But if its objective is to encourage repeat buying from existing customers, a more balanced media mix between broadcast, cable and streaming would be the way to go.
Advanced audiences (like New Moms or the OpenAP Diaper Brand Buyers) can be incredibly helpful to minimize ad waste and improve campaign ROI, but the real breakthrough is that they allow advertisers to match their campaigns to the company’s business objectives.

A new era of data collaboration

While advertisers and their agencies are responsible for gathering relevant customer data and assembling target segments that make sense to their business, they can’t decide where to allocate their media budget if they don’t know how those segments overlap with what audiences media sellers have to offer.

What does that mean for media companies in 2025 and beyond? The onus is on them to understand their broadcast, cable and streaming audiences at a much more granular level than when age and gender ruled the day; help potential clients evaluate whether those new audiences are a good match for their target customers; make audience activation as seamless as possible on their platforms; and standardize measurement to allow advertisers to monitor campaign performance across media.
At Nielsen, we anticipate that data collaboration will be key for media buyers and sellers this year. Check out our newly released 2025 planning guide for all the cross-media and audience insights you’ll need to get the most of this year’s negotiations.

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