TV Ad Impressions Grow YoY According to iSpot.tv’s 2022 TV Season Recap

Just in time for the 2022 Upfronts, iSpot.tv today released its 2022 TV season recap report, measuring the ad impressions and trends defining the 2021-22 TV season.

Aggregating data from September 6, 2021 to May 8, 2022, the report highlights the top networks, shows, genres, industries, advertisers and individual spots that left their mark in the past year, providing a glimpse into the trends that will define the year ahead.

At the top level, total TV ad impressions grew 6.8% YoY to 1.88 trillion total. Of that, 678.2 billion occurred in primetime, itself a 4.7% increase.

But digging further into the findings reveals notable trends worth following. For instance, while audiences continue to splinter into increasingly fragmented groups across disparate programs and genres on both broadcast and cable TV, sports and news programming remain important tentpoles uniting viewers.

According to the report, General News & Info led the top programming genres by share of overall TV ad impressions, at 10.83%. Pro football closely followed at 9.32%. Among individual programs, the NFL dominated, capturing 9.11% of all TV ad impressions. College football was a distant second at 3.82%. In all, six of the top 10 top programs feature sports, while two were news.

Among the four TV broadcasters, the NFL was the top program by ad impressions for all but ABC. But on cable networks, news dominated, with FOX News, CNN and MSNBC ranking first, third and fourth by ad impressions SOV. Of them, FOX News was the clear outperformer at 19.84%, while CNN boasted 9.53% and MSNBC 8.54%. Leading the individual news programs, however, is ABC’s Good Morning America with 5.82% of overall ad impression SOV.

For more insights, analysis and methodology behind these findings and more, read the full report here.