TV Ad Reach, Minutes, Airings Show Growth In 2023 As Industry Battled Programming Headwind
Data from iSpot shows slight increases for TV ad impressions, ad minutes, airings, to counteract reduced spend year-over-year
TV measurement company iSpot.tv revealed its new 2023 TV transparency report, highlighting key data takeaways from the last year, across all of TV advertising. As TV becomes increasingly fragmented across linear and streaming, iSpot believes this level of transparency is crucial for advertisers to understand where audiences are migrating, where ad reach value can be located and, in a more complete fashion, how the ad market is performing overall.
Within the report, iSpot found that household TV ad impressions were up 1.8% year-over-year in 2023; some of which is attributable to networks airing more ads for more minutes (both ad airings and minutes were up 2.2% year-over-year, respectively). The volume of ads across TV also helped fuel an incredible number of unique creatives in 2023, as over 647,000 ads, from 35,200 advertisers appeared across TV.
iSpot’s report shows how a growing Spanish-speaking population in the U.S. impacted TV advertising as well. Spanish-language TV ad impressions grew by 19% year-over-year, and 27% more brands aired Spanish-language ads than they had in 2022. Networks like Univision, Telemundo and UniMas all saw ad impressions growth by 18% or more vs. 2022, too.
With less scripted programming in 2023 due to entertainment work stoppages, there was also an assumption that reality TV would reap the benefits. Yet, iSpot found that reality TV actually delivered 5.9% fewer TV ad impressions year-over-year. Instead, it was sports programming (+6.9% more ad impressions) and news (+4.2%) that truly filled the void for both networks and advertisers throughout the year.
iSpot kicked off 2024 with the launch of its new Streaming Measurement dashboard which provides an answer to TV’s unified needs, and puts new standards in place to enable better reach across screens, greater ad spend efficiency and more business outcomes for the buy- and sell-side. In doing so, iSpot has created a solid foundation for streaming-first currencies of the future.
These capabilities are built on top of the iSpot Unified Measurement platform, which saw major advancements in 2023 — including serving as the default provider for incremental measurement for The Trade Desk, new integrations with YouTube and expansion with Amazon — bringing the number of direct integrations to over 400.
For the full scope of what happened on TV in 2023, download iSpot’s TV Transparency report today.
