Data
CBS Defends TV, and Its Own Power, With Data on Viewers’ Purchases
Story Highlights
On the eve of Upfront Week, the annual ritual in which the broadcast nets walk advertisers through their fall schedules, CBS is prepping a sales pitch designed to demonstrate its superiority in reaching consumers of nearly every major product category.
Using data from Nielsen and Rentrak that effectively matches TV deliveries to purchasing behavior, CBS says it can show how ratings leaders like “The Big Bang Theory,” “NCIS” and “NCIS: New Orleans” reach more consumers of everything from luxury automobiles to Happy Meals than any series on ABC, NBC and Fox.
“We can now demonstrate to our clients how many consumers of their products and services watched a given show,” said CBS chief research officer Dave Poltrack. “The new analytics are really expanding the level of sophistication with which we can define the audience.”
The data continues CBS’s long effort to look past traditional TV metrics such as age and gender to get at viewers’ purchasing behavior, but may also serve to reinforce TV’s power as the upfronts begin.
While CBS is not making specific client data public — Mr. Poltrack won’t disclose, for instance, how many people in the market for a new Lexus watched last week’s “NCIS” — the network did provide a read-through of its performance across all key ad categories. For example, CBS says it enjoys a huge advantage over its rivals in terms of its deliveries of viewers interested in financial services, besting ABC by a 50% margin, NBC by 55% and Fox by 153%.
Mr. Poltrack said CBS delivers more consumers of cars, movies, financial services, and leads the pack as well in the retail, restaurant and travel categories.
Naturally, a good deal of CBS’s ability to connect with consumers has to do with its steroidal prime-time reach. Season-to-date, the network is averaging 11.4 million nightly viewers, or 2.54 million more than NBC (8.83 million). CBS’s overall deliveries are 31% higher than ABC’s (7.9 million) and 48% bigger than Fox’s (5.95 million).
