- September 29, 2015

The Rise of the Super Viewer and Why Advertisers Should Care

Consumers today benefit from new technologies that have dramatically changed how we watch TV ... or at this point, video in general. Yet, through the rapid adoption of new viewing options like binge-watching and time shifted viewing, a new type of consumer has risen: the Super Viewer. Instead of one platform competing with another for attention and time, Super Viewers actually consume more content throughout the day across multiple devices versus single platform users.

How Do Super Viewers’ Consumption Habits Differ?
Super Viewers are highly-engaged multi-platform consumers who crave specific content that appeals to their interests, hobbies or passions all throughout the day, no matter the time or device. This trend is most often observed across cable networks that create lifestyle or interest-based content around particular categories like cooking, finance, news and sports.

Because Super Viewers access content across TV and digital, we’ve seen that cable networks benefit from up to a 50 percent lift in their total audience reach when they account for the content consumption that’s also happening on their digital properties.

A Look at Super Viewers of Sports and News Content
To examine this change in consumer behavior, we analyzed a handful of cable networks that create interest-based content such as news, business or sports and observed that on average, the Super Viewer drives 2x the total consumption of the total audience.

Among this multi-platform audience, we can see that Super Viewers in certain categories like sports and news account for more than 42 percent and 27 percent of total time spent on TV and digital platforms, respectively.

Why Advertisers Should Care

For advertisers to capitalize on this new viewing phenomenon, they should look at cable networks with a niche audience reach that can maximize the frequency of their brand messaging. By placing highly contextual or sequential messages on the right platforms at the best time of day, advertisers can optimize their cross-platform media strategies to leverage a networks’ entire ecosystem on TV and digital.

Find out more about Super Viewers during our Advertising Week Panel here: http://www.advertisingweek.com/calendar/-comscore-seminar-2015-09-30-1330