Among the wave of change sweeping advertising practices, marketers are pressuring linear TV sellers to price and package inventory more like impression-based media of the internet. Notably, “audience-based buying” is an emerging media-buying strategy for TV to advance beyond the standard age/gender targeting dimensions that have dominated linear for decades and instead price and plan TV buys according to characteristics that more closely align to the consumer characteristics marketers are looking for.
Standard Media Index recently partnered with Comscore to enable eCPM based pricing according to such advanced audience attributes. Below, for example, are how leading cable and broadcast networks compare on eCPMs adjusted by their respective audience compositions for Households with Children, and those who visited a PetSmart or Ritz Carlton respectively in the past 90 days.
Source: SMI/Comscore Advanced Audiences Pricing Suite
Fox and NBC show up as the most expensive for all three of these rankings, but the ordering of the rest of the networks changes according to which advanced audiences are being targeted. The scale of the CPM changes considerably, where reaching visitors to the luxury hotel chain commands a high premium because there are fewer of those people in the general population. But for marketers who know their acquisition costs or with niche buyer segments, this kind of advanced audience pricing can help identify strategic opportunities in the linear TV landscape that have not been so apparent in the past.
