TV Ads Reach Smart TV Owners

To round off this week’s series on smart entertainment, today’s chart looks at the reach TV ads have among owners of smart TV sets.

Watching on a smart TV gives viewers the chance to choose ad-free services like Netflix directly through their sets, and avoid channels with ads. By putting a spotlight on how Smart TV Owners discover brands, we can test how impactful TV ads are to an audience with the option to avoid them.

TV ads continue to make an impact with Smart TV Owners as they are the most popular form of brand discovery overall. As it stands, owning a smart TV is more likely to increase exposure to TV ads, rather than directing viewers onto ad-free platforms. As Thursday’s chart showed, smart TV sets are just one part of a fragmenting media landscape, with multi-device viewership on the scene.

TV may not be the big-screen family viewing it once was, but it now gives more chances to tailor advertising to viewer interests and viewing history – something the Interactive Advertising Bureau have explored with their new guidelines for OTT platforms. While ads seen on TV are unlikely to ever be as precisely targeted as those online, we can see that owners of smart TVs are used to discovering brands through targeted recommendations, as they are 33% more likely to discover brands through personalized purchase recommendations online.

With TV ads still proving to be a robust way of reaching viewers on live TV and on-demand, perhaps we shouldn’t be writing the obituary for TV ads just yet.

Smart TV Owners are defined as internet users aged 16-64 who personally own a smart TV.