Nielsen Reports Latest Shifts

Retail Media Networks (RMNs) have rocked the industry by shooting up to $62 billion this year based on current run rates. They were not being paid much attention as a category prior to 2023, when we all discovered that they were already bringing in over $40B that year. eMarketer projects them to be $107B by 2027. The great advantage of RMNs as advertising media is that they have built-in sales effect measurement.

Here’s a chart provided by Nielsen which shows the relative reach sizes of a number of the major RMNs:

The value of an RMN to the buy side is that purchase data is automatically available relative to specific campaigns, and IDs can be clustered to the client’s segments by the more sophisticated players. Amazon is very sophisticated and reports that the provision of “shopability” (interactivity) adds 28% to buy rate, addressability adds 35%, new to brand purchasers increase 59%, and off-Amazon sales increase 81%.

Just a few months ago in December I reported a Nielsen survey which found that 63% subscribe to SVOD in order to watch old TV shows and movies, and things are moving so fast that now Nielsen Gracenote reports that three quarters of the TV shows and movies on FAST channels were made since 2010 – and FAST channels with their on-average somewhat more recent content are growing faster than SVOD. The three leading FAST services are Tubi, The Roku Channel, and Pluto.

FAST channels solve a problem that viewers complain about in using SVOD (not to mention having to pay) - they also have to think about what to watch on SVOD - whereas in FAST as in linear they can just turn on the set and watch what’s on and then switch around if they don’t get hooked on what they see. That old way of using TV, which we took for granted, is now recognized for its ease.

The trade press, every year before the Upfronts, interviews leading media investment decision makers, and this year, one of the main themes has been that linear TV is still a crucial part of the media plan because, without it, massive reach is impossible. And a big part of broadcast TV’s reach story is about sports.

Nielsen measures all live sports events nationally and locally across broadcast, cable, streaming, in homes and out of home, and is credited by the buy side for its exact reporting of sports start and end times, which is often not perfectly handled by companies using only big data without an area probability sample large panel, streaming meter, and watermarks. In this chart, Nielsen shows that sports on cable is relatively stable from quarter to quarter, compared to broadcast, which varies considerably quarter to quarter because of tentpole events not carried on cable.

“Sports accounted for 26.4% of all broadcast viewing time in the third quarter of 2024 (in large part because of the Olympics and the start of the NFL season). By comparison, sports are a much steadier driver of viewing on cable, averaging an 8.8% share of viewing on the platform during a 12-month period (and only 1 point higher in the second quarter of 2024 when March Madness and the NBA Finals were on).

With the current broadcast-heavy contracts for the NFL and NBA set to expire in 2033 and 2036, respectively, broadcast TV appears to be on solid ground.”

— Nielsen’s Guide to cross-media and audience insights for the 2025-2026 Upfronts/NewFronts Planning Season

The team at datafuelX developed a paper focusing on the breakdown of specific types of sports viewing by ethnicity. The paper noted that Nielsen is in a unique position with regard to measurement and reporting of ethnic viewing patterns. Due to privacy concerns, the main suppliers of big data ethnicity until now have been Experian and Acxiom, and they have stopped including ethnicity variables due to various state privacy laws. Nielsen’s core data on ethnic groups is based on opted-in panelists volunteering that data, and data science powered by AI enables Nielsen to make extremely accurate estimates of ethnicity on the 135 million people in its panel + big data MRC Accredited currency.

Here are a few highlights of the paper from DfX and Nielsen:

• Football has a 46.4% share of total sports viewing in the US, followed by basketball with 15.4%, and the Olympics with 6.1% (the paper reports ten types).
• For brand campaigns aimed at Spanish Dominant and Hispanic consumers, note that these two groups massively over-index on soccer with indices of 937 and 555, respectively, and Spanish Dominant also have the highest index for baseball of all ethnic groups (116).
• Asians have the highest index for tennis (196) and also the highest index for the Olympics (129).
• Blacks have the highest index for basketball (172) and also slightly over-index for tennis (107).
• Whites over-index on golf (121), motor sports (120), hockey (114), and baseball (109).

Given the almost universal appeal of sports and the splintering of all other forms of media information and entertainment, it seems likely that women’s sports is going to become an important category of its own in the near future, and eventually, there will be a local market for youth sports.

Shoppable advertising, FAST, and sports are three of the most important morphing areas convulsing the rapidly changing mediasphere. 2025 will be a year of many more changes and we will continue to make best efforts to provide early keys to the big picture for you.

Posted at MediaVillage through the Thought Leadership self-publishing platform.

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The opinions expressed here are the author's views and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillage.org/MyersBizNet.