Expand reach of linear TV campaigns with Amazon Streaming TV ads

April 12, 2021 | By: Maggie Zhang, Head of Measurement Success

Behind the Streams: In this blog series, we’ll help you to gain insights and learn about the latest trends that are shaping streaming TV advertising.

In two years’ time, non-pay-TV households in the US will surpass pay-TV households,1 with more viewers turning to streaming. That means advertisers must rethink their media strategies, beyond traditional pay TV, to engage this next generation of viewers who cannot be reached with linear TV campaigns.

Amazon Ads conducted an analysis across Amazon Streaming TV ad campaigns in 2020 using industry-recognized third-party measurement to help brands understand how streaming TV ads can complement their linear TV campaigns. In this post, we will discuss our findings around the benefits of the Amazon Streaming TV ads audience.

Here’s how Amazon Streaming TV ads can help brands reach new audiences

Benefit #1: Amazon Streaming TV ads deliver incremental reach and unique audiences to linear TV campaigns.

In an earlier blog post, “What is incremental reach, and why should you care?," we defined incremental reach as the unique audience a streaming TV ad campaign engages, in addition to the audience reached by a brand’s linear TV campaign. In our study, we found that Amazon Streaming TV ad campaigns delivered an average of 6.5% incremental reach to a brand’s linear TV campaign reach. That means if you had a campaign that engaged 100MM viewers on linear TV, you could reach an incremental 6.5MM viewers if you added Amazon Streaming TV ads to your media mix.

Figure 01: Amazon’s ad-supported streaming TV deliver an average of 6.5% incremental reach to an advertiser’s linear TV campaign reach.

To help further contextualize this incremental reach, we also found that three-quarters (74%) of the audience engaged by Streaming TV ad campaigns were exclusive to Amazon―meaning, they were not reached by the advertisers' linear TV campaigns.

Figure 02: On average, 74% of the audience reached by Amazon Streaming TV ads is not reached by an advertiser’s linear TV campaign.

Benefit #2 Amazon Streaming TV ads audience consists of a higher proportion of light TV viewers than linear TV campaigns.

As TV viewing behaviors continue to shift to streaming, advertisers are eager to engage non-linear TV viewers and light-linear TV viewers that are hard to reach with traditional TV campaigns. Amazon Streaming TV ads have proven to be an effective and reliable avenue for advertisers to engage with these viewers. We found that nearly half (43%) of the audiences reached by our Streaming TV ads were light TV viewers, 6x more than linear TV campaigns (7%). With a higher concentration of this audience, our Streaming TV ads on average delivered 78% incremental reach of light TV viewers.

Figure 03: On average, 43% of the audiences reached by Amazon Streaming TV ad campaigns are light TV viewers, 6x more than linear TV campaigns.

Benefit #3 Amazon Streaming TV ads help provide great viewing experiences by delivering lighter frequency than linear TV campaigns.

One of the biggest challenges today for advertisers is frequency management. Frequency indicates the number of times viewers are exposed to an advertiser’s message throughout a campaign, making it an important metric to the customer viewing experience. We found that linear TV delivered an average campaign frequency between 30 and 64 to heavy TV viewers. On the other hand, Amazon Streaming TV ad campaigns delivered an average frequency of 4.4―less than half of the average linear TV campaign frequency of 9.5.

Figure 04: Amazon Streaming TV ads deliver an average campaign frequency of 4.4, less than half of the average linear TV campaign frequency of 9.5.

What’s next?

We are continuing to expand our reach each day to new and unique audiences. We are also working hard to help advertisers reach the most relevant audiences and drive a full-funnel impact across our Amazon advertising solutions. We’ll continue to share more insights into how Amazon Streaming TV ads are helping brands achieve greater brand lift and drive consideration beyond reach.

Want to learn more about Amazon Streaming TV ads? Check out our video advertising page.

1https://chart-na1.emarketer.com/245043/us-pay-tv-vs-non-pay-tv-households-2017-2025-millions