
Home >> Insights >> Content Hub >> Connected TV Drives Younger Audiences: 20% of German CTV users are exclusively reached through this channel
The cross-media measurement study also examined the effect of integrating CTV ads for five large brands, including McDonald’s, which ran video campaigns over eight weeks in late 2021. Viewers taking part in the survey installed our proprietary Automatic Content Recognition software, which analyzed what was playing on their TVs over the course of the study.
Five video campaigns were delivered in parallel via CTV and linear TV. On average, the campaigns ran for eight weeks. Reach was measured using the Beatgrid Cross-media Audience Solution, which uses single-source audio fingerprinting to uniquely identify which spots were seen by the target audience via which channel.
German brand advertisers wanting to be at the avant-garde of cross-media advertising tendencies -by reaching younger audiences- will have to start diversifying their cross-platform campaigns by introducing CTV in their media mix (regardless of what their products or services are).
After the above Beatgrid study, we can determine that, in today’s world, and especially when wanting to reach younger segments, CTV presents a greater opportunity than Linear TV, as this channel’s incrementality is continuously peaking. It has been proven that cross-channel advertising campaigns including CTV also allow for better efficiency controls with enhanced campaign frequency management, ultimately contributing to accurately reaching the right viewers, and preventing, ad fatigue with the brand message.
“We got more bang for our buck than if we had invested the same budget in linear TV alone, and were thus able to reach more people in our target group. This disproportionately affects the young target group, which is increasingly difficult to reach with linear TV,” says Georg Sladek, head of brand marketing at Mobile.de, the leading car sales platform in Germany.
Beatgrid’s findings are yet another indicator that advertisers that depend exclusively on Linear TV are overlooking a huge opportunity to engage with the “inaccessible” 18 to 34 age segment -and younger-, as 25% of 14 to 29s and 22% of 30 to 39s, that were surveyed, said they no longer consume Linear TV on a daily basis.
The shift in viewing behavior comes as more Germans enjoy TV content via streaming services and devices, validating a tendency -though this time localized- that had already been identified after conducting +400 cross-platform measurement studies in different regions. CTV is here to stay, and brand advertisers, globally, will have to acknowledge the incremental value of investing their media budgets in Connected TV if they want to reach the said younger segments.
Furthermore, results also revealed that German viewers under 40 were twice as likely to exclusively stream their favorite shows vs watching them through linear channels. In fact, 63% of those who exclusively watched through CTV were 39 and under, backing the growing importance of Connected TV, and how it reaches new and emerging consumer audiences, namely Millennials and Gen Zs; as opposed to 36% of the same age group being exclusively reached on Linear TV.
“It’s great to see that this study has validated cross-media single-source measurement as a groundbreaking component to understanding CTV’s exclusive reach in an increasingly fragmented and complex advertising landscape,” adds Daniel Tjondronegoro, co-founder of Beatgrid, a leading cross-media audience measurement company. “Knowing how a CTV campaign compares to linear TV helps advertisers plan accurately.”
Subscribe to our newsletter to learn about the latest news and industry trends.