Netflix has a viewership and programme ‘tune-in’ problem, with reports of losses of over 50% of its viewership on top shows season to season.
The problem is fixable. One of the most efficient solves would be to speak to Netflix subscribers when they’re watching linear TV.
The paradox of choice on TV today is enormous. It’s absolutely impossible for any TV viewer today to know everything that’s available that they might want to watch.
When it comes to TV series, we all know that if you haven’t seen season one, you are not going to watch season two. The same for missing season two and not watching season three, and so on.
Audience continuity
Thus, if you want to develop audience continuity and growth season over season, you have to be smart and methodical. The best way to do that is to reach viewers, segmented by interests and previous behaviours, when they are already watching TV, and let them know about the upcoming season of the great series they watched previously.
Programme promotion advertising — ‘tune-in’ advertising — has been around for many decades and is incredibly effective. Why? Because nothing sells TV like TV.
OK, assuming that Netflix buys in to the fact that it should leverage TV ads to drive viewership, why should it even consider trying to reach them on linear TV? Netflix is streamed. Shouldn’t it first and foremost promote shows on its own air?
Yes, but ad spots on its own service are few, and can drive super-high CPMs from others. So using Netflix’s own spots is very expensive.
Linear TV reaches Netflix viewers
How about buying ads on other streaming services or on connected TVs? Once again, these spots can work well, but they are super expensive. And, since Netflix is competitive in some ways with other services, you can be certain that Netflix will have to pay top dollar.
Linear TV reaches the vast majority of Netflix subscribers daily, and can deliver more than 40 ads to those subscribers each and every day.
Yes, eMarketer tells us that Netflix subscribers watch 2.5 hours of linear TV on average daily in the U.S.
Critically, not only are many tens of millions of subscribers available weekly, but they can be targeted efficiently in heavily concentrated cohorts on the basis of content, time of day or granular previous viewing behaviours through data-driven linear TV ad platforms.
So Netflix could be measuring performance at the spot and person level, understanding exactly how many of its subscribers it was reaching, and whether or not they then watched a new show or season.
This can all be measured on a ‘cost per converted viewer’ (CPCV) basis, something many TV company marketers do on a daily basis for their own tune-in ads.
Ad viewing time is on linear TV
Most importantly, linear TV ads — even data-driven targeted ads — cost a fraction of targeted ads in premium streaming or on smart TVs, typically one-third of the cost at the strategic target level. Steaming ads on TV cannot match the CPCV of linear when the target audience is in the many millions daily.
Of course, for Netflix to leverage linear ads — other than super-expensive brand ads on top show in prime time — would be cultural anathema.
Its story is that ‘old TV’ is dead and only ‘new TV’ matters, even though Nielsen Gauge demonstrates that 50% of all TV viewing time in the US is still on linear — and, almost 85% of ad viewing time is still on linear, since so much streaming viewing is on ad-free or ad-light services.
What do you think? Should Netflix look to its old grandma, linear TV, to help solve its viewership problem?
