John Casillo, an analyst at TVREV adds, “Sports betting is seasonally-focused, with a specific emphasis on the fall and winter for the NFL.”

Via Inscape, Vizio’s TV data product with glass-level insights from a panel of more than 19 million active and opted-in smart TVs. Data is linear, live TV only and includes all episode types (new and reruns). Rankings are by percent share duration (i.e., time spent watching).

The NFL's opening weekend secured the top spot in our watch-time ranking for Sept. 5-11. Across Thursday and Sunday broadcasts on NBC, CBS and Fox, the league accounted for 7.16% of minutes watched.

Other platforms are also leveraging ACR data, with Roku incorporating it into its dynamic linear ads product. Vizio in May unveiled an advertising analytics platform with Inscape ACR, which Vizio says grabs data from 20 million connected TVs.

Boy, that escalated quickly. The onset of the NFL season had both an immediate and notable impact on automotive TV advertising during its first week, iSpot.tv data shows..

Every weekday we bring you the Ad Age/iSpot Hot Spots, new commercials tracked by iSpot.tv, the always-on TV ad measurement and attribution company. (Scroll down to watch them all.)

A few highlights: Tarama Blue, a Charles Schwab financial consultant, speaks metaphorically about market turbulence. FanDuel hypes its Same Game Parlay offer in time for tonight’s Chargers vs. Chiefs NFL game. And a man who likes to smell his own beard shares that creepy personal detail with improbably patient “Jake from State Farm.”

Via iSpot.tv, the always-on TV ad measurement and attribution company. Rankings are by TV ad impressions, for new episodes only.

Week one of the NFL’s regular season delivered 16.69% of TV ad impressions to fly to the No. 1 spot in our ranking. Between NFL and college games, football accounted for nearly 27% of TV ad impressions on the week.

And back in December, iSpot.tv struck an agreement with LG Ads to tap into ACR data from more than 20 million LG smart TVs.

Looking at all NFL-related linear TV programming over that period, the first week posted $413.0 million in advertising revenue -- 3% higher than the total of $401.3 million in 2021, according to iSpot.tv estimates.

NBC came in at $125.6 million, followed by CBS at $83.2 million; Fox at $77.4 million; ABC at $53.9 million; ESPN at $36.9 million; ESPN2 at $9.2 million; NFL Network at $1.2 million; NBCUniversal’s Universo at $18.1 million; and ESPN Deportes at $7.5 million.

National TV Sports Betting Ad Spend: As expected, NFL games dominate national TV spending with sports betting advertisers. In analyzing iSpot data, John Casillo points out in 2021, 41.7% of TV ad impressions — and 81% of estimated national TV ad spend — for sports betting brands were allocated toward the NFL.

For the first week of the 2022 NFL season estimated sports betting ads accounted for 4.80% of NFL TV ad impressions and $24 million in ad spend. These figures are comparable with Week 1 of 2021 (4.83% ad impressions and $23.8 million in ad spend). For week 1 of 2022, FanDuel led in ad spend at $13.8 million, followed by DraftKings ($5.4 million), BetMGM ($2.6 million) and Caesars ($2.2 million).

You’ll find insights from TVREV Thought Leaders Circle members at InnovidXP, VIZIO, IRIS.TV, SpringServe/Magnite and Mediaocean, with an additional deep dive, including maps, from MadHive.

This summer, it announced that “companies including Disney, Fox/Tubi, LG Ads Solutions, NBCUniversal, Paramount, VIZIO and Warner Bros. Discovery have committed to working at an industry level with agencies, advertisers, and standards-setting bodies” on a measurement framework that ensures ads are only counted when delivered to screens known to be on that have viewers in front of them.

FASTs offered by smart TV and device OEMs embedded in interfaces such as Samsung TV Plus, Vizio WatchFree+, LG Channels, The Roku Channel, and Amazon’s Freevee and; and single publisher apps such as Crackle, along with wide-range content providers that populate linear and on-demand channels for others.

Vizio of late has doubled down on improving its SmartCast streaming platform and its WatchFree+ service. WatchFree+ now ranks as the number two free ad-supported app on SmartCast – behind YouTube – according to Vizio’s chief revenue and strategic growth officer Mike O’Donnell.

“We’ve been able to add a lot of different touchpoints,” O’Donnell said at the Piper Sandler Grwoth Frontiers investor conference on Wednesday. “Whether that be the button on the remote, the app itself, the promotional tools and additional custom carousels…to make our consumers aware of what’s available.”

CTV is a wholly unique environment. It’s a TV environment. So it must be measured with practices that take into account the uniqueness of the TV reality.

Yet despite these fundamental differences, many are still trying to apply the same technology used to measure mobile/computer ad viewability to the TV space. Forgive the cliche, but that’s the classic definition of forcing a square peg into a round hole.

The record points to that being no empty threat. The former comedian and founder-CEO of Entertainment Studios, whose properties include The Weather Channel, Justice Central, Comedy TV and The Grio streaming and digital platform, is also known for his $10 billion 2021 discrimination lawsuit against McDonald’s Corp. He’s also sued measurement giant Nielsen twice over billing and performance disputes since 2020.

Every weekday we bring you the Ad Age/iSpot Hot Spots, new commercials tracked by iSpot.tv, the always-on TV ad measurement and attribution company. (Scroll down to watch them all.)
A few highlights: Heinz promotes No Sugar Added Heinz Tomato Ketchup in an animated musical spot about “adulting.” Kia promotes the Telluride X-Pro in an epic spot with a visual punchline about the true nature of the sky and clouds. And Comcast says, “Through Project UP, Comcast is committing $1 billion to open doors for the next generation, so they can build a future of unlimited possibilities.”

It follows a joint study with TV ad measurement company iSpot that quantifies inflated CTV ad delivery counts. It revealed that, on average, 8-10% of streaming impressions play when the TV is shut off, primarily through ancillary devices.

​​Unicorn as of: May 2022
Total funding to date: $383 million, according to PitchBook
Most recent valuation: $1 billion

Ten-year-old iSpot is the newest adtech startup to enter the unicorn club. Its audience measurement tools let marketers manage their TV and streaming ad investments.

TV manufacturers, including Samsung, LG and Vizio, have small but booming ad businesses built on the same premise. Their bread and butter is advertisers like Disney, Amazon and Netflix, who will pay to get ahead of the streaming bottleneck that occurs when users have time and space to choose what they want to see but don’t know what they want to watch.

Smart TV’s increased usage in Q2 contrasts with the fact that smart TV sales have been hampered by supply-chain issues. Smart TV maker Vizio, for example, reported hardware sales had flatted from Q1 2022 to Q2 2022.

Smart TVs surpassing connected TV devices — i.e. TVs that use a CTV device like a Roku streaming stick or Apple TV puck to access streaming services — doesn’t mean that smart TV platform owners like Samsung and Vizio have overtaken CTV platform owners like Roku and Amazon for viewership share, however. In fact, Roku’s and Amazon’s CTV platforms — which are built into some smart TVs — still combine to account for more than a third of global streaming watch time in Q2.