From TVE’s Monopoly to Hyperfragmentation in the Digital Age

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What do I want to watch today?

It seems incredible to us now, but it was only 35 years ago that we had just two national channels and a few regional ones to watch on TV in Spain. Today, when we sit down in front of the TV, the biggest dilemma we face is choosing what to watch from among the millions of options that Smart TV offers us.

While the amount of time spent watching traditional (live) television has been declining year after year—reaching 187 minutes this past year—the average time spent choosing content continues to rise. We’ve gone from consuming a single piece of content to experiencing decision fatigue—that mental exhaustion we feel when faced with too many options—and the paradox of choice, meaning that the more alternatives we have, the less satisfied we are with what we choose.

The Coverage Dilemma

Back then, television was the heart of the home, the undisputed queen of entertainment. With a single commercial spot on shows like the legendary “Un, dos, tres …,” you could reach more than 20 million viewers and achieve audience shares of over 80%.

In 1990, the private television networks Antena 3 and Telecinco began broadcasting, and Canal+ also launched its pay-TV model: exclusive content, sports, and movies without commercial breaks. All of this led to greater diversity in entertainment and attracted different audience segments. It marked the beginning of the battle for viewership share.

Since 2015, the range of television programming has expanded to the point where it is now practically overwhelming, thanks to the explosion of digital platforms, whether subscription-based (Netflix) or free (Pluto).

This diversification of content, combined with the shift in consumption patterns—where users choose what they want to watch and when they want to watch it—has substantially altered television’s ability to generate maximum reach in the shortest amount of time. And we’re beginning to kill off traditional television while elevating OTT services to the pinnacle of trendiness.

But we soon realized that consumption patterns don’t change, that traditional television is a “one-to-many” medium and digital television is “one-to-screen, ” and that traditional television remains the only option capable of reaching more than three million viewers with a single commercial and reaching 54% of the population within one or two days.

That said, we’re committed to analyzing the cost per point of efficient coverage—the point at which it pays to shift part of the budget from traditional television to connected TV—in order to reach this diffuse and ill-defined segment that no tool can clearly quantify, but whose name we all know: Low TV Viewers—that is, those who no longer watch or almost never watch traditional television.

And we go crazy analyzing incremental reach, exclusive reach, and total reach. Of course, we do this without a market-wide measurement tool that can measure print and digital media on an equal footing and provide solid data on overall reach.

The Benefits of Data

That said, what connected TV can offer us is something the big screen has never provided: the ability to segment and target our campaigns to the specific audience we want to reach, even allowing us—through HbbTV—to deliver digital advertising within linear content.

Segmentation options are becoming increasingly sophisticated. From classic sociodemographic and geographic segmentation to solutions for targeting incremental reach among “non-viewers” or “low TV viewers.”

Thanks to first-party data from the Smart TVs themselves, we have access to a wealth of browsing data: viewing history, interactions with apps, etc. If we add third-party data, we can cross-reference it with valuable information such as purchase intent, creating clusters based on interests and viewing habits. And through AI, we can even deliver real-time contextual ads on connected TVs by integrating contextual advertising onto the big screen.

Another new feature recently introduced by Mediaset is “Meteo Targeting,” which allows us to deliver personalized messages to different audiences based on weather conditions, opening up significant opportunities for pharmaceutical products, food, apparel, tourism, and other industries.

United, they will never be defeated

The truth is that when we sit down in front of the TV, we decide what content we want to watch without thinking about whether it’s traditional TV, on-demand, a Prime Video series, or even a Mediaset original series that we’re watching through our Netflix subscription. We’re now in a race to keep users on the platform for as long as possible, whether with our own content or third-party content.

Advertisers and agencies must understand this new audiovisual landscape and learn to work with “hybrid television” as we consume it today—a medium that is not only far from dead but is gaining more followers year after year and is now capable of reaching nearly 99.9% of the population.

Depending on our product type, objectives, and budget, we will choose one approach to television over another. If we need broad reach, we will prioritize traditional television; however, if we need niche targeting—from ZIP codes to a specific type of app or TV—we will choose connected TV.

In fact, compared to online video on mobile devices, tablets, or computers, the big-screen effect influences other metrics that are currently being developed and serve to validate the effectiveness of the big screen. We’re referring to the attention metric, which is becoming a key tool for measuring the effectiveness of advertising. This metric goes beyond impressions and clicks, measuring the duration and intensity with which an individual interacts with an ad. Atresmedia has introduced CPM-a (Cost per Thousand Attention Impressions), which enhances the traditional CPM metric with other KPIs such as attention.

This complementary nature of television viewing also applies to different demographic segments: while older viewers prefer traditional television, younger viewers opt for digital television—even when the content they choose is a top-rated program on traditional television. The generational divide is at age 55; it is therefore not a matter of content but rather a matter of habits.

Mass Media Team