Delivering better audience experiences – across regions and niche programming

Challenge

RTVE is Spain’s largest state-owned public media company. It produces and distributes content and programming that seeks to inform and entertain audiences across demographics and regions throughout the country.

Over 4,000 hours of content are produced each year for RTVE. Kantar Media’s TV audience has been used to understand and measure the audience since 1988.

Today, a representative sample of 5,720 homes form the panel – the ground-truth of who is watching what and when within a population of 46 million inhabitants. But panels have inevitable constraints due to size, and media fragmentation has dramatically increased the number and diversity of channels available. Niche channels, in particular, catering to specific audience demographics, sometimes see zero ratings reported, and so can’t always easily reap maximum value from panel data alone. 

Approach

RTVE partnered with Kantar Media to take on this challenge by ingesting large-scale data directly from Connected TVs together with its own panel demographic data – thus enlarging the data set.

Data science techniques are used to integrate the data sets, with a subset of CTV data expanding the reporting sample, thereby augmenting the robustness of the insights and enhancing the levels of granularity.

Insight

The solution utilised four months of data from across ten channels, including national, regional and local, e.g., news channels La1, La2 and 24H, children’s channel Clan, and sports channel Teledeporte. Fusing large-scale CTV data has resulted in a clear improvement in granularity and had several benefits:

• Improved audience foresight: less fluctuations in the ratings making it easier to forecast audiences, sell and plan inventory. 
• Stability in ratings across time periods: the enriched data provides more context to understand day-to-day fluctuations in programme ratings for smaller programmes and segments. 
• Improved inventory management: the significant reduction in zero cells is equipping RTVE to enhance its inventory planning. The children’s channels, Clan and Teledeporte, saw a reduction of over 98% in zero cells.
• Granularity across channels and platforms: exposure of smaller niche channels within viewing data.

Impact

Enhancing audience measurement data by ingesting large data at scale has enabled RTVE to enhance its programme strategy evaluation as well as the return on investment for the regional content, leading to a more effective content strategy and a more efficient resource allocation.