As the upfront advertising market draws nigh, the Cabletelevision Advertising Bureau has issued a special report examining just how dominant ad-supported cable was during March.
Titled "A Month in the Life of Cable Nation" and issued to U.S. advertisers and their media agencies, the report aims to furnish ad-budget allocators with a big-picture looks and supporting stats on the prominent role the medium plays in the daily lives of U.S. consumers.
"We wanted to furnish the 15,000-foot view of the heights that ad-supported cable occupies; U.S. consumers have put cable at a level above all others," said CAB CEO and president Sean Cunningham, who noted that the industry garnered 84% of the ratings points among the Madison Avenue-coveted 18-to-49 set in March.
A further breakdown shows that cable collected 80% of the ratings points in total day with sports, 73% with dramas and 89% with comedy. More impressively, those totals expand to 98% and 97% of kids and movie fare.
Citing Nielsen data, the CAB report found that 76% of all ad-supported cable programs - 2,020 of them - were original in March, with 80% of ad-supported cable viewed live in digital video recorder households.
All told, the study indicated that the average U.S. household spent nearly one-third of its total waking hours consuming ad-supported cable TV brands.
According to ComScore, branded cable also played big on the Web, claiming top five traffic sites across nine content genres: sports, comedy, weather, news, food, kids, music, entertainment news and TV entertainment.
Can cut off here:
On the advertising front, cable operators helped launch "I+" to provide blanket coverage in local TV markets, combining MSOs' local footprint with Direct TV, Verizon FIOS and AT&T U-Verse.
Meanwhile, CAB said that advanced advertising usage grew in local markets, as dozens of top marketers embraced interactive and on-demand overlays, VOD telescoping and voting-/polling-enabled ads.
