According to a study of Nielsen and ComScore results commissioned by the Video Advertising Bureau earlier this year, the average American aged 13 or older watches 17 times more television than he or she does YouTube. “If you look at total time spent on both TV and YouTube, the split is 95% to 5%, yet YouTube draws a lot more than 5% of the attention of the industry,” says Sean Cunningham, president and CEO of the Video Advertising Bureau (VAB), a new organization dedicated to singing broadcast and cable TV's praises and whose members include CBS, Comcast, Disney, NBCUniversal, Verizon FIOS, and Viacom.
Now the VAB has released another Nielsen/ComScore comparison presenting the case that, far from being a victim of digital media, broadcast is instead digital's key enabler. Entitled “Ignition Point,” the study finds the correlation of website traffic to TV advertising among 125 brands to be inextricably linked. Of the 85 brands with visitor increases, according to VAB, 87% had increased their TV spends. More than two thirds of the 40 that cut TV spending experienced declines in uniques.