In a failing difficult bid to catch up with Netflix, the legacy media groups are investing heavily in promoting their streaming services on their own and other channels.
iSpot.tv reported on the promotion and advertising spend by the major TV network groups for their streamers.
- Discovery+
Ran 420,485 national TV airings of promotion/advertising content, with much of it on Discovery-owned TV networks, which would be media valued at $260.9 million and just $40.6 million has been paid advertising on Discovery owned channels. - Disney+
$204.6 million in total media value/paid advertising – with $104.2 million in paid advertising from 79,025 airings. - Paramount+
$115.2 million in media value from airings on its sister TV networks and $20.8 million in paid advertising on other networks/platforms – a total of $136 million in all national TV advertising/promotion, from 62,111 airings. - NBCU’s Peacock
$49.2 million, which translates into $39.1 million in media value and $10.1 million in paid advertising via 20,730 advertising/promotional airings
Takeaways
- These major investments in promotion are failing to bring the legacy networks into competition with Netflix.
- The major media groups like Disney are caught in conflicting strategic pressures to preserve their existing channels, studios, theatrical distribution and other assets. They aren’t going all in on streaming.
- Despite investing $200 Mn for promotion, as I reported last week, Disney+ earned only 5% of Time Spent watching on connected TV’s versus 32% for Netflix.
- And the Discovery brand seems more likely by the day to disppear as a standalone when the Warner merger is complete.
Thanks to John Morse and Byron Media for today’s data snapshot. Dr Morse is a longtime valued partner who specializes in audience profiling for all media including production companies, channels and streaming services.
