What People Watch

It’s June, the sun has finally appeared, and thoughts turn to Christmas. Well, for some in our industry they do, as planning for Christmas campaigns is well underway.

Christmas produces changes in behaviour. People travel to locations they aren’t usually in, many pause working and when it comes to media consumption, the available content often looks different to a standard week.

This is not necessarily helpful for those planning an advertising campaign. So, if we look at viewing behaviour over the last three Christmas periods, what can we understand about the way viewers’ habits change?

Chart 1: Total Identified Viewing picks up as we approach the end of the year

The data here are weekly averages on all devices for Q4 2022, 2023 and 2024, indexed against the three-year Q4 average by age group. While the overall pattern is perhaps expected – viewing over-indexes at the end of the quarter – there are some interesting points of nuance.

November’s penultimate week could give access to an audience preserving cash ahead of Christmas shopping

For these three years this week (week 47) has covered November 18 to 27 – this is the week before November payday for many people. This may suggest that viewers are watching more TV because they have less money, or don’t want to spend ahead of the need to buy Christmas presents in early December. This might be leading audiences to stay at home and watch more TV than in the surrounding weeks.

We should also recognise that in each of these years Black Friday occurred in week 47, while in 2023 and 2024 this week was the first full week of I’m A Celebrity… on ITV.

The latter is clearly pulling in viewers, while the former could be a reason to activate campaigns in this week for some brands, or be avoided by others.

Week 47 could be the golden week

As we know, TV sets are only one of the four screens on which Barb monitors viewing. If we focus on 16-34s in 2024, we can see that viewing regardless of device increases to a point where non-TV viewing over-indexes for four consecutive weeks covering November. This holds for 2022 and 2023, not shown here for clarity.

Again, the penultimate week of November (week 47) is interesting being the only week in Q4 where viewing on TV and non-TV screens over-indexes, before non-TV viewing starts to fall away against the quarter average.

This could be the sweet spot for those planning TV campaigns that make use of inventory across all four screens.

Chart 2: 16-34s non-TV viewing peaked in November in 2024

Viewers watch almost 5X as much on TV-sets than on PCs, tablets and smartphones combined

Presented with data such as these, it might be tempting to disregard the TV set at times. However, data for the last three years show that in Q4, viewing is consistently higher in volume terms on the TV set than away from it. In fact, we can see that the balance has tipped in favour of the TV set at an overall level.

Chart 3: Kids and those 55+ move towards more TV-set time

While the data here clearly show older viewers dramatically favour the TV set, it is interesting to note that Total Identified Viewing for those under 16 has also tilted towards the TV set. Time on the biggest screen in Q4 is 2.2X that on non-TV devices in 2024 compared to 1.9X in 2022. Although it is worth noting that the volume of Total Identified Viewing across all screens (that is including streaming services like Netflix, YouTube and TikTok) has declined 11% over this period for these younger viewers.

Time to be together

Finally, we can consider co-viewing on TV sets. As we would expect, this grows during Q4 from 38% of all commercial TV-set viewing time to 42% in week 51 before surging to 50% in week 52 – the week containing Christmas Day itself.

Again, if we index co-viewing against the Q4 average, week 47 is the point at which co-viewing becomes more likely than average. Although this dips into a slight under-index in week 50 (Dec 9th – 15th 2024), perhaps as Christmas party season sees more people left at home to view on their own while their partners / housemates are out, or they nurse hangovers of their own. The pattern remains the same if we include non-commercial viewing.

Chart 4: Co-viewing becomes more likely after November’s penultimate week

So, should all advertising campaigns be focused on week 47 – the penultimate week of November? While Amazon seem to feel it works for Black Friday that isn’t going to hold true for all. Each brand has far more nuanced considerations than to fit into such a sweeping generalisation. Perhaps though, some of the interplay between volume, devices and co-viewing can point towards an early Christmas present for those trying to make sense of the great British public’s festive viewing habits. If so Merry Christmas from Barb – even if it is June!

Doug Whelpdale is Head of Insight at Barb.

Doug also shares some of these insights in the following video: