Second-screen viewership isn’t going anywhere. eMarketer estimates 177.7 million US adults use a second screen device while watching TV, and this is only going to grow. Every day millions of adults are sitting down on their sofas, grabbing the remote, turning on the television and immediately looking down at their phones and tablets. Attention isn’t going down. It’s getting diverted in multiple directions.

Time is the Competition

People are operating in a world full of choice when it comes to how they spend their time, especially when it comes to entertainment, but instead of choosing one thing over the other, they’re choosing both things at the same time, which dilutes attention and makes every message on any media being consumed easily missed.

Marketers would be wise to take diverted attention into account.

Media behaviors can’t be taken at face value. Marketers need to look at behaviors holistically. It’s not just a question of what people are consuming. It’s a question of what behaviors consumers are pairing together. More often than not, TV and social go hand-in-hand.

TV + Social

TV and social amplify each other. Marketers know consumers aren’t always giving their undivided attention to TV commercials, but they’re also only casually pursuing their social feeds. That creates an opportunity for creative, tailored to each platform, to exist in both places.

Twitter has added 6% incremental reach to TV across campaign target demographics. A CPG brand actually saw 22% incremental reach as compared to just advertising on TV, according to Nielsen.

Facebook’s massive reach and targeting capabilities give advertisers the power to extend their TV campaigns into user News Feeds. These units can continue to reinforce a brand’s message or even push a bit harder on product attributes and RTBs.

Advertisers don’t even need to be television sponsors to be part of the TV-viewing experience. Creating content that adds value to a show without directly referencing it and launching it during specific time windows, lets advertisers be part of the TV viewing experience.

Second screen viewing is the new normal, and it gives advertisers the opportunity to deliver users in-the-moment content that adds to the TV-viewing experience.