The home screen is festive gold for brands – Samsung Ads
Partner content from Samsung Ads
As the holiday season approaches and the nights draw in, households across the country are settling in for cosy evenings together, sharing classic movies and streaming marathons in front of the biggest screen in the home.
December is when TV viewership peaks, and in households with a Samsung TV, which make up a third of all Smart TVs in Europe, viewers spend an average of three hours watching TV each day.
The run-up to Christmas is also, as we all know, the busiest season of the year for commerce.
UK consumers are expected to spend around £91 billion in the six weeks to the end of December. Even as they watch, they are actively browsing, discovering and purchasing.
For advertisers, it’s a golden opportunity to ensure their brand is front and centre in a moment when consumers are at their most connected.
Dealing with a fragmented TV landscape
Many advertisers, however, are struggling with how to cut through to those consumers. The days when viewers had just a handful of channels to choose from, and programmes regularly attracted millions of live viewers, are long gone.
According to our Anatomy of a Streamer report, the average household uses four TV viewing apps across subscription video on demand (SVOD), advertising-based video on demand (AVOD), and broadcaster video on demand (BVOD).
However, the sheer volume of apps to choose from – and the number of combinations – makes it difficult for TV campaigns to achieve the reach advertisers traditionally depended on TV to provide.
Home screen to the rescue
So, how to square this circle? The answer is staring advertisers – and viewers – in the face: the home screen. This is where most people’s viewing journey starts. And it’s not just the starting point of the TV viewing experience – it’s the heartbeat.
Samsung’s most recent Behind the Screens study found that Samsung Smart TV viewers use the home screen more than five times per session, and spend 10.5 minutes each day finding what to watch.
That makes it the perfect moment for brands to meet viewers in a premium, high-attention space – their first stop before any content consumption begins.
A recent home screen campaign for Mini aimed to break through the noise by using high-impact placements to reach viewers the moment they power on their TVs.
It delivered striking results: an 80% increase in ad awareness, a 26% lift in promoted brand awareness, and a 25% increase in first-choice purchase.
Better together: the power of ad-supported CTV
Those are impressive numbers, and when we combined the home screen with ads on the Samsung TV Plus ad-supported TV service, things got even better.
MTM, the research consultancy that evaluated Mini’s campaign performance, found there was also a 36% boost in brand trust when home screen ads were combined with ads on Samsung TV Plus – and we have seen comparable numbers across a wide range of brands.
And so, far from bemoaning the choices available to viewers and the audience fragmentation they cause, I would invite brands instead to celebrate the power of the home screen this festive season. It truly is the gift that keeps on giving.
Antonia Faulkner is head of corporate communications and marketing, analytics and insights EMEA at Samsung Ads