iOS & Android Apps: Prime-time All the Time
On broadcast television, brands seek to reach their target audiences as efficiently as possible. For example, a brand might run a TV campaign targeting 24 - 35 year old females through prime-time shows that reach that desired audience.
Context & Ripple Effects
Flurry has been building this argument for a year: its October 2010 data showed iPhone apps out-drawing major TV shows and sports broadcasts on audience size, and last month it sized app inventory as large enough to absorb internet display ad spend outright. The new post completes the pitch by reframing apps in the language media buyers already use — dayparts — claiming iOS and Android deliver prime-time-quality demographic reach continuously rather than in scheduled blocks.
That framing matters because it targets the pricing logic of broadcast television itself: if a brand buying 24-35 female audiences against prime-time shows can buy the same audience inside apps at any hour, the scarcity premium that underwrites TV rates comes into question.
First-order effects
- Brands planning fourth-quarter campaigns gain a new line item pitched as a direct substitute for prime-time TV buys, with Flurry's usage data as the sales collateral.
- Broadcast networks face an apples-to-apples audience comparison on their most profitable inventory, since Flurry is explicitly benchmarking app sessions against prime-time reach.
Second-order effects
- App inventory now competes not just with web display budgets but with television budgets, pulling brand-advertising dollars — historically TV's moat — toward iOS and Android developers.
- Ad networks and publishers must respond with engagement-based metrics that can stand next to Nielsen-style demographics, or cede the comparison to whoever supplies the measurement.
Third-order effects
- If buyers accept time-in-app as a currency comparable to daypart ratings, advertising measurement shifts from scheduled-audience ratings toward continuous engagement tracking — a structural change in how both TV and mobile inventory get priced.
- The pattern points toward platforms that own both the audience data and the inventory (Apple, Google, and analytics firms like Flurry) gaining pricing power over intermediaries that own neither.
The trend: Mobile app engagement is being repositioned from a complement to television into a substitute for its prime-time advertising inventory.