FierceWireless has partnered with TV advertising measurement firm iSpot.tv to bring you a monthly snapshot of the wireless industry's advertising spending and digital engagement. The results below are for the top five biggest spenders among wireless industry brands in August.
The wireless industry went big last month, spending a whopping $270.8 million to run 115 spots 47,674 times on national TV, up almost $80 million from the industry’s July spend. Check out how these figures compare with May , June and July.
Although 20 wireless marketers ran ads, the following 5 brands stole the show, accounting for 87% of the industry’s total spend:
1. T-Mobile closed out the month in first place, spending an estimated $74.8 million running 19 ads 8,268 times. Focusing over 30% of this spend on the Rio Olympics, T-Mobile managed to generate 1.01 Billion TV ad impressions in August. The brand spent the most money running “T-Mobile’s Most Epic Deal Ever,” which offers a free Samsung Galaxy phone for everyone in the family (or at least everyone who gets their own line):
2. Verizon closed out August in second place, running 16 spots 10,078 times for an estimated total spend of $57.8 million. This impressive push led to 911.9 million TV ad impressions with an average view rate of 89.41% (view rate is the percentage of an ad that, on average, is being watched across all airings of that ad). Verizon’s commercials were seen most widely on NBC, ESPN and TBS. The ad with the biggest push, “Best Coverage,” featuring Jamie Foxx, alone was seen over 273 million times.
3. Sprint closed out August with an estimated spend of $42.8 million to run 15 ads 8,687 times on national TV. Its top ad, “Powerslide,” features Verizon’s old pitchman Paul explaining why he switched over, and alone aired over 2,100 times. In terms of impressions, 294.8 million of the brand’s total 813.6 million came from this ad.
4. Falling just short of Sprint, AT&T Wireless accounted for 15.4% of the Industry’s total spend in August, totaling an estimated $41.6 million. Running 18 spots over 7,191 times, the brand focused its spend on high-value placements such as the Rio Olympics, NFL Preseason Football and America’s Got Talent. In total, AT&T Wireless generated over 950 million TV ad impressions in August. Its top ad, “Longest Fumble: Free Gear S2,” generated 250.3 million of those impressions on its own.
5. Closing out the chart is T-Mobile's MetroPCS, accounting for just under 7% of the wireless industry’s spend in August. The brand spent an estimated $18.4 million running 9 spots 4,994 times. MetroPCS prioritized NBC (particularly the Rio Olympics telecasts), BET and Univision with its TV ad budget. The brand’s top ad, “Nightmare,” generated over 221 million TV ad impressions on nearly 60% of this spend.
iSpot's data does not include co-promotions or local market data. Click here for more on iSpot.tv's methodology.
The company's software leverages proprietary audio and video fingerprinting algorithms to automatically identify and extract TV commercials, movie trailers and show promos.
The company tracks hundreds of millions of explicit interactions with TV ads across roughly 100 million unique consumers. These interactions include video plays, searches and social activity. The company also analyzes online views across YouTube and iSpot.tv, searches on Google, Bing and Yahoo! and social activity on Facebook (including Facebook private views) and Twitter.
The company tags over 40 different dimensions of metadata, including brand, agency, actors, products, songs, moods, URLs and other pertinent data, to create its results.