If you haven’t heard, streaming is the future. But too bad for marketers: A big chunk of that future isn’t ad-supported. New data from Nielsen released last week breaks down how Americans are watching TV and on which platforms.

In the month of December, streaming accounted for 27.7% of all time spent on television sets, according to Nielsen, while cable captured 37.3% and broadcast took 26.1%.

While that’s on par with viewing habits throughout the year, Americans watched a whopping 183 billion minutes on over-the-top platforms during the week of Christmas—an “all-time weekly high,” per Nielsen. Streaming accounted for a third of total TV time during that week.

Take a look at some of the streaming services accounting for December’s streaming watch time:

• Netflix commanded 6.4%
• Amazon’s Prime Video was at 2.1%
• And Disney+ made up 1.6%

What do those services have in common? Barring some select programming on Amazon Prime Video, they don’t come with ad breaks. While those figures may be small on their own, tally them up: At least 10% of all streaming time spent watching television is on platforms that are almost entirely ad-free.

“The viewing has moved, but so much of it has moved [to] non ad-supported streams,” Dave Morgan, CEO of TV-buying platform Simulmedia, said. “There’s a real disconnect.”

• Ultimately, that percentage is possibly even higher since Nielsen’s calculation doesn’t account for other ad-free streaming services on the market, like HBO Max, Hulu, and Paramount+, all of which have both ad-supported and ad-free tiers. Nielsen doesn’t break down time spent on these other services individually, but it did say 3% of total streaming time went to Hulu and Hulu Live.
• In this report, Nielsen doesn’t measure time spent doing other things on TV, like gaming. Gen Z ranks “playing video games as their preferred form of entertainment,” and about two-thirds of US consumers play video games at least once a week, according to data previously released by Deloitte.

Most ad-viewing hours are still through linear TV, Simulmedia has found. Linear TV—which on the whole has viewers older than 55, according to Nielsen—still makes up 95% of total TV ad-viewing time, per Simulmedia’s estimates, while only 4% of ad-viewing time is spent on streamed ads, Morgan said.

Cheer up: Earlier this year, 65% of US consumers told Deloitte they watch free ad-supported video services at least some of the time.—KS

Brands desperately want to stand out on Twitter. Sometimes it goes well, other times, not so much. And sometimes a brand’s tweets can make a bad situation worse. (Remember Cinnamon Toast Crunch’s shrimp saga?)

At any rate, Twitter is offering up a few nuggets of research for brands to peruse as they make Wordles craft social strategies for 2022. Last week, it released #RealTalk, a report that sheds some light on how people perceive brands on the platform. The study involved an analysis of 5,000 “unprompted tweets about brands” as well as a survey of thousands of Twitter users in the US + seven other countries, including Brazil and Canada. Some highlights:

• Same tweets, different day: According to Twitter, it showed US survey respondents tweets from various “prominent” brands without any “identifiable branding,” like names and logos. Only one in three respondents was able to select the right brand from a list of five options.
• No joke: Brands want to be funny on Twitter—maybe too much. Roughly 50% of respondents agreed “brands that rely on humor and jokes can feel outdated today.”
• To post or not to post: Only 7% of global respondents said marketers should not tweet about social and cultural issues (56% agreed they could, while 37% think they should).

Looking ahead: So what’s Twitter’s advice? “Distinction is everything a brand needs to succeed on Twitter,” the report reads. “It’s time to revisit what seems right for your brand, not just what topics are trending, or what other people are jumping in on.”—MS

Each Tuesday, we’ll be spotlighting Marketing Brew’s readers in our new Coworking series. If you’d like to be featured, introduce yourself here.

Caitlyn San Pablo is a social engagement and content strategist at Razorfish, an agency that’s part of Publicis Groupe. In her role, she builds digital strategies for oncology and immunology brands.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in marketing? Helping patients and caregivers get the treatment information, resources, and support they are searching for, which is grounded in insights pulled from data around conversations naturally occurring on social media and patient behaviors.

What’s your favorite ad campaign? Last year, a TikToker posted that he bought a TV and it ended up being an Arby’s menu. Arby’s played along and eventually used all of that momentum and attention to announce a new menu-item release. Talk about a perfect opportunity to insert your brand into a conversation naturally and authentically, in a fun, playful way.

Something we can’t guess from your LinkedIn profile? Sometimes I can be indecisive, so that’s why I’m going to share TWO things you can’t guess from my LinkedIn profile: I’m a loyal Directioner and my top-used emojis are ‍. I guess this ended up being three things you can’t guess about me.

One marketing-related podcast, social account, or series you’d recommend? eMarketer’s Behind the Numbers.

There are a lot of bad marketing tips out there. These aren’t those.

Best foot forward: YouTube BrandConnect will soon roll out Media Kit, a tool designed to make it easier for creators to pitch themselves to brands.

Fake out: Meta is developing an “ethical framework” for virtual influencers.

Twitter: Check out its new tools for column creation and list discovery in TweetDeck.

Customer-first: B2B or B2C or both, your e-commerce site is more important than ever. So check out dotdigital’s new e-book “Building the future of e-commerce” to learn how to create an ecosystem that supports growth and delivers a unique customer experience. Get the e-book here.*

^{*This is sponsored advertising content.}

Catch up on a few Marketing Brew stories you might have missed.

• Funny Face Bakery teams up with Deuxmoi for a giveaway
• Who’s in (and out) of the Super Bowl this year
• Social-commerce stats for the year ahead

This brand spent an estimated $61.4 million on Super Bowl ads between 2016 and 2020, and in the last 11 years has aired an eye-popping 26 commercials during the big game, according to iSpot. Which brand is it?

1. Bud Light
2. Volkswagen
3. Pepsi
4. Tide

Keep scrolling for the answer.