Advertising-relevant target group is a term used in radio and television advertising and marketing to describe the most important target groups (listener and viewer groups) for these mass media when setting the price of commercials. It is the second most important metric in addition to total reach. The advertising-relevant target group only makes the performance of broadcasters comparable, but is not decisive for marketing or programming. The general main target group in Germany today is defined either as a group of 14 to 49-year-olds or as a group of 20 to 59-year-olds.
Private TV broadcasters, in particular, have to reach a large critical mass in order to be profitable due to their typical cost structure. One criterion of this is the group of viewers/listeners who are the most consuming in terms of age and can therefore be intensively confronted with radio and television advertising. The aim is to cover the age group that has sufficient financial resources to consume the advertised products. Another criterion is the broadcasting time in which the largest part of this audience can be reached on a daily basis, namely prime time. In the case of commercials, broadcasters must also take into account that more than 50% of TV viewers and radio listeners tune out as soon as advertising appears; only 9% do not switch programs by zapping.
In particular, private broadcasters tend to focus on prime time, because the broadcasting slots meet with the highest television usage with the highest number of viewers during this time. The purchase of film rights is based on the expected advertising revenue within a planned broadcast slot. Accordingly, a purchased film fails if it achieves a lower than average channel market share in a broadcast slot. Consequently, no television station will deliberately show a film in a slot that would be significantly below the average audience and advertising revenue typical of the intended slot. Therefore, if the broadcasting slot is in prime time, it will meet with the highest possible number of viewers and would normally have to make a profit contribution. A large part of this target group can be reached, especially during prime time, because they are in their free time after work.
---
The advertising-relevant target group of adults aged 14 to 49 is relatively “broad”. If the potential is severely limited by a smaller age range or gender, one speaks of “peaked” target groups, especially in media planning. Low-usage slots are more likely to be predestined for special programmes of little interest. Your audience response can be increased by the phenomenon of audience flow. After that, programmes with a high number of viewers trigger a kind of magnetic effect for the following programme, because experience has shown that a large proportion of viewers neither change the channel nor switch off.
Since the beginning of the 2010s, the group of 20- to 59-year-olds has been considered an advertising-relevant target group for individual broadcasters.
