On Thursday Nights, Not a Pretty Picture for TV Networks
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Once deemed the most crucial night of the week for movie studios looking to get fannies in theater seats on all-or-nothing opening weekends, Thursdays no longer provide the sort of ratings juice that can help ring up registers at the box office. As a result, buyers continue to push more of their theatrical clients’ marketing dollars into higher-impact nights like Sunday and Wednesday, when the trailers and teasers for the latest releases have a better shot at drawing an audience.
According to iSpot.tv data, Sundays accounted for $453.3 million in studio spend across broadcast and cable TV last season, or nearly one-quarter (23%) of the category’s overall $1.96 billion investment in TV during 2016-17. In a further sign that Thursday is on the downhill slide, Wednesday studio spend jumped 16% to $293.2 million, making Hump Day the second-biggest TV target for the likes of deep-pocketed studios like Twentieth Century Fox, Universal Pictures, Warner Bros. and Paramount Pictures.
While the studios last season essentially spent the same amount of dollars ($280 million) on total-day Thursday TV inventory as they did in 2015-16, primetime investment on the night fell about $20 million to $140.4 million, per iSpot. And while that’s more or less a rounding error for an industry that dropped 100 times that amount on TV marketing over the course of the 35-week season, it’s difficult to overstate the significance of where Thursday nights now stand in relation to the rest of the calendar. Having already dropped to third place among the studios’ top targets in total-day spend, Thursday prime ranked fourth in 2016-17 behind Sunday night ($242 million), Monday night ($165.1 million) and Wednesday night ($163.5 million).
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