You know the type. The pitch deck peacocks. The “strategic” consultants who can’t define CPM.

The media buyers who swear their campaign is “optimized” but can’t explain the funnel. They’re quoting ADOTAT+ on calls like they thought of it themselves.

Because we don’t just break news—we expose it, dissect it, and serve it raw with receipts. Vendor drama? We’ve got the texts. Ad tech fraud? We name names. Holding company whispers? We’ve already heard them scream.

This isn’t a newsletter. It’s a crowbar for prying open the black box of this industry.

If you’d rather skip the recycled LinkedIn threads and get to the part where you actually know what you’re talking about, join ADOTAT+. Or don’t—and let your competitor use our reporting to crush your next pitch.

🧠 Stay Bold. Stay Curious. Know More than You Did Yesterday.
👉 [Subscribe to ADOTAT+] — And stop pretending you “heard it first.”

You know the type. The pitch deck peacocks. The “strategic” consultants who can’t define CPM.

The media buyers who swear their campaign is “optimized” but can’t explain the funnel. They’re quoting ADOTAT+ on calls like they thought of it themselves.

Because we don’t just break news—we expose it, dissect it, and serve it raw with receipts. Vendor drama? We’ve got the texts. Ad tech fraud? We name names. Holding company whispers? We’ve already heard them scream.

This isn’t a newsletter. It’s a crowbar for prying open the black box of this industry.

If you’d rather skip the recycled LinkedIn threads and get to the part where you actually know what you’re talking about, join ADOTAT+. Or don’t—and let your competitor use our reporting to crush your next pitch.

🧠 Stay Bold. Stay Curious. Know More than You Did Yesterday.
👉 [Subscribe to ADOTAT+] — And stop pretending you “heard it first.”

Once upon a time, TV was the campfire.

The moon landing wasn’t just Neil Armstrong taking one small step — it was millions of people crammed into living rooms, classrooms, and bars, squinting at black-and-white sets and gasping together.

The MASH* finale pulled in over 100 million Americans, making it less of a “show” and more of a national group therapy session.

The Super Bowl halftime show? That wasn’t just entertainment, it was a family event, a friend event, sometimes even a neighborhood event.

The point is simple but powerful: television has never been a solo sport. It has always been about who was in the room with you. That’s the DNA of TV culture, and no matter how many personal screens or streaming apps we invent, the instinct to watch together hasn’t disappeared. If anything, in an era of everyone disappearing into their own algorithmic bubbles, the shared screen has become a kind of countercultural act.

Strip away the industry jargon, and co-viewing is just this: more than one butt on the couch, more than one pair of eyes on the same glowing rectangle. Families, roommates, partners, or even strangers at the local bar — it all counts.

Advertisers, of course, love to make it sound complicated. “Multi-viewer engagement across shared household devices” is how you’ll see it phrased in slide decks, but at the end of the day, it’s just people watching TV together. It’s not so different from the cinema experience — a group sharing the same story at the same time — only the modern version usually involves a smart TV, some snacks, and at least one person arguing over who gets the remote.

It’s tempting to write off co-viewing as something from a bygone monoculture. After all, streaming shattered the old broadcast model into a thousand personalized rabbit holes. Everyone can now binge their own shows, in their own room, on their own timeline. But here’s the catch: the very fragmentation of streaming makes co-viewing moments stand out more.

When the family actually gathers for a movie night, when roommates crowd the couch for a playoff game, when couples compromise on what to watch before bed — those moments feel bigger because they’re rarer. Shared viewing is no longer the default, but when it happens, it matters. And that matters most of all to advertisers, who see each co-viewed stream not as one impression, but potentially two, three, even four at the price of one.

So here’s the real tension: is co-viewing a quaint holdover from the broadcast past, or a high-stakes metric that still drives billions in ad spend? It clearly still exists — Nielsen estimates that nearly half of all TV viewing in the U.S. is co-viewed — but in a fragmented, streaming-first marketplace, should advertisers treat it like a golden multiplier?

Or is it just another layer of hype that makes measurement firms rich while brands keep guessing who’s actually in the room?

What looks like a living room ritual is actually a boardroom obsession. Advertisers drool over the possibility of extra, “free” eyeballs. Platforms trot out co-viewing numbers to prove they can still deliver cultural moments in the middle of the streaming chaos.

Measurement firms, meanwhile, quietly panic about how to capture it without getting laughed out of the room for fuzzy math.

This isn’t just about who’s on the couch.

It’s about who gets paid.

And that’s where things start to get interesting. Because if you want to know why measurement companies fight over buttons, cameras, and probability models, or why advertisers pretend not to care while secretly begging for more clarity, you’ll need to keep reading.

But here’s the catch:

Most of this series — the deep dives, the research, the messy truths — is PAID ONLY for our ADOTAT+ members. No waiting a week for a watered-down analyst note. No recycling eMarketer slides six months late. You get behind the headlines, same-day. That’s the point of ADOTAT+: cutting through the hype with real research, not PR spin.

The industry’s favorite line goes something like this: “If two people are on the couch, that’s two impressions.” MediaScience flatly disagrees. As Dr. Dwayne Varan puts it, “The assumption is that if you have multiple viewers you should be able to multiply that by the number of viewers… The problem is that what do people do when an ad comes on television? They talk.”

And that talk is rarely about the ad. It’s usually about the show, the storyline, or something completely unrelated—leaving the ad competing with conversation for attention.

MediaScience pooled data from 11 studies and nearly 2,300 participants. What they saw was consistent: co-viewing makes ads harder to process. Memory encoding suffers, and retrieval—the ability to recall the ad later—drops by around 15% on average.

As Varan explains, “They have to do two things—engage in the conversation and process the ad. Which one loses out? The processing of the ad.”

Here’s where it gets tricky. The damage isn’t uniform. MediaScience’s data shows some genres experience relatively minor drops, and in a few cases co-viewing even gives ads a tiny lift. But the spread is wide. In certain program contexts, ads took a 58% hit in recall. That’s not a rounding error—that’s an ad falling into a black hole.

The killer point: it’s not just the second viewer who brings less value. The first viewer actually processes less in a co-viewing scenario. As Varan notes, “It’s not just that you’re getting less value for the second viewer—it’s also the first viewer is getting less value.” That means advertisers aren’t just missing a bonus impression; they may be weakening the original one.

Despite the scale of CTV ad spend, this issue is barely modeled at all. Varan doesn’t mince words: “This is a great example of a really important research question that is being completely neglected by the industry.” His call is for program-level data—tracking how specific shows and genres behave in co-viewing environments—so that advertisers can price and value impressions accurately.

The myth that co-viewing automatically amplifies ads? “Busted.”

This is MediaScience’s lens, grounded in their data. Other voices in the industry argue that co-viewing builds social reinforcement, sparks shared memories, and influences household purchasing decisions in ways that raw recall tests can’t measure.

In other words: the debate is alive, and you’ve got to hear both sides.

When Nielsen says nearly half of all television viewing in the U.S. is co-viewed — 47 percent to be precise — it’s not a throwaway statistic. It’s the kind of number that makes advertisers lean forward and media buyers sharpen their pencils.

Put simply, for every two hours of TV watched, one is shared with at least one other person in the room.

But the headline masks wide variations. Co-viewing isn’t evenly distributed across the schedule or across genres. Sports consistently push the average higher, as living rooms fill up for playoff games, tentpole events, and the Super Bowl. Children’s programming also sees elevated co-viewing, with parents and siblings routinely present. At the other end of the spectrum, dramas and late-night binge sessions skew more solitary, as viewers opt to watch alone on their own timelines.

Time of day is another driver. Primetime shows naturally draw more shared viewing, when families or roommates are home together. Early mornings and mid-day hours see the opposite, with solitary viewing dominating. Household composition adds yet another layer: larger households with children see significantly higher co-viewing rates, while single-person households drag the average down.

For years, planners have relied on what’s known as a “flat co-viewing multiplier” — shorthand for treating every screen as equal to 1.2 or 1.5 viewers. It’s tidy math for a messy reality, but it’s also misleading. A playoff broadcast watched by a family of four and a late-night streamer alone in bed should not be treated as equivalent impressions. Multipliers may have worked in an era of three networks and predictable routines. In today’s fragmented landscape, they risk obscuring more than they reveal.

The implication is straightforward but significant: co-viewing is not niche behavior. It accounts for nearly half of all television time, but its shape changes dramatically depending on what’s on screen, when it airs, and who’s in the household. For advertisers and platforms, that variability is not just noise in the data — it’s the very terrain on which campaigns succeed or fail.

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Stay Bold, Stay Curious, and Know More than You Did Yesterday.