It’s natural to assume the best time to advertise is whenever the most people are watching. That would be the evening, when the big dramas, soaps and entertainment shows go out, and for some adverts it’s exactly right. The size of the audience is only part of it, though, because the frame of mind people are in when they’re watching matters too, and it changes through the day and through the week. An advert that does well at eleven in the morning can fall flat at nine at night, and the other way round.
How the day is divided up
Media buyers split the broadcasting day into parts, running roughly from breakfast through daytime to the evening peak and then on into late night, and each part has its own price. Peak costs the most, because that’s when the audiences are biggest and it’s where most advertisers want to be, and daytime and late night cost less.
The people watching change as the day goes on as well. A daytime audience has more retired people in it, along with parents at home with small children and people who work shifts, and the evening brings in everybody who’s been out at work. So before mood comes into it at all, your media buyer will want to know who your customers are and when they’re likely to be in front of a television.
Daytime: fewer people, readier to act
Daytime audiences are smaller, and the airtime is cheaper. They also tend to be in a different frame of mind, because the television is often on in the background while people get on with other things, and they’re not so wrapped up in a programme that they can’t be pulled away from it.
That makes daytime a good home for adverts that ask for an immediate response. If you want people to pick up the phone or look at your website now, you’ll often get more response for your money in the daytime than in the evening, which is why so much direct response advertising has always been bought there. There’s a practical side to it as well, because an advert that asks people to ring needs somebody there to answer, and daytime is when most businesses have the phones staffed.
Evenings: bigger audiences, harder to distract
In the evening, far more people are watching, and they’re watching properly. They’ve chosen the programme, they’re following the story, and the last thing they’re going to do in the break is go and fill in a form.
That makes it a very good time for an advert that’s building your name, because people are relaxed, paying attention and often watching together. The viewer who sees you during their favourite drama may not act tonight, but they’re more likely to remember you, and watching in company seems to help. When Thinkbox, the marketing body for commercial TV, looked at how the setting affects what viewers remember in 2024, it found that people who’d watched with others were better at recalling the adverts the next day than people who’d watched alone.
It would be wrong to write the evening off for response, though. In 2015 Thinkbox published an analysis of 1.38 million showings of adverts, carried out by the media agency group GroupM, and it found that peak had become a strong time for response too, because so many people now watch with a phone or a tablet beside them and can look something up without leaving the sofa. It also found that the quickest response tended to come from showings with smaller audiences, probably because viewers were less absorbed in what they were watching. Breaks at the end of a programme did better for response than breaks in the middle of one, most likely because people wait for the programme to finish before they go and look something up.
For an advert that’s building your name, that last point cuts the other way. A break in the middle of a programme generally keeps more of its audience than one between two programmes, when people take the chance to put the kettle on, so if being seen is the aim, the middle of the programme is the better place to be.
Things people want, and things people need
The day of the week matters as well as the time, and the Thinkbox research on response offers a useful way of thinking about it, which is to split products into two kinds. There are the things people want, such as holidays, cars, clothes or a meal out, where the shopping is a pleasure in itself, and there are the things people need, such as insurance, energy, a will or a new boiler, where sorting them out is a chore.
According to Thinkbox, people are more receptive to the things they want on weekday evenings, particularly at the start and end of the working week. After a long day, they’re in the mood to daydream about a holiday, and in no mood at all to compare insurance quotes. The things people need do better at the weekend, and on Sundays in particular, which is when most of us have the time, and the inclination, to get the dull jobs done.
It won’t hold for every business, but it’s a helpful starting point. If you’re a solicitor, a Sunday slot may do more for you than a Friday night one, and it may well cost less.
The programme matters as well
Within any part of the day, an advert sits more comfortably in some programmes than others. A kitchen company in a cookery show, or a travel business in a programme about places in the sun, is talking to people who are already thinking along the right lines. Channel 4 research quoted by Thinkbox found that adverts placed in a fitting programme were noticeably better remembered. Tone counts too, because a light-hearted advert can feel out of place in the middle of something harrowing, and that’s worth thinking about when the airtime is planned.
It’s easy to get carried away with this and want every showing to sit in the perfect programme, but there are rarely enough perfect matches to build a campaign from. A real campaign is a spread of programmes that your kind of customer watches, with a few picked out because they fit especially well.
So when should you advertise?
It depends first on what your advert is for, because one that’s asking for a response today points towards daytime and the lower-cost slots, and one that’s building your name belongs in the evening, where the audience and the attention are. What you sell then refines it, with weekday evenings a good place to start for the things people want, and the weekend for the things they need.
Picture a flooring company with two adverts. One announces a sale that ends this month and asks people to book a home visit, so it’s looking for viewers who are free to act on it. A media buyer would probably lean towards daytime and Sundays for that one, at times when there’s somebody ready to take the calls. The other shows the showroom and the quality of the fitting, and it’s there so that people think of the company next year when the hall carpet finally has to go, which makes it an evening advert, in the kind of programme a couple sits down to watch together.
In practice, most campaigns use a mixture, and there’s more to that than hedging your bets. People who watch a lot of daytime television would see a daytime-only campaign again and again, while everybody who’s out at work would never see it at all, so spreading the showings across different times and programmes is how a campaign gets round to more of your customers. The trade calls that reach, and it’s one of the measures we’ve explained in what are TVRs? The first few weeks on air also show which times are bringing in the visits and the calls, and a good media buyer will move the weight towards them as the campaign goes on.
Our media buying partners will work out the right balance for your business and your budget, and they’ll be able to tell you what each option costs. We’ve written separately about the two kinds of advert, about how a campaign is spread over the weeks and months, and about the time of year, which matters mostly because of what it does to the price.
Because the right time depends so much on what the advert is asking people to do, it’s best settled while the advert is still on paper, and a free storyboard is a good place to start that conversation.