Who is really watching.

Most marketing plans begin with a description of the audience. Most of those descriptions are written before anyone has looked. Here are four we would correct, from the people actually watching our channels.

Sport is not a teenage audience

Short sport videos are often pitched as a young, scrolling crowd. On our sport channel, six in ten viewers are between twenty-five and forty-four, and one in five is older still. Teenagers are fewer than one in fifteen. The audience is adults with their own money, spread across the United States, Germany, India and Japan.

Family video reaches the generation above

A family brief describes a young parent. On our family channel, two-thirds of viewers are women and more than four in ten are over forty-five; one in six is over sixty-five. The audience for a baby's first words is a generation older than the brief imagines.

Fishing is watched from the couch

We think of short video as something seen on a phone in a spare minute. In fishing, one in seven viewers watch on the living-room screen, more than 1.5 times the rate across our channels. That is a sit-down audience, and a different moment for a brand to appear in.

Fashion is global, and it finishes what it starts

The fashion audience is three-quarters women, and the largest single country is India, ahead of Germany and the United States. On our front-row fashion channel, viewers watch nearly nine in ten of each video.

The audience you plan for and the audience that watches are rarely the same. The second one is the one you are paying to reach.

Why this matters before a launch

Each of these would change a plan: the age in the brief, the country the budget goes to, the length of the video, the screen it is made for. None of them is visible from a desk. They show up only once an audience is watching, which is why we build the audience first and write the plan from what it shows us.