Why Entertainment TV Is a Goldmine for Advertisers

On a Wednesday night in December 2025, 5 million people tuned in live to watch the finale of Survivor season 49. These viewers weren’t passively channel-surfing—they were leaning forward, avoiding social media spoilers, and planning tomorrow’s water-cooler conversations. By the next morning, another 2 million had caught up, so nobody would ruin the surprise blindside at tribal council. This isn’t a sports broadcast; it’s entertainment television. And it’s been delivering this kind of engaged, appointment viewing for decades—generally at a fraction of the cost advertisers pay for comparable reach in sports programming.

Entertainment TV represents the foundation of television viewership. In 2024, entertainment content accounts for roughly 64% of all TV viewing hours, regularly reaching over 70 million cable households.

Yet, despite its scale and effectiveness, entertainment TV often operates in the shadow of sports when it comes to advertiser attention and investment. Sports programming commands CPMs of $60 or more, while equally large entertainment audiences can be reached for around $25–$30 per thousand viewers. This pricing disconnect creates one of the biggest arbitrage opportunities in television advertising today.

So why is entertainment TV such an underappreciated goldmine for advertisers? Let’s dive into what “entertainment TV” really includes, how it compares to sports in reach and engagement, and how savvy marketers can leverage its undervalued pricing to build cost-effective, high-impact media plans.

What Exactly Counts as “Entertainment TV”?

Entertainment TV encompasses the vast majority of television programming that people watch for enjoyment – for distraction, emotional engagement, social connection, or escape. It’s perhaps easiest to define entertainment TV by what it isn’t:

• It’s not sports: not those live athletic events that command premium prices and drive same-day urgency. Entertainment TV lives in all the spaces around sports: scripted and unscripted programs designed to emotionally engage viewers, deliver narratives or thrills, and create shared cultural moments (the kind people talk about at work or on social media the next day).

• It’s not news: not the breaking news, elections, or crisis coverage that spikes viewership intermittently.

• It’s not “utility” content like weather channels, financial news, or home shopping networks. And it’s not purely educational or documentary programming, which serves a different purpose.

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In essence, entertainment TV is everything else people eagerly watch during their leisure hours, the shows they choose for fun, drama, and connection.

As you can see, “entertainment TV” covers pretty much everything on TV that isn’t news or sports, from scripted dramas and comedies to reality competitions and beyond. It’s the stuff people binge, gossip about, tweet about – the shows that become part of pop culture and daily life.

Massive Scale and Diverse Reach (That Everyone Overlooks)

Far from being a niche or “filler” content, entertainment programming is the backbone of television consumption. Even though sports’ share of TV viewing has grown (from ~13% in 2013 to ~19% by 2024), entertainment programming still makes up approximately 64% of all TV viewing hours in 2024. In other words, nearly two-thirds of the time Americans spend in front of the TV is spent with entertainment content. This translates to tens of millions of viewers on a regular basis – entertainment TV reaches over 70 million cable households consistently. It’s a huge, steady audience pool.

Importantly, this isn’t one homogeneous blob of viewers either. Entertainment TV’s reach is massive and diversified across networks, dayparts, and audience segments. On one end, you have broad-appeal cable networks like USA, TBS, or TNT that air a mix of syndicated shows and originals appealing to broad audiences. On the other end, you have highly targeted networks catering to specific interests – think Food Network for cooking enthusiasts, HGTV for home improvement fans, Bravo for reality TV junkies.

Yet, viewers don’t silo themselves to one genre or channel. Most people sample across the TV landscape, watching a cooking competition one night, a crime drama the next, a sitcom the following day. For example, the same person might watch Property Brothers on HGTV, Law & Order on NBC, and The Masked Singer on Fox all in one week. This cross-genre viewing behavior means advertisers can find their target audiences popping up in multiple shows and networks. Each program may have its own fan base, but there’s a lot of overlap and broad coverage when you aggregate many entertainment shows together. Rather than concentrating your spend on one or two big “tentpole” broadcasts, you can piece together dozens of high-performing entertainment placements that collectively deliver huge reach.

In fact, the breadth of entertainment TV’s audience is a key advantage. Unlike sports, which tends to skew toward certain demographics (e.g. many sports heavily over-index on men 18–49 or 50+), entertainment programming attracts everyone – young and old, male and female, across different household types. Procedural dramas like NCIS pull strong numbers among adults 50+; reality competitions like The Voice and Survivor draw multi-generational audiences; game shows bring in whole families; cooking and home improvement shows deliver concentrations of women 25–54, etc… Because there’s such a variety of content, whatever audience segment you care about, there’s an entertainment program (or ten) that those people are watching. For a marketer, that means with the right data, you can pinpoint which shows over-index for your target customer and buy those spots at a bargain, rather than paying a premium to reach the same people in a sports event.

Engaged Audiences and “Appointment Viewing” Beyond Sports

One common misconception is that only sports and maybe big news events command live, attentive viewership, while entertainment content is all DVR’ed or binge-watched later without the same urgency. Not true. Entertainment TV can drive appointment viewing habits that rival sports – and this is a crucial point for advertisers looking at audience attention.

Think about why people watch their favorite entertainment shows. It’s not random background noise; viewers deliberately choose entertainment programs because they get specific psychological and social benefits that other content can’t match. Research summarized in the deck highlights a few primary motivations for entertainment viewing:

Escapism & Relaxation

After a long workday, many people actively seek out a TV show that lets them unwind and escape daily stress. Whether it’s getting lost in the fictional world of a drama or enjoying the low-stakes fun of a cooking competition, entertainment TV provides a mental break.

Ritual & Comfort

Entertainment TV becomes a comforting routine. Weekly viewing rituals (e.g. Monday night sitcoms, Wednesday Survivor night), re-watching familiar favorites in syndication, and seasonal cycles (fall premieres, etc.) all create habitual patterns. Viewers come back week after week, year after year – which means predictable reach for advertisers savvy enough to align with those rhythms.

Social Connection

Many entertainment shows turn into communal experiences. The proverbial “water cooler” conversations still happen – now they’re just as likely on social media as in the office. People watch shows like The Masked Singer or The Bachelor not just for the content, but to be part of the discussion and pop culture buzz that surrounds them. There’s real pressure to “stay current” with popular shows to avoid feeling left out or getting spoiled on big reveals. This creates the same kind of live urgency to watch in real-time that we usually associate with live sports.

Emotional Engagement

Great entertainment hooks viewers emotionally. Whether rooting for a contestant on The Voice, getting attached to characters in a drama, or laughing along with a sitcom family, audiences care about what they’re watching. That emotional investment leads to higher attention and memory, which is exactly what advertisers hope for when placing their brands in content.

These motivations translate into high engagement and timely viewing. Advertisers often assume only the NFL or live sports get people to watch right now instead of later; in reality, entertainment programming also delivers engaged, attentive audiences at significantly lower CPMs. For example, competition reality franchises and serialized dramas often maintain very high rates of live or same-day viewing. Why? Because nobody wants tomorrow’s Twitter feed or office chatter to spoil the latest plot twist or reality elimination. As noted earlier, millions made sure to watch that Survivor finale live for exactly this reason. The same goes for shows like The Voice, The Masked Singer, Dancing With the Stars, Big Brother, or The Bachelor. These popular entertainment series drive live and next-day viewership because the social experience matters – if you wait too long, the internet will spoil the winner, and you’ll be left out of the conversation. In fact, streaming platforms often don’t release new episodes of these shows until the next day, forcing fans to watch on live TV if they want to be part of the real-time excitement.

The data backs this up: according to Nielsen, nearly 70% of competition reality shows’ viewership is live (same-day), and even scripted primetime dramas and comedies hover around 59% live viewing. That level of immediacy isn’t far off from many sports broadcasts. And it’s valuable: when people watch live, they’re also watching the ads live, in a shared cultural moment. Brands get to reach audiences when they’re highly engaged, paying full attention (not fast-forwarding days later on DVR).

For advertisers, the takeaway is that entertainment TV delivers real, attentive eyeballs, not just fragmented time-shifted scraps.

Sports vs. Entertainment: The CPM Gap (and Why Attention Isn’t the Difference)

If entertainment TV engages audiences and delivers comparable reach, why does it remain so much cheaper than sports? Let’s look at the numbers side-by-side. Premium sports inventory – think NFL games, top-tier college football, NBA playoffs – routinely commands sky-high ad prices, often in the range of $60–$100+ CPM (and even higher for marquee events like the Super Bowl). Entertainment programming, on the other hand, with a comparable audience size and composition, typically trades in the $25–$35 CPM range. Both reach large swaths of Adults 25–54. Both deliver meaningful viewer attention and engagement. Both create brand exposure. But one costs roughly double the other on a per-impression basis.

Crucially, this gap in price is not because entertainment TV delivers inferior results. It’s not as if an ad on The Masked Singer is half as effective as an ad on Monday Night Football – far from it. The gap exists largely because of market perceptions and buying habits, not audience value. Sports feels premium. Sports has the prestige factor – CEOs and CMOs love boasting about that Super Bowl spot or sponsoring the big game. Sports content is scarce (there are only so many playoff games or primetime slots), so it creates a frenzy of demand among advertisers that drives prices up. Entertainment TV, in contrast, is viewed as the everyday, “ordinary” content – no one wins an award for buying a package of sitcom ad slots, even if those slots quietly deliver better ROI. In board meetings, the sports buy gets applause while the entertainment buys are seen as just GRP fillers. In short, advertiser psychology and tradition play a huge role in sustaining this pricing disconnect.

There are a few specific factors behind entertainment’s underpricing:

• The Prestige Factor: Marketers and execs tend to treat sports as strategically important and entertainment as just “basic” media. Sponsoring an NFL game or the Olympics carries a certain cachet that being in a Tuesday night drama does not (at least on the surface). As the deck notes, CMOs love telling the board about big sports buys – it sounds bold and exciting. This psychological premium means many advertisers are willing to pay extra for sports, beyond what the raw impression delivery would warrant. Entertainment, no matter how effective, doesn’t generate that same excitement, so it doesn’t get priced the same way.

• Buyer Behavior & Budgets: Media agencies and brands often bucket sports separately from other TV buying. Big chunks of budget are earmarked for sports upfront, and agency teams are built to negotiate those packages. Everyone is chasing the same limited sports inventory, which leads to artificial scarcity. It’s not that sports ad spots are truly more scarce in a supply sense (after all, there are countless entertainment shows on dozens of networks, which collectively have endless ad slots). But because so many advertisers focus their spend on the same few sports events, those spots become exorbitantly expensive. Meanwhile, the vast supply of entertainment inventory has far fewer advertisers fighting over each spot, keeping prices low. It’s basic demand and supply imbalance – driven by herd behavior.

• Fragmentation (and the Effort to Buy Smart): Entertainment audiences are spread across hundreds of programs and many networks, unlike sports which concentrates millions of viewers into a single big event at a time. Buying ads against that fragmented landscape can be more complex. It requires data-driven planning to identify which of those many shows over-index for your target audience and are undervalued. Simply put, it’s easier for a lazy marketer to just dump money into the NFL and call it a day than to carefully assemble 30 different show buys that achieve the same reach. Brands without sophisticated TV planning capabilities default to the “easy” route (sports) , leaving the efficiency on the table for those willing to do a bit more homework. Those who do embrace audience data and advanced TV buying can cherry-pick the best entertainment placements and reap huge cost advantages because many competitors aren’t even in those auctions.
  

In summary, entertainment TV’s bargain CPM isn’t a reflection of poor performance – it’s a market quirk. The content delivers eyes and engagement just as well as sports, but legacy biases and buying habits keep it undervalued. For advertisers, that spells opportunity.

Building a High-Impact Media Strategy on Entertainment TV’s Efficiency

All this leads to a clear strategy insight: To maximize reach and efficiency, flip the typical “sports-first” TV buying approach on its head. Rather than spending the lion’s share of your budget on a handful of pricey sports events and using leftover dollars for entertainment spots, do the opposite. Build your reach foundation with plentiful, low-cost entertainment inventory, then layer in select sports placements for extra visibility and sizzle. This way, you capture far more impressions and unique audience reach per dollar, and you still get the benefits of big sports moments on top.

Here’s how an entertainment-first playbook could work, according to the research deck:

1. Start with Entertainment to Build Efficient Reach: Use audience data to identify the top 30–50 entertainment programs where your target audience is concentrated (the shows your customers actually watch most). Buy across this spread of shows and networks to aggregate reach. You can often achieve on the order of 60–70% target reach at $25–$35 CPMs by using these multiple entertainment placements as your base. That broad penetration is achieved at a significantly lower total cost than a sports-heavy plan. The goal here isn’t about chasing the flashiest programs; it’s about reaching as many of your target consumers as possible, enough times, to drive results. Entertainment TV’s sheer volume and variety make it possible to hit a large chunk of your audience very cost-effectively. (In other words, fill the jar with pebbles first – the many smaller audience buys – before adding big rocks.)

2. Add Sports Selectively for “Rocks” (Visibility & Cultural Moments): Once you’ve built an efficient reach foundation, layer in sports strategically. Identify a few marquee live sports events that align with your brand or campaign (NFL playoffs, NBA finals, the World Cup, etc.) and invest there to get the benefits sports does offer – e.g. high visibility, a big PR moment, and association with culturally significant events. The key is you’re using sports as a complement, not your primary reach vehicle. The entertainment base is doing the heavy lifting on reach at half the cost; the sports buys are the “shine” on top for when you need that extra buzz or prestige. This blended approach gives you the best of both worlds and avoids blowing your whole budget on a few games.

3. Optimize Frequency Holistically: With an entertainment-first approach, you’ll want to monitor reach and frequency across all your TV placements combined. One reason to invert the strategy is to avoid the trap of over-frequency in expensive sports while under-reaching overall. It’s common in sports-first plans to hit the same sports fans 10+ times (because you bought so much within the same sports events), yet miss other audience segments entirely. By starting with broad entertainment reach, you ensure you’re touching more unique people a few times, rather than bombarding the limited sports audience. Then the sports ads you do add will supplement that reach without excessive duplication. The result is a more balanced campaign where a greater number of people see your message 3–5 times, instead of a small group seeing it 15 times and others not at all.

4. Measure Success in Reach Efficiency, Not Just Glamour: Internally, shift your metrics to reinforce this strategy. Track your cost per reach point (CPRP) or cost per percentage of target reached, not just the cost per impression. When you do this, you’ll likely find (as the deck’s analysis shows) that reaching the same person through entertainment programming costs about half of what it costs via sports. That efficiency adds up: the same budget can deliver 40–50% more reach through an entertainment-first plan compared to a sports-first plan. Those are huge gains in media effectiveness. Ultimately, what drives business outcomes is reaching more of the right people enough times – not simply buying the glitziest ad slot. So celebrate and optimize for that reach efficiency.
   

To illustrate the power of this approach, the deck provides a striking example of finding sports viewers through long-tail entertainment. In one analysis, a target was defined as heavy NFL/NBA viewers (~61 million people). One option was a single spot in a high-profile NFL playoff game with a ~$1 million price tag. That one spot would reach roughly 17% of the target audience. The alternative was taking that same ~$1 million and spreading it across dozens of entertainment networks and shows (79 different placements in a data-optimized plan) – which delivered about 34% of the target audience over the course of a month. In other words, double the reach for the same budget by using long-tail entertainment instead of a single sports splash. Now, this isn’t to say a long-tail buy gives the immediate splash of a live playoff game (it doesn’t), but if your goal is maximizing how many potential customers you touch, the efficiency of entertainment is unbeatable. And you could always do both: run that entertainment-heavy schedule plus the one big game spot, and you’d still dramatically outperform a sports-only plan in total reach gained.

By embracing an entertainment-first strategy, marketers can unlock several benefits that directly impact campaign performance:

• Massively Higher Reach per Dollar: As noted, you can expect on the order of 40–50% more unique audience reach for the same budget by leaning into underpriced entertainment inventory. That’s additional market penetration that can drive growth.

• Flexible, Data-Driven Optimizations: When your plan spans dozens of shows on many networks, you have lots of levers to pull. You can shift spend to the programs or channels proving most effective, test and learn, and continuously optimize – much like digital buying. You’re not stuck paying whatever one big game costs; you have flexibility across a portfolio of placements.

• Better Frequency Management: As mentioned, you’ll reduce over-exposure to the same viewers. Entertainment-first plans naturally spread out impressions, so you’re hitting more people a few times (the optimal frequency) before you start heavy repetition. Then the few sports ads you do add can increase frequency in a controlled way, rather than doubling down on people who’ve already seen you many times. The result is a broader, more balanced exposure curve – which is exactly what a brand wants for awareness and recall.

In short, entertainment TV isn’t the lesser alternative to sports – it’s the secret sauce for efficient reach that makes your whole TV buy work harder. You can still get the “sizzle” of sports, but you’ll get far more total bang for your buck by first filling your plan with these high-value entertainment placements. Or as the authors put it: Entertainment TV is the foundation that makes sports placements more effective. It’s the base of the campaign reach “jar,” and sports are the extra rocks on top.

Conclusion: The Efficiency Hiding in Plain Sight

The opportunity of entertainment TV lies in the gap between perception and reality. Let’s recap the case:

• Entertainment programming dominates TV usage: it delivers ~64% of viewing hours across virtually all audience segments. It’s not a niche or filler; it’s truly the foundation of television viewership in terms of where people spend their time. And its vast array of shows and networks means you can reach both broad audiences and very specific targets within this category.

• Entertainment TV engages viewers and drives appointment viewing comparable to sports in many cases. The “must-see TV” phenomenon didn’t disappear with DVRs – it merely shifted to reality competitions, big dramas, and other entertainment content where audiences choose to watch live to stay part of the cultural conversation. These viewers are attentive and emotionally invested, which translates into advertising impact.

• Yet entertainment inventory is significantly underpriced relative to its value, creating a huge arbitrage opportunity for marketers. The CPMs are roughly half of sports for comparable delivery, not due to any performance issue but due to historical biases and market behavior. Advertisers who recognize this can capture incredible efficiency – essentially getting two impressions for the price of one versus a sports-centric buy.

The strategic implication is clear: Entertainment TV is not an afterthought to use only once the “real” (sports) budget is spent. It should be the starting lineup for reach-building. Entertainment is where efficient reach lives; sports can then be layered in for added visibility and those buzzy moments. The brands winning on TV today understand this hierarchy. They know that while sports delivers great flash and prestige, it’s entertainment programming that quietly provides the frequency, scale, and cost-efficiency that actually drive business outcomes.

Entertainment TV truly is a goldmine hiding in plain sight. Picture it: millions of fans tuning in to Survivor or The Voice with the same fervor as a playoff game, but advertisers can get in front of them at half the cost. Procedural dramas reliably churning out weekly audiences. Reality competitions creating water-cooler buzz without the Super Bowl price tag. The only question is, will you keep chasing expensive prestige placements, or start building reach where the efficiency actually lives? The smart media planners are already pivoting – because when it comes to maximizing impact on a limited budget, entertainment TV is as good as gold.