TV advertising uses an arcane vocabulary. For modern marketers, that's a problem.

What’s a TARP? Can you explain how it’s calculated? What about average audience? How about 1+ reach, a PUT, a FIB, or a LIB?‍

See our full glossary of TV terms here.

If you answered no to any or all of these, you’re far from alone – a lot of marketers can’t. And for those marketers considering harnessing the reach and effectiveness TV can offer, that’s a real issue.

Since its inception and explosion in popularity in the 1950s, TV broadcasters have developed their own language to describe what advertisers are buying. Instead of using words that marketers can easily understand, the syntax has become replete with acronyms and often impenetrable jargon.

“It’s pretty easy to forgive marketers for being confused by the language of TV advertising,” says Ben Gibb, Head of Sales at Sky TV. “Especially younger marketers who weren’t here between 1980 and 2010 when we were at peak TV. It’s developed into something that has really overcomplicated some pretty simple ideas.

“I think it’s also become a barrier to entry for some marketers because they just don’t understand what they’re buying, whether it actually offers value, and how or where that value is created. Which, frankly, is fair enough.”

Gibb has worked in print, digital and outdoor, and says other advertising mediums don’t have this problem, using much simpler language to explain their critical metrics. “Broadcasters are really their own worst enemy in this regard,” he says. “For example, impressions are an easily understood idea across most platforms, being the number of times an ad has been viewed. That’s pretty simple and intuitive, but TV wraps that idea up into several layers like the advertising equivalent of a sub-prime mortgage, and calls it a target audience rating point, or TARP.

“Really we should just scrap that idea and start using impressions like everyone else.”

Dust off your secondary school maths, TARPs are here

The TARP, also known as Gross Rating Points or ratings, has been the most common metric used to define TV advertising for decades. Essentially, a TARP is equal to 1% of a desired audience for an individual ad. Here’s an example of how crazy it is:

Sunshine Brand Soap runs a TV campaign targeted at all people aged 25 to 54, and the broadcaster is delighted to report they have achieved 250 TARPs. That means the total number of people the campaign reached is equal to 250% in the 25 to 54 demographic. Because New Zealand has 2.16 million people in that demographic, that equates to around 5.4 million impressions.

Great result! But when the media analytics show 250 TARPs next to 5.4 million impressions for digital, it’s pretty easy to think digital has outperformed TV by a factor of 21,600. And a lot of marketers do.

“Unless you’re fluent in TV language, which most people aren’t, you’d wonder why anyone allocated any budget for TV in the media plan at all,” Gibb says. But it gets worse: TARPs on the TV spot list, which is an ad’s schedule of the day and time it was broadcast, are also misleading. Gibb: “If the highest rating spot in the campaign got 8.6 TARPs, or the equivalent of 186,000 impressions, since it’s just one spot the 1+ reach would also be 186,000.

“What that does in real terms is obscure the potential value of TV advertising, because it doesn’t clearly reflect the size of the audience it’s actually connecting with.” Because for every impression delivered to a 25 to 54-year-old, 2.4 impressions are delivered to people outside the 25 to 54 demographic.

Average audience: another mathematically average term

Another metric unique to broadcasting is average audience, which is the average number of people watching a particular programme. It’s further defined by numbers like 1+, which means the ad reached one person in the target demographic at least once. Meanwhile, 2+ means the ad reached one person at least twice.

Confusingly, this scale goes up to 10+, and then stops. Again, here’s an example: a show – let’s call it Victoria Street, because every town in New Zealand has one – has an average audience of 39,000, made up of all people 25 to 54. But 1+ reach per episode is 86,100, while weekly 1+ reach is 176,600, and series reach is 412,800.

And none of that accounts for the episode where we found out Harry was cheating on Aimee, where viewership went through the roof, because average audience is always lower when compared to reach.

“That’s a good example of how hard the average audience metric makes it for marketers to understand whether their campaigns are reaching the right people and when,” Gibb says. “Which is probably why no other advertising channel uses it.

“Other channels measure performance using total reach over a specified period of time. And that makes sense, because you can understand what you’re looking at. You can gain insight into where the peaks and troughs of your reach actually were when you look at the graph, and extrapolate out from there.”

Time for broadcasters to evolve how they communicate with marketers

In the simpler days before digital, TV was the first choice media channel for most major advertisers, and because it was the first thing on their media plans, most marketers were fluent in TV. But in 2025, a lot of TV language has become the equivalent of Latin.

“The industry has been losing its fluency in TV because it’s no longer the lead channel for most campaigns,” Gibb says. “I think it’s pretty important for broadcasters to note, marketers don’t need to be retrained on TV language, because who has time for that anyway?

“The responsibility is really on broadcasters to evolve, and to change the way they describe their product. They need to start using the language shared by other media channels to define metrics and value, so marketers can actually understand what they’re buying without using a calculator. Or asking a boomer.”

But could something as simple as updating the language used to describe TV advertising help boost its declining popularity with marketers? Gibb reckons it might help: “I think it could, because fundamentally as marketers it’s still the most effective channel we have, and especially when combined with other channels, where it acts as a kind of force multiplier.

“That’s still a great story, but it’s mostly buried under this Byzantine language. Adopting simpler terms like impressions, reach and CPM across the industry – with clear explanations about what make those up – would make that story a lot more accessible and compelling.”

See our full glossary of TV terms here.