Spanish media habits fragment through summer

Spanish media consumption is becoming more fragmented during the summer without producing the wholesale audience disengagement often associated with the holiday period, as television, streaming, radio, mobile use, and out-of-home activity compete across changing daily routines.

Research from Dentsu España’s Consumer Media Insights team, developed with Fifty5 Blue, GfK, and AIMC, finds television remaining the most-used media device during the summer even as people spend more time away from home and divide attention across digital platforms.

Around half of Spanish consumers continue to use traditional television and radio, while newspaper consumption has shifted overwhelmingly towards online channels. Established formats are therefore retaining a significant place in the summer media mix even as they sit alongside a wider range of digital alternatives.

Live sport has strengthened television’s ability to assemble large audiences. La 1 reached a 19% share during the summer, supported by coverage of the 2026 World Cup, demonstrating how major live events can still concentrate attention at a time when entertainment viewing is otherwise distributed across multiple services.

Video on demand is now firmly established alongside traditional broadcasting. Paid streaming services have a presence of 86% among subscribers covered by the research, with Prime Video, Netflix, and Movistar+ among the leading services used during the holiday period.

Behaviour changes more noticeably outside the home. Dentsu’s data indicate that 36% of people spend more time away from home from Monday to Friday during summer, rising to 44% at weekends. Out-of-home radio listening has approached 53%, its strongest level in three years.

Internet use among people remaining at their normal residence stays broadly stable, producing a media environment in which attention is redistributed rather than withdrawn. Different locations, devices, times of day, and content formats become more important as work, travel, leisure, and household routines change.

Seasonal media planning becomes harder under those conditions. Traditional assumptions about weaker summer audiences can lead advertisers to reduce activity, yet a consumer who spends less time at home may still be highly reachable through radio, mobile platforms, connected television, outdoor media, streaming, or digital services used while travelling.

Television illustrates the complexity. Continued reach does not imply a return to a purely linear viewing model, because broadcast channels now coexist with streaming catalogues, connected television, online video, mobile devices, and social platforms. A household can remain heavily engaged with television sized screens while switching repeatedly between different commercial environments.

Live sport behaves differently from on-demand entertainment because major tournaments can temporarily reverse fragmentation. Important fixtures create shared viewing moments that remain difficult to reproduce through most other media, although the commercial value depends heavily on rights ownership, scheduling, national interest, and the strength of the competition.

Radio and outdoor media benefit from another set of behavioural changes. More road travel, tourism, leisure activity, and time spent outside the home can increase opportunities to reach consumers away from conventional domestic settings. Those environments become particularly relevant when commuting patterns weaken without producing a comparable reduction in overall mobility.

Measuring the resulting mix is increasingly difficult. A single consumer may encounter television, streaming, outdoor advertising, radio, search, retail media, and social content within the same day, creating substantial duplication across channels and complicating attempts to identify incremental reach.

Attribution systems often give disproportionate credit to the touchpoints closest to a transaction, while broader media that created awareness earlier in the customer journey can be undervalued. As channel mixes become more complex, advertisers are placing greater weight on marketing mix modelling, incrementality tests, experiments, and other methods designed to separate genuine commercial contribution from simple correlation.

Budget pressure raises the standard further. Marketing teams are being asked to demonstrate clearer returns while audiences divide their time across more platforms and customer journeys become harder to observe. Seasonal allocation therefore requires more than historic assumptions about which media consumers traditionally use during July and August.

The Spanish findings also expose the difference between reach and attention. A channel can retain a very large audience while individual sessions become shorter or more distracted, while a smaller medium may provide a highly relevant context at a specific moment. Channel selection increasingly depends on the objective of a campaign and the role each medium plays within it.

International campaigns face another layer of variation. Holiday timing, climate, domestic travel, television rights, streaming penetration, radio habits, and local media structures differ considerably between European markets, limiting the usefulness of copying a single summer strategy across several countries.

Fragmentation also changes the competitive environment for media owners. Broadcasters are defending reach while investing in streaming, digital publishers are competing for attention across several device types, and platforms are attempting to capture more advertising spend through integrated data and measurement products.

Dentsu’s Spanish data show a market in which summer remains commercially active, but the route to consumers is less predictable. Audiences have not disappeared; their routines have become more fluid, forcing media strategies to follow shifts in location, device use, and attention rather than relying on a simple seasonal reduction in activity.