Show how an audience has shifted year over year

The task

Audiences drift. A fan base gets younger or older, richer or poorer, more female, more suburban, and the shift is invisible month to month. By the time it shows up in ratings, you’re behind on the trend. Understanding how an audience is shifting is often the first step you’ll take when you’re looking to understand how to grow your brand.

The AI Connector makes this a one-question check. Morning Consult asks tens of thousands of people every month what they watch, buy and follow, so any audience you can define by a behavior (“watches the NFL,” “shops at Target,” “uses Spotify”) can be profiled for one period and compared with the same period a year earlier. Comparing like months to like months strips out seasonality, which is what makes the comparison honest.

Prompt

Using Morning Consult data, show me how the NFL audience has shifted. Compare the NFL audience from January to July of 2026 to the same period in 2025. Please use consumers who say they watch the NFL.

The result

The AI Connector defines the audience the way you asked (adults who say they watch the NFL), pulls its demographic profile for both periods, and returns a grouped comparison across age, gender and community type, with the share of the audience each group represented in each year. For the NFL, the audience got measurably younger, more female and more suburban: Gen Z and Millennials grew from 45% to 48% of viewers while Boomers slipped from 27% to 25%, women rose from 41% to 42% of the audience, and suburban viewers from 44% to 46%. With more than 80,000 interviews behind each period, these shifts are meaningful and not just noise.

The chart shows every cut side by side, and the weighted interview counts behind each period are documented.

Natural next questions from here:

• “Run the same comparison for the NBA and MLB so I can see whether this is an NFL shift or a sports-fan shift.”

• “Which brands over-index with the groups gaining share? I want sponsorship candidates.”

• “Set this up so I can re-run it each July with the new year added, and flag any group whose share moved more than two points.”

Keep in mind

Compare like periods to like periods. Any audience looks different in January than in July. Naming the same months in both years is the single instruction that makes a year-over-year comparison trustworthy, and it applies to any seasonal business: retail, travel, sports, streaming.

Define the audience by behavior, in your own words. “Consumers who say they watch the NFL” is a cleaner audience than “NFL fans,” because it’s a question people actually answer. When you define a group by a specific response, say so in the prompt, and the result comes back with the definition attached.

Ask for composition, not just levels. “What share of viewers are under 35” moves for two reasons: young people watching more, or everyone else watching less. If the distinction matters, ask your tool to show both the share and the underlying rate.