Commentary
What's Time-Shifting Got To Do With It: The Media Community's Dilemma
- by Mitch Oscar , Op-Ed Contributor, December 1, 2009
At the turn of century, a colleague, Jon Swallen (currently SVP, TNS Media Research) and I were pondering the impact of TiVo's time-shifting technology on commercial viewing. Early analytics revealed that 80% of TiVo subscribers (approaching 300,000) were fast-forwarding through commercials. The Chicken Littles were right, I thought. It was the beginning of the end: a rebellion against traditional linear video commercialization and passive viewer acceptance.
Jon, on the other hand, long-distance cyclist and meticulous numerical idolatry-type-analyst that he was, emotionlessly informed me that currently 50% of TV commercials are not viewed in American households: "people simply leave the TV viewing room to take a bathroom break, get food, make a telephone call, channel surf or dialogue with other family viewers until the commercials are over and their program continues." "50%", he repeated knowingly.
I've always taken Jon for his numericals as many people, particularly researchers, have. I don't remember he and I, or any other media professionals or TV buyers over my past long analog career, discussing audience delivery dispensations from the ratings services and content providers for TV viewers that indulged in non TV activities when they were supposed to have eyes glued to the screen. No diminution of audience delivery, no commercial audience make goods or transactions that resulted in money back guarantees.
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We all agree that the media community is evolving to measure specific commercial viewing activity rather than just panelized program viewing quarter hours, but I don't think that it's fair to automatically mitigate the value of commercial viewing or frames of commercials in households that own the technology to fast-forward -- which I understand is approaching 33% of the TV household universe in this country.
Lately, there's been lots of trade press covering the initial broadsides over implementation of local live plus same day program ratings vs. live only audience ratings. Advocates (local TV stations), opposites (ad agencies and their trade associations) and neutralists (audience aggregators) have thrown data to the wind to support their arguments: live plus same day ratings are currently 13% higher than live only, marketers would be paying 8% more than what the commercial exposure actually is, 10% of TV viewers actually fast forward through commercials, 60% of DVR households skip commercials, inflation of cost of local TV advertising by 3% to 4% initially... The patina of numbers brought to mind Dick Cheney's immortal words: torture statistics long enough, they will confess anything. I think that we, as a community, have to come up with formulas, other than numerological profligation, to determine fair compensation to program originators and distributors, be they local TV stations, national networks, broadband video delivers and mobile devices, for the audience they deliver factoring in human nature, desires and the need to be engaged in motility.
As I lay pondering the issue of fair measurement and currency standardization for the advertising community by happenstance I came upon this unpublished verse from Tina Turner's popular song "What's Love Got To Do With It":
What's time-shifting got to do, got to do with it
What's time-shifting but an appointment viewing option
What's time-shifting got to do, got to do with it
Who needs a schedule
When a schedule can be broken
It may seem to you
That the viewer is acting confused
When the commercial is in view
But it's a consumer's right
To skip, to watch or take flight
TV's been taking on a new direction
Some have been known to say
Content providers thinking about their own protection
Scaring advertisers and their agencies that they feel this way
What's time-shifting got to do, got to do with it
What's time-shifting but an appointment viewing option
What's time-shifting got to do, got to do with it
Who needs a schedule
When a schedule can be broken
For when a commercial is in view
It's a consumer's right
To skip, to watch or take flight
if we are working to get commercials viewed then we have to discuss the 'watchability' of the commercials.
with sec by sec data, do we start 'rating' commercials?
commercials that trigger the 'skip' button pay more?
how many times is a viewer expected to watch the same commercial?
do we vary the length of the commercial breaks to 'trick' the viewers?
5, 10, sec spots for maximum impact?
with BIG HDTV's and surround sound, we've got a great delivery mechanism, the messages can have HUGE impact, YES WE CAN figure this out together.
As a person whose business partner, Andrew Kastner, has been a fixture in the LA music scene for 30 years and who wrote 5 gold record songs, my advice is, "Don't quit your day job."
Seriously, I watch commercials that speak to me or that entertain me. I also don't watch a commercial for the twentieth time. Commercials should be fresh, compelling, informative, entertaining and connect with me. If they're not, I hit the fast-forward button on the remote.
"Dick Cheney's immortal words: torture statistics long enough, they will confess anything."
Is there any evidence that Dick Cheney ever said such a thing???
An interesting post Mitch.
But I do have to take issue with issue with the "50% don't watch commercials" factoid. First, 50% is a convenient number (a la Viscount Leverhulme and John Wanamaker). which is rarely if ever backed up by research.
What I do know is that in 2004 when I studied every commercial broadcast in a week of prime-time commercial network viewing here in Australia, I found nothing approaching that level. Mind you, my data was people-meter based so I didn't have any handle on 'not paying attention', but I could tell when people changed channels (by FAR the biggest method of ad avoidance - but a nett gain to one of the other channels), and left the room (well, logged themselves out of the PeopleMeter, which internal coincidental tests place compliance at 90+%).
What I did find was that the average break yielded around a 5% audience loss, with a peak loss of around 8% at the trough of the break. Mind you, this was at a time when DVRs weren't prominent. Just last week, one of the broadcasters published s piece of research on a single programme (Australian Idol) which showed an average loss of audience of 6% - with the key finding that the ad break that was a solus trailer for 'The Avatar' showed an INCREASE in audience. In my study I also found numerous instances of ad-break audience increases - mainly due to channel switching. Such claims of 50% are, in my opinion, apocryphal.
Finally, is it really a braodcasters fault that the ad-breaks suffer audience loss? I know if I was in network sales I'd be saying something along the lines of ... well we spent millions creating this show which attracted 10 million viewers, and in 30 lousy seconds your crappy ad lost us 1 million of those viewers - I ought to be surcharging YOU for audience loss!
I believe what Jon is alluding to is the fact that a lot of people in the peoplemeter sample don't use their meter correctly, i.e. they leave the room during a commercial break without punching-out their button on the meter as instructed. Therefore, whatever relatively small audience decline the PM reports during a break doesn't account for those individuals in the sample not using it correctly. In other words, stealth commercial avoiders. And although they may not be enough to result in a 50% decline they certainly add to the number of commercial-skippers.
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Sorry Rob, I have obviously not explained myself correctly.
Here in Australia we have 5,000 people meter homes (around 13,000 people), and we conduct continuous "co-incidental surveys". This means that OzTAM (the ratings company) contacts each household at least twice a year to check out the co-incidence of what the PeopleMeter data says and what the person in the home says they are watching. This is either done as part of a scheduled call (installation, maintenance, panel member change etc) or as a random call (when there has not been a scheduled call for around 6 months).
Basically, the call goes along the lines of "when the phone rang, who was home, which TVs were on and who was watching them?" This is then followed by "for each person watching, what channel and programme were they watching?"
This verbal respondent data is then matched to the People Meter data the following day. What we find is 90+% compliance - that is, 90+% of them time what the person on the phone says is what the meter says. Interestingly, the approximately 8% of the differences relate to the respondent claiming to watch a programme on a channel that it is not broadcast on (e.g. claiming to watch NCIS on NBC), or confusing broadcast with cable.
Obviously, a proportion of these calls include ad breaks. So if when the phone rings someone is in the kitchen making a coffee or on a bathroom break we expect to see them logged out from the TV ... and in the main that is what we find. In your vernacular - there are very few 'stealth ad skippers'.
To put this 'error level' in perspective it is a LOT lower than we see in the online world, where for example ads are served to a browser page that does not have the users focus, thus wildly overstating the "page impressions" that could have actually been seem. This is a large factor in why click-through rates are so low.
I hope this makes sense and helps.
I'll watch a good TV commercial 100 times like a zombie, especially if I like the song they play or if there is an attractive woman in a mini-skirt. If you want women to watch a commercial 100 times, show a cute guy. This isn't rocket science. It works.