• by Paul Gough , August 4, 2003

After years as the lone wolf of out-of-home TV audience measurement, ESPN ABC Sports is expanding its research beyond TV sports and is inviting the rest of the TV industry to think beyond couch potatoes.

Effective with the 2004 edition of the so-called Total TV Audience Monitor (T-TAM), Disney sibling ABC will begin adding data on the out-of-home audience of its entertainment shows, which are viewed in such far-flung locations as college dorms, Laundromats, gyms bars and other venues that are not normally measured by Nielsen Media Research.

An expanded version of the every-other-year study, which has been commissioned solely by ESPN ABC Sports, should be especially noteworthy to media planners and buyers, because the research shows out-of-home viewing to be sizeable, especially among the highly coveted 18-34 demographic.

For example, the study finds more than 17 million men watch TV each week in unmeasured out-of-home locations.

"This is a significant audience that can't be ignored. The traditional out-of-home advertising of billboards and such is a $6.5 billion business," said Artie Bulgrin, senior vice president for research and sales development at ESPN. "Advertisers obviously consider that to have value. Why not this?"

ABC's contribution widens the net, not only attempting to measure ESPN's predominantly young male audience but also expanding to include out-of-home viewing by women over 18. It's an effort that network executives and researchers say is crucial to moving the study away from a proprietary nature.

"What we're trying to get off the ground here is more a syndicated study, and we are trying to move away from a proprietary study that we've conducted over the years, because that will lead to more acceptance throughout the industry," Bulgrin said.

The Total TV Audience Monitor, conducted by Montesano Marketing Research, has helped ESPN find an additional 1.5 rating points by counting out-of-home viewers. It's almost a half a million additional viewers, said researcher Dick Montesano.

"A good amount of that audience is unduplicated," said Bulgrin. "In any given week you can't reach the viewers except outside the home." Bulgrin said that where it doesn't provide incremental reach, the out-of-home audience represents additional exposures. Barbara Leflein, a market researcher whose Leflein Associates is involved in the study, said including female demos will help chart a whole new audience and help fill in another that T-TAM has already partially mapped, the college student.

Bulgrin said the T-TAM study is probably the only study that provides a complete measure of college students, whether they live at home (measurable by People Meters) or on-campus. He said college students who live off campus are eligible for People Meters but it isn't clear how many they have in the panel. "What they clearly don't measure is the students who live on campus in group quarters," Bulgrin said.

However it's measured, the 15.6 million college students nationwide are a marketer's dream. A 360 Youth-Alloy/Harris Interactive study found last year that college students spent $200 billion a year, with the average student having about $287/month in discretionary spending. The study found that 85% watched TV daily, although the study didn't track specific usage like the Total TV Audience Monitor does.

360 Youth/Alloy's Samantha Skey said there's little research available about the viewing habits of college students and the population is probably vastly undercounted. She said a lot of the media is following the audience, with far more TV programming, Web sites and video games directly engaging the Generation Y audience.

"It's the media measurement that hasn't caught up," Skey said.

A Harris survey found that teen-agers today are spending twice as much in equivalent dollars than teens did in 1966. They're also more influential and better educated than previous generations, Skey said. Marketers see this now and, looking at Census data, know that they'll be contending with the Generation Y audience more and more. Companies are starting to interact with them now.

"Even if it's not their top audience today, it will become a very important audience to them," Skey said. "They've got to be addressing this audience. How can you not? It's a critical time developing their brand loyalties."

Montesano said it isn't true that all out-of-home viewing is distracted and not as intense as in-home viewing. The definition is wide. It encompasses not only glancing at the TV while working out or killing time in the waiting room but also watching alone in a dorm room or a group of women watching a soap opera.

There's also the issue of methodology. The Total TV Audience Monitor is diary-based.

"There's no exposure measurement, no viewing measurement. Ours is a diary. If they [survey respondents] put that in there as a show that they watch, they not only were there but they considered themselves viewing it. It's a more rigorous measure, which is close to what Nielsen does," said Montesano.

Viewing behavior is different, and ESPN's experience with the out-of-home TV audience is that there's more likely to be a lift during the daytime. It's not only the college students' prime viewing time but also a growing number of people watching TV in the workplace.

ESPN and ABC aren't expecting this to replace other measurements but rather to augment them. No one thinks it's going to be a currency, least of which because it isn't measured every week or even every quarter. But Bulgrin said he hopes that by marketing the study to others who can buy it or join in, its status in the marketplace will be assured. Montesano and Leflein are taking their case - and kits - to other networks, agencies and advertisers, hoping to enlist more support.