Agencies Find Scripps Study Less Than Engaging, Ask To Broaden Its Base

Scripps Networks added another piece in a growing movement toward understanding consumer engagement with media, a measurement that itself is rapidly gaining attention among agencies and advertisers.

Armed during the last several TV upfronts with its own annual viewer engagement study, Scripps Networks met Tuesday morning with researchers from several top media agencies to pitch the usefulness of the study to planners and buyers.

By hosting the meeting, Scripps hoped to alleviate concerns about a study that turns out to favor its own networks at the expense of the other guys, and in the process find ways to streamline the process. While the agencies said they appreciated the effort, they were less than bowled over by the findings.

Scripps owns established networks like HGTV and Food Network, along with smaller channels like DIY and Fine Living. For a company like Scripps whose channels don't pull big ratings, the study is a way to show there's more to life than GRPs and a high number of impressions, and to maybe justify higher CPM increases. It also provides data for its channels that aren't Nielsen rated.

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Finding a way to quantify a network's impact on its audience, and how that helps to drive ad recall and boosts sales, is top of mind at ad agencies. It's been known since the 1950s that viewer involvement boosts ad recall, and studies from Nielsen and others have sought to find the types of programs that resonate with viewers.

There's still no industry standard, but it's been the subject of several agencies' proprietary studies, including Carat Insight's Foretel and an MIT Media Lab-Initiative Media report released earlier this summer. All have found that the more viewers are involved in the programming, the more likely they'll pay attention to commercials.

David Ernst, executive vice president/director of futures and technology at Initiative Media, said the study's main value is adding to the growing body of evidence on the strong relationship between viewer engagement and higher ad recall.

"It's going in the right direction but it's confirmatory more than anything of the information we already have," said Ernst, who co-authored the MIT-Initiative study. Ernst and others said that it's good information to have but the data has to be taken with the understanding of its limitations. He said studies like these added to agencies' knowledge base, although the data doesn't mingle with planning models and research conducted in-house.

"It's something that buyers and planners will always be a little skeptical of in a study," Ernst said.

Scripps Networks executives were told some changes next year would help the study fly better with agencies and advertisers. Lyle Schwartz, managing partner, research and marketplace analysis at mediaedge:cia, said Scripps' study was limited by only measuring 24 cable channels and by omitting broadcast networks. He and others said showing Scripps' networks in the larger media landscape might be more useful, more closely following the process agencies do in their viewer engagement research.

Planners and buyers take the "home-team advantage" data into account and don't base a lot on it, instead using their own research and other data they've collected. Schwartz, who felt the meeting and the study were positive, said he knew the reality of network-commissioned studies.

"When research comes out by a media company, a lot of research is done but the only ones that see the light of day are the ones that show the person paying the bill in a favorable light," he said.

"Research that is conducted to support the sales of any media organization is always going to have that at its heart," Ernst said. "It's got a specific purpose and that's to present the network in the most favorable light." That doesn't blunt the importance of the study or Scripps' grades for trying, Ernst said.

"Most media professionals will understand that this kind of study has limitations," Ernst said. "We will take from this study what will help us understand the media landscape."

Schwartz agreed.

"The idea is that Nielsen is still going to be the ruler that we measure our buys, positively or negatively, but there are other variables out there that we use to measure the buys," Schwartz said.

Michael Pardee, Scripps' vice president of research, acknowledged the concerns raised by network-commissioned research. Scripps' viewer engagement study is conducted by a third-party and that its results are similar to other findings like Nielsen's quad and length of tune studies, Simmons data and TV-Q and Cable-Q reports.

Pardee said Scripps' intent was to see what agencies had to say and gather input that could be used to set up the next survey, planned for the beginning of 2004. "It was more about making the next study better," Pardee said.

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