Commentary
Trump Loads His TiVo, America Time-Shifts News Shows
- by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, June 19, 2017
Politico reports President Trump watches so many hours of TV news coverage every day that “sometimes [he is] even storing morning news shows on his TiVo to watch in the evening.” It's all fodder for his morning tweet complaints.
That’s a lot of work. But when you have “engaging” content, how can you turn away? That’s good news for TV networks and news programming.
And it is just the kind of TV consumer behavior networks love to see this time of year -- as they ready to ink billions of dollars in upfront TV advertising commitments for the upcoming season.
As with Trump, networks like to see consumers saving TV shows. They also like to know where viewers engage in that content, such as social media.
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Big exclamation marks are optional! Sad!
Typically, cable TV news networks don’t see much time-shifted viewing -- like most entertainment cable TV networks. But with dramatic times for the President and national politics as a whole, time-shifted viewing of non-scripted/news content continues to gain value. Some evidence here, with sharply higher overall TV news ratings.
These trends follow existing TV behaviors other viewers, such as young millennial viewers, exhibit. The later spends a greater part of their TV consumption with time-shifted or on-demand programming.
This upfront ad selling period, TV networks want to grab higher advertising revenue when it comes to time-shifting from more C7 deals -- viewing guarantees from average commercial minute ratings plus seven days of time-shifted viewing.
Estimates are about half of existing upfront deals are now guaranteed on C3 metrics and the other half on C7 measures. Network executives believe moving to virtually all C7 deals could result in anywhere from 1% to 4% gains in overall advertising revenue.
But for all of this, many TV advertisers will want something in return -- looking for small cost per thousand viewers (CPM) hikes, if not a declines in legacy/base CPMs for marketers.
President Trump’s time-shifting is a good thing. But due to the volume of news content, is he also skipping through TV commercials? Doesn't he want to support American business? Tsk. Tsk.
Wayne Friedman is West Coast Editor of MediaPost. You can reach Wayne at wayne@mediapost.com.
Wayne, if a TV network gains, say, 2% more "commercial minute viewers" by extending the delayed primetime head count another four days, why should advertisers expect that because of this the networks should lower their CPMs? Does that mean that the mostly younger, and more affluent "delayed" viewers, thus added have less value than the older and mostly downscale-mid scale "live" viewers? Are the agencies claiming that because a handful of viewers are "reached"a few days later by a spot in one episode that this diminishes their worth to the advertisers compared to "live" viewers who, as we know, always rush out the very next morning to buy the products in touted in ads they "saw" the previous evening? It's all so silly, isn't it?