Study Reveals New Commercial Avoidance Culprit: Talking

Madison Avenue tends to worry about the impact of remote controls and DVRs, but one of the biggest factors deterring TV viewers from watching their commercials is, well, other people. That's the finding of a first-of-its-kind study observing how people divide their attention while watching prime-time TV.

The study, dubbed "Remotely Interested," which was unveiled recently during MEDIA magazine's Forecast '07 conference in New York, found that the biggest single factor detracting viewers' attention from TV commercials is "people talking to other people." According to the findings, people are talking 21.9 percent of the time they are watching TV commercials, making it the single biggest form of "attention-shifting" from TV commercials.

The second-biggest detractor is "paying attention to other media," which the study found happens 18.3 percent of the time commercials are being aired. The other biggest factors included: Changing channels (6.7 percent of the time), muting the TV volume (4.3 percent), using electronic programming guides (4.1 percent), and leaving the room (2.5 percent).

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The research does not reveal how these phenomena impact the attention to TV commercials--or whether some, like talking, may even enhance it--they simply observed and recorded the phenomena.

"This is not an ad avoidance study. Ad avoidance is too emotionally charged a word," said Mike Bloxham, director of research and insight at Ball State University's Center for Media Design, an academic research group known for its Middletown Media Studies and other highly regarded research methods.

Bloxham and Michael Holmes, associate director of insight and research at the center, cautioned that the findings are based on a small pilot study of only 49 respondents and that the research would need to be replicated on a larger scale before widespread conclusions could be made.

However, the early indications are that technology such as remote controls is only one of the factors influencing how people watch TV advertising and programming. In fact, the study also found that the average prime-time viewer watched commercial breaks from "start to finish" 32.7 percent of the time--more than many industry executives would have suspected.

The biggest factor occurring during commercial breaks was what the academics dubbed "scene-shifting," which primarily meant turning the channel to other programming or commercial content. Scene shifts happen 44.6 percent of the time. The next-biggest culprit is "attention-shifts" such as those cited above.

Bloxham and Holmes conceded that the study has some shortcomings. Aside from its small sample, the researchers failed to record how many people were in the room when people were watching TV, and what they were talking about when conversations were taking place. But they hope to obtain funding to scale a bigger and more robust version of the study.

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