• by Wayne Friedman , April 3, 2007

Going into the upfront season, Magna Global USA says trends won't come easy for media researchers looking to get a handle on commercial ratings.

"There was... a surprising lack of consistency in commercial pod dynamics across multiple episodes of the same program," writes Steve Sternberg, executive vice president of audience analysis for Magna Global USA, in analyzing recent data.

Commercial ratings fluctuate from telecast to telecast, from different commercial pods in the same broadcast, as well as the same pod across many different episodes of a particular show (say, the first pod in "Desperate Housewives" in episodes running in November, January or March).

For broadcast television, the "A" pod--the first commercial in a pod coming out of program content--averages 3% higher ratings than other pods. For cable, the differences are greater--some 6% higher for the "A" pod.

All this ends up being better for cable networks, because--as Magna notes--60% of the first commercial messages on cable networks are for their own program promos.

Magna Global doesn't advocate using average commercial pods ratings in the long term: It believes second-by-second granular ratings should be the ultimate goal, given discrepancies in minute-by-minute ratings data.

"But let us remember that this must be simply the first step in moving toward ratings," writes Sternberg, who was referring to the Nielsen Media Research plan to start issuing average commercial pod data in late May.

Other results from the Magna Global survey confirm previous research: Prime-time broadcast commercials ratings are 7% less, on average, compared to program content. Prime-time cable commercials are a bit worse, averaging 10%. Only syndication does a better job--only losing 3% for its commercials in regard to their program content.

Magna said these commercial ratings indexes-to-program content haven't changed in three years.

Concerning DVR and commercials, Magna says, on average, about 66% of commercials are skipped. Live TV programs, which have the highest commercial retentions, also have the highest retention during DVR playback.

Comedies are the best at retaining viewers. Action dramas tended to have the lowest retention among viewers. With its mostly older viewers, CBS, on average, had the least commercial skipping during DVR playback. On the other side, with its mostly younger viewers, CW had the most ad-skipping.

As far as overall commercial clutter is concerned, the networks now offer about 69% of program content in a given hour, with the rest being national commercials, local ads, and program promos. CBS had the least clutter, with 70% program content per hour. CW had the least--67%. Dramas averaged 16 minutes 52 second of non-program time, comedies were at 8:32, and reality shows, 16:57.

The most clutter came from the marketing-friendly NBC reality show, "The Apprentice," which clocked in with 19:57 time of non-program content.