Doing the Numbers: Ads Are Minuses
If you read most home-theater writers, you'd never guess
that their, ummm, video display devices actually had TV tuners. Well, maybe they
watch a little HDTV, but only because their editors make them, not because they like
it.
Me, I like TV -- it's just the programming that gives me
pause.
Don't worry, this isn't another finger-wagging shriek of
outrage about the state of TV programming today. I reckon television content follows
Sturgeon's Law just like everything else does, which is to say that 90% of it is crud (and
yes, he said crud, not the commonly misquoted crap). Heck, some of the stuff
I like probably dwells within that 90% majority.
What I'm interested in today is the stuff that nobody likes
to watch: the commercials.
Kenneth Bromfield summarized them well: "From any
cross-section of ads, the general advertiser's attitude would seem to be: if you are a
lousy, smelly, idle, underprivileged and oversexed status-seeking neurotic moron, give me
your money."
Like 'em or not, we've got to have 'em, right? After all,
aren't they what pays for the programming? Without a doubt, they do pay the freight on
those programs we like to watch -- and all the other ones as well. The question is, do
they work?
Do you make your purchasing choices based on those
30-to-60-second playlets? Sometimes I do -- for example when an ad informs me about a new
product that fills a need. But I'll only buy it a second time if it lives up to the ad's
claims. I don't buy my batteries based on a mechanical bunny. In fact, I can never
remember if the darn thing sells Duracell or Energizer, and neither can most people
surveyed by polling firms.
Nor do I buy products because an ad has been repeated six
or seven times per hour or has otherwise annoyed me into remembering the name of a
company, which means no DiTech loans for me, or any $50 weight-loss pills, or Bowflex home
gyms.
I'd wager you're no different.
I know this. You know this. So why don't TV
executives? The obvious answer is that they do know it. But why should they tell
the advertisers -- you know, those folks throwing money at the networks?
Interestingly enough, the people who are spilling the beans
on that dirty little secret are those wonderful folks at TiVo. Despite early promises that
they'd never use their nifty little device to monitor anyone's viewing habits, TiVo
began doing precisely that early this summer.
TiVo's interactive service can monitor how many people tune
into a show, and since the PVRs are computers, they can do it constantly and far
more accurately than the Nielsen Ratings logs, which require that people fill them out by
hand. TiVo's new data-collection service can also precisely measure where and when ads are
watched or skipped. And that's the information that has made TV executives very
uncomfortable, because it turns out that there appears to be almost an inverse
relationship between how popular a show is and whether or not its ads are viewed at all.
According to Business Week Online, on April 11,
2002, ABC’s popular TV drama The Practice drew a TiVo rating of nearly 9%
(8.9% of all TiVo owners watched the show live or recorded it). However, those viewers
watched less than one-third of the ads that were broadcast with it. By contrast, NBC's The
Weakest Link garnered a paltry rating of 0.9 (less than 1% of all TiVo owners), but
those viewers watched 78% of the commercials. On CBS, 60 Minutes earned a 2.2
rating, but again, its ads proved "sticky" -- the show's viewers sat through 73%
of the commercials.
The whole concept of the televised advertising industry is
one of spreading the manure thin but over a huge area, and obviously what really
works is focusing it on the viewers who are actually receptive. The very types of
programming that capture the immense ad rates are proving to be the ones that have the
lowest audience retention and commercial-viewing rates -- network dramas and big-budget
sitcoms. Those audiences are "sophisticated," meaning they tend to tape or TiVo
the shows and watch 'em at their leisure, frequently skipping the ads.
Reality shows, news, sports, and "event
programming" (the Oscars, Tonys, and Grammys, for instance) do not tend to be
time-shifted and, presumably, their commercials actually get seen. I suspect that's
another myth, but we'll get to that one later.
Does that mean that TV advertising is going to change
drastically in the near future? Perhaps, but I expect that it's going to take a heap of
demographic data to change it very much, and I have no idea how it will change. Count on
it, change will come. However, right now there are an awful lot of people
scrambling to protect the status quo, no matter how little sense it actually makes -- or
how little impact it has.
After all, they're the experts.
...Wes Phillips
wes@onhometheater.com
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