Delivering Viewers by Fixing Promotion Oversaturation - Stewart Hauser - MediaBizBlogger

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Cover image for  article: Delivering Viewers by Fixing Promotion Oversaturation - Stewart Hauser - MediaBizBlogger

Television has a content discovery problem. With the explosion of channels and programming, viewers have an increasingly hard time finding shows that they would enjoy but have not yet seen. On-air television promotion remains one of the most effective content discovery tools, but viewers are currently overexposed to certain promotions and underexposed (or not exposed at all) to other promotions.

Simulmedia's mission is to deliver television viewership. We believe that new audiences can be reached and new viewers delivered by selectively swapping promotional spots across networks, thereby reaching audiences that might like the program but would not otherwise know about it.

An example illustrates this idea. The charts below show on-channel promotion frequency versus the percent cumulative audience reached by promotions for two programs, "MANswers" on Spike and "The Sarah Silverman Program" on Comedy Central, from October through December 2008. The curves have a logarithmic as opposed to straight-line or exponential shape, indicating the diminishing marginal return of each successive promotion.

The graphs demonstrate that valuable commercial spots are being used on promotions that people have already seen.

A solution would be to swap spots for these shows across the two networks. We performed a hypothetical one-to-one swap of 16 saturated prime-time spots between MANswers and Sarah Silverman. We saw that doing so greatly increased the number of new viewers exposed to both promotions, since cross-channel viewers were much less likely to have been previously exposed.

The subset of viewers seeing the swapped spots who have compatible genre preferences and are available to view the promoted program will tune-in and improve the ratings for both networks.

One point to investigate further is the relationship between response rates to a promotion and the number of times that a viewer has seen the promotion. Perhaps a promotion only becomes "wasteful" or ineffective after a viewer has seen it, say, five times in a given week. This issue warrants further study.

Stewart can be reached at stewart@simulmedia.com.

Read all Stewart’s MediaBizBlogger commentaries at Simulmedia - MediaBizBlogger.

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