InteracTiVoty: "I Never Watch Commercials" and Other Little White Lies (or, "What Would B.F. Skinner Say?") - Todd Juenger - MediaBizBloggers

Once every couple months a thread will show up on one of the TiVo online forums that goes something like this quotI Never Watch Commercialsquot I love reading these threads because most of the posts read something like this quotI never watch commercials either You know the one I really hate the worst is the one for XYZ brand where the guy does blah blah blah and the woman responds with blah blah blah I really hate that one I never watch itquot Hmm You have 39never watched it39 so many times that you know every line of dialogOver the holidays I was having a dinner conversation and when you work for TiVo the conversation inevitably turns to TV I was amazed to learn that hardly anyone in my family apparently ever watches TV And yet amazingly if I asked anyone39s opinion of Jon ampamp Kate or the AMAs or which cable news network is most biased everyone had an opinion ShockingSo why is it that we continue to pay attention to selfreported research I have read numerous studies that claim to measure how people are using their DVRs based on selfreporting quotI never watch commercialsquot More broadly do we really believe people can tell us what motivated them to make a certain purchase Even if they want to tell the truth do we really think the decision process is a conscious cognitive deliberation How about segmentation studies based on programs people claim they regularly watch apparently my entire family would fall into the quotI don39t watch TVquot segment And the most egregious example of all because it39s used as currency for transacting billions of dollars the diary approach to estimating television program audiences in local markets Are people writing down what they really watched and who was in the room what they aspire to watch what they39d like others to believe they watched or what they misremember having watchedAnd to make matters worse all this selfreported research is only available for those who were willing to respond And response rates have plummeted except for the population of professional respondents Something tells me it39s the people who are not responding that I39d most like to hear fromAs I39ve grown increasingly cynical over the years I care less and less about what people say they do or why they do it and focus as much as possible on what people actually do What stimuli were they exposed to and what happened Apparently I39m a disciple of Skinner39s Radical Behaviorism although I39m just finding that outIf you want to understand or at least better estimate how many people watched a particular program or commercial don39t ask them Don39t send them a few crisp dollar bills and ask them to fill out a diary Don39t invite them to join a panel and get compensated in return for installing a bunch of equipment in their homes and punching buttons indicating what is being watched by whom Just let them live their lives and passively anonymously collect the digital trail left by millions of TV sets and you39ll get much closer to the truth This quotpassivity benefitquot of settopbox data is occasionally referenced but I believe significantly underappreciated It usually comes in the same breath as quotYes passivity is nice but you don39t get personslevel demographicsquot To which I am inclined to respond you must also believe that no one with a DVR watches commercials and no one in the Juenger family watches TV and maybe Santa Claus because the methods used to collect the data are all more or less the same quality If it39s that important to ascribe personslevel agesex demographics to an audience and you39re resigned to using a small sample anyway at least find a group where you can observe what they do rather than asking them to push buttons and selfreportThere are of course times when selfreported surveys are the only reasonable way of gathering data and there are professionals and organizations who make sure the validity of the data is as good as possible But for TV when more direct passive measurement is available why would you not use itIf you want to find out if a commercial is effective identify people who were exposed to it at different frequencies in different environments and determine whether it caused them to take action Sound like a pipe dream TiVo and Quantcast can do this today across TV and Internet based on singlesource passive observation 35000 households tracking downstream online behavior and how it correlates to various combinations of online and TV ad exposure TRA can do this today single source across nearly 400000 households for TV ad exposure and grocery store purchases And I expect dozens of other applications to emerge in the near futureFor those of you who are determined to cling to selfreported research you39ll be happy to know I only watch CSPAN and PBS programming I don39t know who39s watching all that trashy reality programming but it39s not meTodd Juenger is VP and General Manager Audience Research and Measurement for TiVo IncRead all Toddamp8217s MediaBizBloggers 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InteracTiVoty: "I Never Watch Commercials" and Other Little White Lies (or, "What Would B.F. Skinner Say?") - Todd Juenger - MediaBizBloggers

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InteracTiVoty: "I Never Watch Commercials" and Other Little White Lies (or, "What Would B.F. Skinner Say?") - Todd Juenger - MediaBizBloggers

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