InteracTiVoty: When Commercial Fast-Forwarding is a Good Thing for Brands - Todd Juenger - MediaBizBlogger

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There are many truths we hold sacred about television. Good always triumphs over evil. The nice guy always gets the girl. The football game always runs into overtime and screws up the whole primetime lineup (except "Heidi"). And it's a bad sign if a commercial gets fast-forwarded a lot by DVR viewers.

I spend most of my professional life studying that last proposition, and I've come to believe it's not necessarily true. Of course, everything else being equal, any brand should want as little fast-forwarding as possible. The loss of all these impressions is devastating to the networks; in fact some argue it's only a matter of a few years before it destroys the very foundation of TV economics. But while all this fast-forwarding is mostly a bad thing, those looking for a silver lining can take heart in this fact -- when viewers are fast-forwarding it is also a sign they are actively involved in the viewing experience. So one could argue those few impressions that do get through are much higher quality impressions than those delivered when the program is little more than background noise.

TiVo has been generating commercial ratings for 3.5 years now, and the consistency is remarkable. The biggest, most popular primetime network shows are generally the most heavily timeshifted, and have the most commercial fast-forwarding among the timeshifted viewing. Take February 2009, for example. The top 10 highest rated programs, in terms of total viewership, had 74% of their viewing on a timeshifted basis, and among timeshifted viewers the commercial ratings averaged 30% of the surrounding programs (indicating, on average, 70% of viewers fast-forwarded any given ad). Note – if the percentage of timeshifting seems startlingly high, remember TiVo is specifically measuring TV sets hooked up to DVRs, whereas the currency numbers you may be more accustomed to represent total U.S. population at a household, not TV-set, level.

Compare this amount of timeshifting and fast-forwarding to an average cable network. I chose a typical, fully distributed cable net that averages roughly a 0.5 primetime household rating. For the same month, it had only 46% of its viewing timeshifted, and among the timeshifted viewers, only 52%, on average, fast-forwarded through the commercials. That's much less timeshifting and fast-forwarding than the Top 10 programs.

Why is it that there is so much less timeshifting on the cable net, and so much less fast-forwarding among the timeshifted audience? Perhaps it's because the audience is paying less attention to the program. Don't get me wrong, lower rated networks (and programs) can often deliver a highly engaged, core target audience. But not always, and not the entire audience.

So what are advertisers to make of all this? Should they move all of their inventory to the cable net? (Probably not.) The answer starts, as it always does, with understanding the facts. There is no reason in this day and age, with the data available, to not know exactly how your advertising is being consumed, or not, across media vehicles. There is no better tool to measure the resonance of an advertising message than a focus group of hundreds of thousands of viewers, passively observed, armed with a DVR and a remote control. Then, based on the communication goals for the brand, relative efficacy of the media vehicles can be compared. And some brands may be left telling their media agencies one of the most unlikely things imaginable – "I don't think my ads are getting enough fast-forwarding!"

Todd Juenger is VP and General Manager, Audience Research and Measurement for TiVo, Inc.

Read all Todd’s MediaBizBlogger commentaries at InteracTiVoty - MediaBizBlogger.

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