On January 8, 2013, Jimmy Kimmel will move to 11:35pm on ABC, competing head-to-head with NBC's Jay Leno and CBS' David Letterman. What makes this move particularly significant is that Jimmy Kimmel is already an established late night presence. This isn't the infamous launch of Joan Rivers on Fox going up against Johnny Carson, or Pat Sajak's short lived late night show in 1989. (Ten points if you can name what network launched that late night debacle.) Quite the opposite, Kimmel has been successful in late night for close to ten years already - he debuted on January 26, 2003, following Tampa Bay's defeat of the Raiders in Super Bowl XXXVII.
We've used TiVo Research and Analytics data to evaluate the current state of late night viewing and we've got some hunches about the possible effects of Kimmel's temporal relocation. The first point worth noting is that over the past several months (March-July 2012) Kimmel has consistently delivered the highest percent of live viewing compared with Leno or Letterman. Couple that with the 23% of live viewers who watch Leno or Letterman's opening monologues and then switch over to Kimmel at midnight and there might be cause for concern in the halls of CBS and NBC. Here's another fact that might be of interest to these networks: 50% of the live Jimmy Kimmel viewers also watch either Leno or Letterman live, which means they will have to make a choice come January.
In our review of some key audience characteristics, you can see in this chart that Kimmel reaches a more upscale audience compared to the more seasoned talkers. Indexing the target rating to the overall household rating, ABC's offering scores better with upper education, income, occupation and families.
Now we turn our attention to actual consumer behavior and find a similar story with the Kimmel viewers. They appear to be consumers that are more readily spending money in vital sectors than the Letterman-Leno audience. Digging a little deeper into the TiVo Research and Analytics audience insights we find Kimmel's viewers are using their credit cards and investing in their future while still finding time to eat out and go to see the latest new theatrical release.