Jimmy Kimmel's Big Move - Alex Petrilli-TiVo

By Thought Leaders Archives
Cover image for  article: Jimmy Kimmel's Big Move - Alex Petrilli-TiVo

The next great late night shakeup is coming soon to a TV near you. The last one involved Jay Leno, Conan O'Brien, 10pm, egos, posturing, agents, fire and brimstone, forty years of darkness, earthquakes, volcanoes, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria! Oh wait, that's Ghostbusters. Sorry.

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.

TiVo+chartIn 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.

TiVo+chart

In a review of CPG product spending, our data reveals that Kimmel's audience indexes higher than its late night brethren in everything from hair conditioner to cold cereal to skin care product purchase. In fact a focus on the mouthwash category finds that Kimmel scores a Household Rating Index of 124.5 while Letterman is at 99.8 and Leno comes in third at 88.0.

Lastly, a review of the top advertisers for May 2012 suggests that the agencies may not be fully aware of these audience characteristics. Some movie studios spend more than twice as much on Leno and Letterman as on Kimmel (if they buy him at all). Credit card companies also seem to prefer the late night veterans to Kimmel, while investment firms as a group seem to be missing a lucrative genre all together because only one advertised in any of the top three late night talkers in May 2012. And that one investment company allocated a significantly higher portion of its budget to the established CBS and NBC late night offerings rather than the new kid (ten years!) on the block.

How will all this play out when January 8 rolls around? What will the viewers' and advertisers' reaction be to this seismic shift in late night viewing? Will DVRs be working overtime or will Leno and Letterman's long reign at the top finally come to an end?

Our apologies to Matt Damon, we ran out of space.

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