Simulmedia: "The Jay Leno Show" Premiere Week Shuffles Viewers' Tune-in Choices, Earns Typical Levels of Viewer Loyalty - Jeff Storan - MediaBizBloggers

Much has been made of NBC's decision to insert The Jay Leno Show at 10PM weeknights. Now that the week of its premiere is past, we have an opportunity to step back and survey the ripples in the great ocean of attention that viewers dedicate to watching television.

The New York Times'Stuart Elliot covered NBC's marketing tactics (a lot of radio). San Francisco Chronicle's Tim Goodman opined on production studios' response to Leno, how they'll wish disaster on NBC as punishment for a strategy that marginalizes their contributions to the television ecosystem. Fellow Jack Myers' MediaBizBlogger and media curmudgeon Charlie Warner has a three-part series on what he's learned from the premiere. Other outlets have relayed The Leno Show's ratings, commented on the above commentary, and foretold further disruption as the competing networks' prime time programming comes online.

The days after a show has premiered in its new timeslot are an opportunity to observe how television viewers have adjusted their choices of what to watch. Focusing on a particular new program, for those viewers who have chosen to tune-in, what kind of programming were they watching in the weeks leading to the premiere and how many are demonstrating loyalty and tuning in multiple times?

Looking at those viewers who tuned in to the first week of The Jay Leno Show reveals indicators of some program preferences that you'd expect and some that would surprise. The two charts below examine the programming airing at weeknights at 10PM that the Leno audience viewed prior to the September 14 premiere.

The first chart reveals television's emerging long tail. The chart shows the percentage of the Leno audience that watched any of 650 different programs airing at 10PM on weeknights across broadcast and major cable networks in the weeks of August 31 and September 7, ranked in descending order by the percentage of the Leno audience that tuned-in.

Only 10 of the 650 programs attracted 5% or more of the audience that went on to view at least one episode of The Jay Leno Showduring the week of September 14. Of the 10, 9 of the programs were on NBC.

The next 30 programs each attracted 1% of more of the Leno audience. Half of those next 30 programs aired on ABC, led by 20/20 and Primetime news programs.

The second chart examines the relative likelihood of The Jay Leno Show audience to have tuned in to various programming in the two weeks leading to the premiere. It shows the top 25 programs by Rating Index, a ratio of the program rating among viewers of at least one episode of The Jay Leno Showand the overall program rating. A Rating Index value of 100 indicates that the Leno audience was no more or less likely to have viewed the program as the general viewing population.

The top 8 programs by Rating Index are, as one might expect, NBC programs. The audience that had tended to watch NBC at 10PM continued to watch after Leno premiered.

Interesting entries in the top 25 programs by Rating Index are Bravo's Flipping Out and PBS' Great Lodges of the National Parks and Wild River: Colorado. Leno viewers were nearly 3 times more likely than the typical viewer to have watched those programs.The Bravo entrant to this list is likely the result of cross network promotion. The crossover of audience genre affinity to explain the connection with Leno and the PBS programming is worthy of more scrutiny.

The degree of loyalty to The Jay Leno Show is similar to observations of loyalty to other programming: low. The chart below examines viewer loyalty to Leno at 10PM. Of the viewers who watched any of the Leno Show during the week of September 14, a majority, 65%, tuned in to one episode. Only 5% of Leno viewers tuned in four times in the program's premiere week.

Audiences arrive to a program, watch some part of it, and depart likely never to return. Networks "own" a viewing audience the same way that you "own" the breeze that comes through your home's open window.

Viewers sampled programs before The Jay Leno Showaired at weeknights 10PM on NBC, and viewers will sample programs after the September 14 premiere. To make the most of the rest of the Fall 2009 season, program marketers will do well to understand which viewers have a proclivity to sample and which viewers have a proclivity to return to programs.

Jeff Storan is a digital marketing veteran and product strategist for Simulmedia and can be reached at jeff@simulmedia.com.

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