Social TV Ratings – Why Advertisers Should Be Careful Of What They Wish For - Graeme Hutton

Allow me to start with a personal declaration As a media researcher who has tracked the word of mouth generated by many advertising campaigns I am excited by the impending launch of social TV ratings Slated to come on stream in Q4 this year social TV ratings should catapult the concept of TV audience ratings from a simple viewer measurement to a consumer response metric Social TV ratings should provide a standardized quantification of consumersamp8217 social media involvement with a TV program Nonetheless in case we all become too rapidly enthralled by the specter of social TV ratings let me also add amp8220Not so fastamp8221 Why do I say thisNielsen and Twitter announced this important initiative in December 2012 Billed as the Nielsen Twitter TV Rating NTTR the NTTR is a revolutionary new TV ratings statistic primarily based on the Tweets each TV show receivesThe NTTR brings the promise of a qualitative behavioral measure to overlay on standard TV ratings Currently in order to determine their total TV presence some media buyers simply add up their TV ratings across the shows in which their advertising appeared In effect all they are doing is weighing their total audience delivery Indeed a campaignamp8217s total TV rating achievement is often referred to as its TV weightI think the issue may be way more complex and nuanced than just comparing a campaignamp8217s total TV ratings weight with its social TV ratings Typically there would seem to be a simple threestep processStep 1 The advertiser or agency decides to focus on social TV ratings invest in the metric and maximize the campaignamp8217s delivery of this measureStep 2 For each show on the campaignamp8217s schedule the media buyer then compares the delivery of social TV ratings to the audience ratings to derive each showamp8217s conversion index Any program with an index above 100 is considered to be in positive territoryStep 3 The ultimate goal would appear to be simple Evaluate all TV shows in the campaign and max the aggregate social ratingsamp8217 conversion indexFor any advertiser or agency hoping that adding up social TV ratings may be akin to summing up audience TV ratings I offer the following two observations to considerFirst take the Super Bowl amp8211 the granddaddy of all TV shows generating word of mouth Counter intuitively not all advertisers who appear in this game see an actual uplift in their brandsamp8217 word of mouth Indeed according to Keller Fay the leading word of mouth researcher about 1015 of advertisers in the Super Bowl can see a decline in their word of mouth in the week after the game This unexpected outcome would not have been anticipated by the above processSecondly in late 2010 the Word of Mouth Marketing Association honored me with their Gold Award for Research for constructing a multiple regression analysis which demonstrated the connection between Sony Electronicsamp8217 advertising and their subsequent word of mouth This connection was not a straightforward relationship One of my key findings was that adgenerated word of mouth depended not only on Sonyamp8217s media weight but also on their share of voice In other words adgenerated word of mouth was seen to be competitiveEstimating a campaignamp8217s word of mouth is not like calculating ad awareness which is largely a function of the total ad weight and its weekly reach A more complex relationship may exist which can make word of mouth modeling more like sales modelingOn the upside UM has undertaken a number of special analyses that frequently demonstrate a strong relationship between a sponsoramp8217s TV show and the sponsoramp8217s consequent word of mouth In this case the sponsoramp8217s recipe for success is clear Match the brand to the programAlign the message to the audienceFor example a perceived older brand would almost always need to exude an evident sense of humor or even youngatheart irreverence if it were being integrated into The Colbert ReportThe upcoming release of social TV ratings justifiably enthuses many of us in the ad business Yet in order for social TV ratings truly to succeed its advertising impact will need to be verified and validated To their credit both Twitter and Nielsen have an impressive array of ad effectiveness experts on their respective benches Make no mistake if Twitter and Nielsen can get beyond the issues Iamp8217ve outlined here and categorically prove the effectiveness of social TV ratings it will upend the TV airtime market as we know itClick here to read genConnectamp8217s interview with Jack Myers on dual mentorship in crossgenerational workplacesImage courtesy of cooldesignFreeDigitalPhotosnetGraeme Hutton is SVP Group Partner Research at UM Graeme came from the UK to the US in the late 90s and his only regret is that he did not do it sooner Graeme joined UM in 2006 At UM he has engineered and activated a broadbased set of integrated communications and consumer insight tools which dovetail in to the agencyamp8217s burgeoning arsenal of media research products and systems His key clients include Sony Pictures Entertainment and Sony Electronics Graeme can be reached at Graemehuttonumwwcomamp160Read all Graeme39s MediaBizBloggers commentaries at Curious Thoughts from Curious Mindsamp160Check us out on Facebook at MediaBizBloggerscomFollow our Twitter updates MediaBizBloggeramp160The opinions and points of view expressed in this commentary are exclusively the views of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaBizBloggerscom management or associated bloggers MediaBizBloggers is an open thought leadership platform and readers may share their comments and opinions in response to all commentariesamp160amp160amp160amp160

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