Unlucky 7: Modern Viewing of "Modern Family" - Jonathan Steuer-TiVo

Last month I critiqued Bill Carter39s discussion of network ratings trickery in the New York Times and said that perhaps this is an opportunity for the TV industry to begin FINALLY to focus on the shifts in viewing patterns brought about by new technologiesMaybe Mr Carter somehow missed my brilliant commentary I39ll forgive you just this once Mr Carter because today39s frontpageofbusinesssection follow up also fails to capture important aspects of modern TV viewing behavior The focus of today39s story is that delayed viewing as measured by Nielsen39s C3 metric is pushing ABC39s Modern Family ahead of Fox39s perennial winner American Idol as the mostviewed show in America among adults 1849 According to Nielsen Modern Family shows a 44 increase in viewing from the Live to the Live 7 day viewing window 102 million vs 71 million among this group Carter reports that advertisers are happy to pay based on the C3 window and that ascribe quotsome valuequot to the incremental viewing of advertisements in the days beyond C3 He quotes Magna39s Tim Spengler who believes that viewers are quotmore attentivequot and quotless distractedquot when watching recorded programming as compared to live Carter goes on to quote Spengler quotWe39re finding that viewers are more attentive They are less distracted They have picked a time when they have the opportunity for more engagement than they would have if their kids were bugging them or they had three things to do at oncequotMore attentive Mmm perhaps But there39s one little detail that the Nielsen data miss Viewers are allocating some of that additional attention to skip commercials Pretty much all of them Pretty much all the time And unsurprisingly Nielsen39s not capturing that behavior Or if Nielsen is capturing that behavior they sure aren39t telling In order to see the level of detail required to understand what viewers are really doing you need accurate secondbysecond data which is a lot easier to collect when you designed the DVR in the first place drawn from a much larger sample than Nielsen uses about 300000 TiVo homes in TiVo39s caseSpecifically take a look at the chart belowHere39s the good news Based on TiVo data there39s about a 600 increase in viewing of Modern Family between Live and Live 3 days and almost a 700 increase if viewing is counted out to 7 days This isn39t surprising given that Modern Family has consistently ranked among the most timeshifted shows since its debutNow for the bad news A closer look shows that while viewing of the program shows significant increases from Live out to Live 7 the increase in viewing of the commercial pods is much much lessSpecifically including the viewing of this commercial pod all the way out to Live 7 days barely doubles the viewing of the commercials compared to a 7x increase in the viewing of the program materialLest you choose not to believe that attentive viewers have itchy skip fingers here39s a zoom in on the first couple of minutes of the program itself The dip you see is 1 in 7 Modern Family DVR viewers skipping the VERY brief 13second opening creditsWhether or not advertisers derive any benefit from ostensiblymoreattentive viewers seeing their commercials whizzing by at manytimesnormal speed that is among those viewers who don39t simply skip them outright the reality is that at least among DVR viewers virtually nobody who is paying attention is watching ads at normal speedYeah I know I39ve heard the objections before quotTiVo owners are special They39re atypical Of course the people who went out of their way to buy a DVR on their own are differentquot Even if that39s true TiVo data have been remarkably stable in showing pretty much this same picture across a wide range of programs and commercials over the 8 or so years we39ve been lookingThis resolute focus on a single currency ie C3 is costing a lot of folks good money If I were an advertiser I39d want to know the magnitude of the commercial avoidance issue so I could get on to the finer pointsamp183 How are advertisements in the shows in which I place ads viewed compared to those in other programsamp183 What are the factors that make a spot more or less likely to be viewed or skippedamp183 Is there anything I can do with my advertising creative to help maximize audience retentionamp183 Is there anything I can do to adjust my media buying habits to maximize the number of my commercials that actually reach their intended audienceThen again I39ve always been a quotbad news firstquot kind of guy I39d rather see the problem as soon as possible so I can do what I can to make things better Sticking one39s head in the sand makes useful datagathering rather difficultBut how to do it right I39ll get to that in a future installment Stay tunedJonathan Steuer recently joined TiVo as Vice President Audience Research ampamp Measurement where he leads TiVo39s efforts to develop innovative new media research products Jonathan can be reached at jsteuertivocomRead all Jonathan39s MediaBizBloggers commentaries at InteracTiVotyCheck us out on Facebook at MediaBizBloggerscomFollow our Twitter updates MediaBizBloggerThe 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 commentaries

Click to Make Your 2025 Contribution to Support the MediaVillage Education Foundation

Unlucky 7: Modern Viewing of "Modern Family" - Jonathan Steuer-TiVo

Author

Publish date

Channel

Archived in

Jonathan Steuer

Empowering Women in Media: Insights from Industry Leaders (Video) - By E.B. Moss

More Videos:

Click to Make Your 2025 Contribution to Support the MediaVillage Education Foundation

Unlucky 7: Modern Viewing of "Modern Family" - Jonathan Steuer-TiVo

Enjoying This Commentary? There's More to Love

Jonathan Steuer

Empowering Women in Media: Insights from Industry Leaders (Video) - By E.B. Moss

The payment was successful

Cookies