Blog
Posted on May 11th, 2009 by Jeff Storan
In Simulmedia’s ongoing analysis of second-by-second television viewing data, we’re learning more about how people choose the programs they watch and how they watch the programs they choose. Some of the most surprising insights we’ve uncovered relate to people’s loyalty to programming.
Approaching loyalty through our personal television watching experience, we start with the programs to which we are loyal, the programs we eagerly await each week. In light of our attitude toward those programs, we can’t help think that everybody that watches our programs is like us, that our programs’ audiences are as devoted as we are.
Extending to other programs, we think that all programs have a similarly loyal audience. All these other programs that we’re not watching, they have their loyal audiences. Other viewers are making dates to watch these programs and are eagerly awaiting their start times.
Dominant promotional strategy bolsters this perspective on television viewing. Networks focus their marketing efforts on their loyal “core” audience – typically a demographic. By concentrating their promotional arsenal in their own programming, networks endeavor to extend their core audience’s viewing to the next program. If network’s loyal core audience is consistent and large, then the standard promotional strategy makes sense.
It turns out that we’re wrong.
Program loyalty is the exception, not the rule. Only a minority of a program’s viewers is faithful and watches every installment. Most of any program’s audience is just passing through. They tune in to a program once or twice in the course of a season, and then go their merry way. We touched on this subject in a previous post on primetime loyalty, and further analyses of individual programs have reinforced the pattern.
And if we hadn’t been looking at set top box-level viewing data, if we had analyzed per-program demographic composition in time series, we never would detected the sizeable churn in program episode viewing from week to week. Looking at panel-based data, we would have seen the same or similarly demographically composed audience tuning in to each episode and failed to see that the larger part of a program’s ratings is attributable to transient viewers.
This makes more sense as we go beyond how we feel about our favorite programs and think through the implications of broader trends in television watching. The fact is that we watch a lot of television. The latest installment of Nielsen’s Three Screen Report has the average U.S. viewer watching a 151 hours of television in the home each month. While we, personally, may watch less than the average, we recognize that we don’t dedicate all our viewing hours to programming to which we’re loyal. We spend time surfing, sampling, and checking (and re-checking) programs we’ve heard about from friends and seen promoted. In aggregate, our time on the hunt adds up and, from the perspective of ratings, accounts for a majority of attention to programming.
Our emotional approach to program loyalty now tempered by intellect and data, we can work though what this means for improving program promotion. Immediately, we recognize that enticing one-time program viewers to commit another episode represents a significant ratings opportunity. If we can find the one-time viewers that are receptive to watching again – whose attention is “for sale” – we can devise an effective promotion strategy.
At Simulmedia, we like to say “we have a segment for that”.
The fact that a program’s audience demonstrates observable differences in loyalty and in attentiveness (the volume of program minutes viewed) implies a program-specific segmentation. We conceptualize the segmentation in the Loyalty-Attentiveness Matrix below.
a conceptual segmentation framework
This Loyalty-Attentiveness segmentation is unique for each program and independent of the Genre Segmentation we introduced last week. Where we crafted the Genre Segmentation to explore notions of audience preference and their impact on what people watch, the Loyalty-Attentiveness Segmentation explores how people watch.
We find viewers tuning in to different numbers of a program season’s episodes. In the matrix, the segments tuning in to more episodes find themselves in the right quadrants. Collectively, these are the “Rooted” audience having demonstrated loyalty to the program. The segments tuning in to fewer episode are placed in the left two quadrants. These are “Rovers”, demonstrating less loyalty.
We also find viewers watching different volumes of program minutes. In the matrix, the segments watching more minutes find themselves in the top two quadrants; segments watching less, in the lower two.
The Rovers with high attentiveness should be the focus of program promotion (the red box in the Matrix). Though relatively less loyal, these are the viewers who have sampled the program with relative vigor. Their higher degree of attentiveness to the program is a signal of their preferences. Exposed to more program promotions, they may be more likely to return to the program for more episodes, helping the program’s ratings as they do so.
Nothing more than this is just fascinating, and so RICH with reason to “pay attention” to your findings….I hope clients are…
[...] and loyalty to a program are positively correlated, as explained in an early blog post. Viewers who enjoy a show will watch a large number of minutes in a given episode and then return [...]