Blog
Posted on June 8th, 2009 by Jeff Storan
Simulmedia has made no secret of our uncovering lower than expected levels of television program loyalty. Stewart Hauser published an example of our research on loyalty, and Dave Morgan cited Stewart’s work in a MediaPost column.
Disbelief and dismissal characterize many of the responses to our findings. Citing their own and their peers’ television viewing habits, people assert the highly directed nature of their viewing and declare their loyalty to a curated selection of television programs. With the exception of live sporting events, they engage their TiVo or cable company’s digital video recorder to record their favorite programs for time-shifted playback at their convenience.
We’re sure that people do do that. We do that. We’re also sure that most people watch a lot more television than just the programs to which they’re loyal. We call this difference between all TV viewing and viewing favored programs the Loyalty Gap.
We can understand the reluctance to accept our findings on loyalty. It’s expected and perhaps natural for our reports of low levels of loyalty to conflict with people’s view of the world.
We’re social creatures. We need to connect with others. Projecting our need to connect on media, we identify ourselves by the television programs we choose and seek others with similar preferences. The challenge of identifying and connecting with others around the more solitary act of inattentive viewing keeps us from looking past our loyalty and recognizing the amount of time we spend channel surfing and sampling programs.
Data from the Video Consumer Mapping Study fits this model. The study found that people tend to underreport the amount of television they watch.
Television viewing duration and reach is in the upper right of the graph. From the graph, survey respondents reported viewing over 240 minutes of television daily but were observed watching around 330 minutes.
Around 90 minutes of daily television viewing are lost on our consciousness. People watched television for those 90 minutes but have failed to include it in their estimation of the time spent watching.
With a gap of that magnitude, people’s reluctance to accept our observation of low loyalty makes more sense. People are likely to recall viewing the programs to which they’re loyal but may tend to neglect additional time spent watching TV.
Another data point in the Video Consumer Mapping Study, one that’s affirmed by Nielsen’s Three Screen Report, conflicts with people’s reports of highly directed, DVR-intensive viewing.
The amount of time people spend watching DVR playback is dwarfed by live TV watching. As a percentage of all TV watching, live and timeshifted, DVR playback is 5.4% in Nielsen’s study and 4.6% in the Video Consumer Mapping Study. Put another way, according to Nielsen’s study, people watch nearly 19 times more live television than timeshifted television.
The imbalance of live to timeshifted television viewing is a stark contrast to reports of heavy DVR utilization and the implied higher degrees of program loyalty.
People are loyal to a selection of television programs, but the data indicates a Loyalty Gap. Viewers allocate attention, sometimes without realizing it, to a lot more television programming than that to which they are loyal.
