Recently, we ran a series of tests to evaluate how well on-air program promotions do at actually driving viewers to watch specific television shows. We analyzed anonymous set-top-box data through TNS’s Infosys Media System. The results we found were pretty enlightening, so I thought that I would share some of them with you today. Below are findings related to viewer responsiveness to on-air promos for NBC’s “Parks and Recreation” from this past spring, which were quite representative for the dozens of shows that we have looked at:

On-air promos work. This has been confirmed time and again in viewer surveys and attitudinal studies, and set-top-box data confirms it as well. Folks that saw on-air promos for “Parks and Recreation” were 15.9 times more likely to watch the show than folks that didn’t see the promos. Yes. 15.9X.

No promo, no viewing. People that didn’t see any on-air promos for “Parks and Recreation” didn’t watch the show. 0.17% is the percentage of folks that watched the show but hadn’t seen a promo. We saw similar numbers for virtually every show we analyzed. This means that if a viewer doesn’t see an on-air promo for a show, you can be 99% certain that he isn’t going to watch the show. Yes. Not only do promos work, but the reverse is true as well.

Viewers of a feather flock together. People who shared similar viewing patterns with those who liked “Parks  and Recreation” were twice as likely to view the show as the viewing population generally. Yes. That meant that the 15.9X lift relative to unexposed went to almost 32X.

What are the implications of these findings? It’s seems that on-air promotion is an enormously critical component in driving viewership to shows, much more so than I had originally thought. Further, it is also pretty clear that different viewers respond quite differently to different promos — thus, lots of opportunities for optimization. What do you think?

(This post originally ran on MediaPost’s Online Spin on July 2nd, 2009.)

Anyone who watches television today knows this to be true. And, anyone who sells or buys television advertising knows that the resulting audience fragmentation is a really big and growing problem — one that threatens the ad-supported foundation of the industry.

Today, it is virtually impossible for the majority of television viewers to be actually aware of the program choices available to them at any one time. The explosion of new channels, programs, platforms, devices, content choices and ways to view video at home has seen to that. In the old days, tools like TV Guide, TV listings in the newspaper, and “lead-in, lead-out” on-air program promos provided all of the information and navigation guidance that viewers needed. Then, their choices could be counted on the ten fingers of their hands. No more. Those tools, and even their online equivalents, have not been able to keep pace with the volume and diversity of television viewing choices available today. Certainly, we have electronic programming guides today but, according to Accenture, even those are only relied upon by a minority of viewers. I don’t know about you, but I myself find programming guides clunky to use and the information in them to be quite flat.

How to fix this? Should we just wait for someone to invent a new version of search for television, and solve this like we solved the problem online? I don’t think so. Here is why:

Video, not text. Search works great for text, but not very well for video. Television is all about video. Over time, more robust video searching will be devloped, but I don’t imagine that changing drastically over the next couple of years.

Little robust interactivity. Search works online because the primary interface to computers is a keyboard. Not so with TV. While remotes are getting more robust and cable TV infrastructure is getting smarter and more interactive, most Americans are not going to be typing search queries on their remote controls any time soon. Yes, I do imagine that smartphones may become remote controls themselves, I don’t imagine that happening in a majority of American homes for many years.

Entertainment-driven, lean-back usage. Using online services on computers is primarily a utility-driven, “lean-forward” activity. Watching video on a television is primarily an entertainment-driven, “lean-back” activity. Search is very powerful in a utility-driven environment. It is not nearly as powerful in an entertainment one.

I think that this problem is going to be solved incrementally, with solutions built on top of — or among — existing tools. Like Accenture, I think that enhancing on-air program promotion with data-driven recommendations and targeting will make a big difference (I am biased here, of course, since that is the path my new company is pursuing).

I also think that we will see social media play a very big role. Word-of-mouth is critical to television viewing choices and the proliferation of smartphones and mobile computing means more and more viewers will also be tethered to the Internet while they watch TV. Finally, I believe that online program listings will get better, and become more personal. These two will benefit from the dual usage of TV and online services.

However, I don’t think that when we turn our TVs on, the first thing we will see is a search box. That future I don’t believe in. How about you?

(This post originally ran on MediaPost’s Online Spin on June 11th, 2009.)