In a small and growing company with ambitions like Simulmedia, everyone we hire will impact the trajectory of our business and have the opportunity to bring positive change to the television media ecosystem.

Today, we’re seeking applicants for several important positions.

Director, Attention Operations – As the Director, Attention Operations, you would be working on every aspect of Simulmedia’s media and client service areas.  We are looking for someone to recruit, train and lead a team of media and client service professionals. You may come from an agency background or perhaps pricing and planning at a media company.  You should have a strong background in media functions. You should be comfortable with all phases of Spot TV Advertising, from research, to planning and buying, to trafficking systems, through to reporting, reconciliation, and billing.

Director, Product Marketing – The Simulmedia a⁷ Platform™ enables us to transform massive volumes of set-top box and other data into predictive insight to the effectiveness of television program promotion.  As Director, Product Marketing, you would be responsible for the launch of products that put the value of our insight into the hands of our television network customers and system operator partners.  You should be an expert on the interests and motivations of television network marketers and programmers and how they make decisions.

Attention Analyst – Simulmedia brings data-driven decision making to the art of television program promotion.  As an Attention Analyst, you would be responsible for the research required by product management, data strategy, operations, and our clients.  Media or TV experience not necessary; you may have come from Wall Street, web analytics, or even straight out of college. The experience we value is your having handled multiple projects at once and making sure deadlines are met.

We’re also seeking a Software Developer Intern for this summer.   Over the course of the internship, you would support our Attention Operations and Attention Science teams, querying set-top-box data to advance analysis and model development.

If you’re interested in any of these positions, have a look at the complete job description on our Careers page and send your resume with a cover letter and salary history to careers@simulmedia.com.

Simulmedia is an Equal Opportunity Employer.  We offer competitive salary, benefits, vacation, stock options and a stake in our company’s success.

The New York Times’ Stuart Elliot covered NBC’s marketing tactics (a lot of radio).  San Francisco Chronicle’s Tim Goodman opined on production studios’ response to Leno, how they’ll wish disaster on NBC as punishment for a strategy that marginalizes their contributions to the television ecosystem.  Fellow Jack Myers’ MediaBizBlogger and media curmudgeon Charlie Warner has a three-part series on what he’s learned from the premiere.  Other outlets have relayed The Leno Show’s ratings, commented on the above commentary, and foretold further disruption as the competing networks’ prime time programming comes online.

The days after a show has premiered in its new timeslot are an opportunity to observe how television viewers have adjusted their choices of what to watch.  Focusing on a particular new program, for those viewers who have chosen to tune-in, what kind of programming were they watching in the weeks leading to the premiere and how many are demonstrating loyalty and tuning in multiple times?

Looking at those viewers who tuned in to the first week of The Jay Leno Show reveals indicators of some program preferences that you’d expect and some that would surprise.  The two charts below examine the programming airing at weeknights at 10PM that the Leno audience viewed prior to the September 14 premiere.

The first chart reveals television’s emerging long tail.  The chart shows the percentage of the Leno audience that watched any of 650 different programs airing at 10PM on weeknights across broadcast and major cable networks in the weeks of August 31 and September 7, ranked in descending order by the percentage of the Leno that tuned-in.

Only 10 of the 650 programs attracted 5% or more of the audience that went on to view at least one episode of The Jay Leno Show during the week of September 14.  Of the 10, 9 of the programs were on NBC.

The next 30 programs each attracted 1% of more of the Leno audience.  Half of those next 30 programs aired on ABC, led by 20/20 and Primetime news programs.

The second chart examines the relative likelihood of the The Jay Leno Show audience to have tuned in to various programming in the two weeks leading to the premiere.  It shows the top 25 programs by Rating Index, a ratio of the program rating among viewers of at least one episode of The Jay Leno Show and the overall program rating.  A Rating Index value of 100 indicates that the Leno audience was no more or less likely to have viewed the program as the general viewing population.

The top 8 programs by Rating Index are, as one might expect, NBC programs.  The audience that had tended to watch NBC at 10PM continued to watch after Leno premiered.

Interesting entries in the top 25 programs by Rating Index are Bravo’s Flipping Out and PBS’ Great Lodges of the National Parks and Wild River: Colorado.  Leno viewers were nearly 3 times more likely than the typical viewer to have watched those programs. The Bravo entrant to this list is likely the result of cross network promotion.  The crossover of audience genre affinity to explain the connection with Leno and the PBS programming is worthy of more scrutiny.

The degree of loyalty to The Jay Leno Show is similar to observations of loyalty to other programming: low.  The chart below examines viewer loyalty to Leno at 10PM.  Of the viewers who watched any of the Leno Show during the week of September 14, a majority, 65%, tuned in to one episode.  Only 5% of Leno viewers tuned in four times in the program’s premiere week.

Audiences arrive to a program, watch some part of it, and depart likely never to return.  Networks “own” a viewing audience the same way that you “own” the breeze that comes through your home’s open window.

Viewers sampled programs before The Jay Leno Show aired at weeknights 10PM on NBC, and viewers will sample programs after the September 14 premiere.  To make the most of the rest of the Fall 2009 season, program marketers will do well to  understand which viewers have a proclivity to sample and which viewers have a proclivity to return to programs.

As a fan of digital video recorder and on-demand technologies and an active manager of my Netflix queue, I’ve pondered the relative lack of attention that these alternate modes of television viewing garner.  Both Nielsen’s Three-Screen and the Video Consumer Mapping studies mark time-shifted and actively selected content viewing as a sliver of the attention that goes to traditional linear television.

What is it about the linear television viewing experience that is so compelling that people forego the increased control and time-efficiency afforded them by their DVRs and on-demand offerings?  In its near-future portrayal of viewers’ willingness to pay the ultimate price for the perfect video entertainment, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest contains insights to this question.

Published in 1996, Infinite Jest is set after the extinction of all broadcast television and the advertising it carried.  Televisions have been replaced by teleputers, or TPs, high-definition video displays with Internet connectivity and built-in read-only cartridge players.  It’s as if Netflix has taken over the entertainment world.  Video content consumption is almost entirely on demand.  Linear TV programming – or, in the parlance of Infinite Jest, “spontaneous dissemination” – is marginalized, preferred only for major sporting events and lower-rent fitness shows.

Lurking in the background of the 1,000-page plus tome is a video of such potent entertainment value that its viewers, both accidental and active, are immediately enraptured and enslaved.  The viewers will literally choose death and dismemberment over turning away from the video.

Intrigued by the challenge posed by the virtual book club Infinite Summer, I picked up Infinite Jest as a summer reading project.  Though I had read it not long after its original publication, I wanted to review the text through a lens focused by my experience at Simulmedia and to experience the online community built around the book club.

In the passage below, Orin Incandenza, a tennis prodigy turned pro football punter, responds to a wheelchair-bound, Quebecois assassin posing as a survey-taker while another female assassin hides under his, Orin’s, hotel room bed covers.

On page 599, the fake survey-taker asks, in French-Canadian-accented English, what Orin misses.

Orin’s gaze now was up at the ceiling’s acoustic tile, the little blinking disk of the hall’s smoke detector, as if memories were always lighter than air.  The seated man stared blandly up at the throb of Orin’s internal jugular vein.  Orin’s face changed a little.  Behind him, under the blankets, the non-Swiss woman lay very calmly and patiently on her side, breathing silently into the portable O₂-mask w/ canister from the purse beside her, one hand in the purse on the Schmeisser GBF miniature machine pistol.

‘I miss TV,’ Orin said, looking back down.  He no longer smiled coolly.

‘The former television of commercial broadcast.’

‘I do.’

‘Reason in several words or less, please, for the box after REASON,’ displaying the board.

‘Oh, man.’  Orin looked back up and away at what seemed to be nothing, feeling at his jaw around the retromandibular’s much tinier and more vulnerable throb.  ‘Some of this may sound stupid.  I miss commercials that were louder than the programs.  I miss the phrases “Order before midnight tonight” and “Save up to fifty percent and more.”  I miss being told things were filmed before a live studio audience.  I miss late-night anthems and shots of flags and fighter jets and leathery-faced Indian chiefs crying at litter.  I miss “Sermonette” and “Evensong” and test patterns and being told how many megahertz something’s transmitter was broadcasting at.’  He felt his face.  ‘I miss sneering at something I love.  How we used to love to gather in the checker-tiled kitchen in front of the old boxy cathode-ray Sony whose reception was sensitive to airplanes and sneer at the commercial vapidity of broadcast stuff.’

‘Vapid ditty,’ pretending to notate.

‘I miss stuff so low-denominator I could watch and know in advance what people were going to say.’

‘Emotions of mastery and control and superiority.  And pleasure.’

‘You can say that again, boy.  I miss summer reruns.  I miss reruns hastily inserted to fill the intervals of writers’ strikes, Actors’ Guild strikes.  I miss Jeannie, Samantha, Sam and Diane, Gilligan, Hawkeye, Hazel, Jed, all the syndicated airwave-haunters.  You know?  I miss seeing the same things over and over again.’

…

The man tended to look up at him like people with legs look up at buildings and planes.  ‘You can of course view entertainments again and again without surcease on TelEntertainment disks of storage and retrieval.’

Orin’s way of looking up as he remembered was nothing like the seated guy’s way of looking up.  ‘But not the same.  The choice, see.  It ruins it somehow.  With television you were subjected to repetition.  The familiarity was inflicted.  Different now.’

‘Inflicted.’

‘I don’t think I exactly know,’ Orin said, suddenly dimly stunned and sad inside.  The terrible sense as in dreams of something vital you’ve forgotten to do.  The inclined head’s bald spot was freckled and tan.  ‘Is there a next item?’

In describing what he misses about TV, Orin describes exposure to and participation in a framework of which he feels he has a complete understanding.  He likes that his responses to “low-denominator” programming are prescribed and predictable.  He states a preference for the familiar over the new.

When the fake survey-taker reminds Orin that he can access those familiar programs and commune with his “syndicated airwave-haunters” whenever he pleases through his entertainment subscription service, Orin remarks that the fact of his actively choosing the familiar disrupts his enjoyment of it.  Similar to his taking pleasure in the bad grammar and volume modulating tricks of direct response advertising, he would rather be “subjected to repetition” and uses the word “inflicted”, connotative of pain and torture, to mark the source of his preference.

To understand why people prefer the linear feed over their DVRs and on-demand content, I think about those “emotions of mastery and control and superiority” that broadcast TV enables in its viewers.

The changes raise the question of whether channel placement has an effect on ratings.  Do stations gain an advantage from having a lower channel number, or are channel choices so diverse and complicated to begin with that channel placement doesn’t matter?

Radio stations have long understood the value of being in the “middle of the dial,” but it is less clear whether such an effect also exists in television.  Our initial findings are ambiguous–channel location seems to matter in certain instances but not in others.

Several networks have negotiated for more favorable places in the line-up.  For example, Discovery and Discovery Kids are moving from the programming guide’s figurative continental shelf of the 100’s into adjacent spots in the shallow waters of the low 20’s.

Other networks are making room for the next cohort of high-bidders.  CNN is vacating its spot for FX at the broadcast-like channel 10 and moving down to channel 78.

For the majority of Time Warner Cable subscribers who don’t follow cable trade press, the line-up shuffle will come as a surprise.  Those unprepared viewers looking for Adult Swim on the Cartoon Network and plugging the familiar two 2’s into their remote controls are likely to experience a disruption to their lean-back experience upon finding Discovery Kids on their screens.

If the accidental viewer find herself ensnared in Discovery Kids programming and takes in a commercial pod or two, the network may count this disruption as a happy accident.  And if the accidental viewer falls fast for the Discovery Networks’ brand and returns to its channels enough to be considered a loyal viewer, then the happy accident becomes part of the justification for working with the cable operator for a lower channel number.

The question is how many of these happy accidents can a network expect to gain with a lower channel number and to lose with a higher channel number.  Set top box data can help answer the question.

The figures below show how audiences with similar affinities for program genre tune in to the same program when the program appears in different places in the channel line-up.  Each figure identifies the Genre Segment analyzed, the network, the program, the date range, whether new or all episodes were considered and includes a table with the neighborhood head-end, the channel number, the average rating for the program at that channel number, and a box plot to illustrate the variability around the average rating.

For Bravo’s The Fashion Show, the effect of the lower channel number on ratings is unambiguous and positive.  The Reality Watchers, the subset of all viewers who have demonstrated a proclivity for unscripted television, tune in at different rates depending on where Bravo appears in the channel line-up.  In Malibu, where Bravo appears at channel 42, new episodes of The Fashion Show score an average rating of 4.6 among the Reality Watchers.  In Riverside, where Bravo appears at channel 135, the same episodes receive an average rating of 1.0 among the same audience.

For USA’s longer running and critically acclaimed Psych, the effect of channel line-up placement is harder to detect.  The Remote Detectives, the subset of viewers with a demonstrated preference for crime dramas, tune in to new episodes of Psych at almost the same rate in Monterrey Park where USA is located at channel 8 and in Riverside where USA is located at channel 60.

Finally, for CNN’s Larry King, lower channel numbers have a positive effect on ratings, except for in Malibu with both the highest channel number at 70 and ratings among the highest.  Fake New Followers, the subset of viewers with an affinity sarcastic news programming that carries over to the real news, tune in to Larry King at higher rates in Monterey Park where CNN is located at channel 10 than in Riverside and Longbeach where CNN is located at channels 48 and 61, respectively.