The New York Timesb Stuart Elliot covered NBCbs marketing tactics (a lot of radio).B San Francisco Chroniclebs Tim Goodman opined on production studiosb response to Leno, how theybll wish disaster on NBC as punishment for a strategy that marginalizes their contributions to the television ecosystem.B Fellow Jack Myersb MediaBizBlogger and media curmudgeon Charlie Warner has a three-part series on what hebs learned from the premiere.B Other outlets have relayed The Leno Showbs ratings, commented on the above commentary, and foretold further disruption as the competing networksb 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.B 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 youbd expect and some that would surprise.B 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 televisionbs emerging long tail.B 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.B Of the 10, 9 of the programs were on NBC.

The next 30 programs each attracted 1% of more of the Leno audience.B 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.B 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.B 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.B 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 Bravobs Flipping Out and PBSb Great Lodges of the National Parks and Wild River: Colorado.B 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.B 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.B The chart below examines viewer loyalty to Leno at 10PM.B Of the viewers who watched any of the Leno Show during the week of September 14, a majority, 65%, tuned in to one episode.B Only 5% of Leno viewers tuned in four times in the programbs premiere week.

Audiences arrive to a program, watch some part of it, and depart likely never to return.B Networks bownb a viewing audience the same way that you bownb the breeze that comes through your homebs 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.B To make the most of the rest of the Fall 2009 season, program marketers will do well toB understand which viewers have a proclivity to sample and which viewers have a proclivity to return to programs.

This is why media companies are suffering from such extraordinary audience fragmentation, having to work so hard to capture audiences and even harder to keep up their ad rates. Certainly, the maintenance of ad rates is also under extraordinary pressure from the current financial crisis. But what I think is clear to most, is that if media companies don’t solve their “audience problem” (or “business model” problem) by the time this crisis is over, their businesses will probably be over anyway. Thus, it is critical today for media companies not only to structure their businesses to survive the crisis over the next two or so years, but to structure them to be competitive in what will certainly be significantly altered media landscape that values audience attention, not media distribution. Here’s some of what I think folks should expect from this new media reality:

• Smaller mass media. Audience fragmentation will not only continue, but accelerate. It will be harder and more expensive to truly capture and keep audiences’ attention.

• Heavy, inflexible fixed cost structures mean death. Not only that — but the inability to move nimbly and develop, test, measure and adjust new media products to audiences in a constant and dynamic way will also mean death.

• Exposure-driven ad model dies. In a world where media distribution is scarce, so are audience exposures. In a world where media distribution is plentiful, audience exposures become plentiful as well and very, very cheap. This is why MySpace, Facebook and Twitter are killing the CPM-driven model of the current display ad model in the online world. It is only going to get worse. In a world where attention is scarce, value shifts away from the exposure and toward either unique sponsorship (athlete or sports team) or performance (Google AdSense). Anyone stuck in between will die.

• Subscription relationships become even more precious. Where attention is scarce, those companies that already have access to both the attention and wallets of audiences have a perishable opportunity to hold or expand those relationships, but they will need to move quickly and aggressively. Whether these efforts look like Jeff Bewkes’ “TV Everywhere” strategy or sports teams giving season ticket holders free hot dogs and preferred parking, it is incumbent on media companies to find ways to hold existing subscriber relationships, at all costs. The advantage that such relationships give companies over their competitors is enormous, particularly when times are tough. Just look at the ascendancy of cable programmers and their dual revenue streams, relative to broadcast networks and their ad-only models.

• Audience re-aggregation becomes critical. As audiences fragment, it become even more important for media owners to participate in scaled offerings to advertisers. Whether this means more consolidation and more ad networks across different media, scale becomes more essential and in the future it will likely only be achieved through “re-aggregation” plays that combine access to audiences from multiple properties for sale to advertisers and marketers.

As you can tell, I think that our media future is going to be all about audience attention rather than media distribution. What do you think?

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