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.

Conan O’Brien was recently promoted on NBC from “Late Night” at 12:37am to “The Tonight Show” at 11:35pm, taking over for Jay Leno and leaving a “Late Night” void that has been filled by Jimmy Fallon.  This programming switch gives us a unique opportunity to investigate program loyalty vs. daypart loyalty in our quest to better understand viewing habits.

“Tonight Show” always outdraws “Late Night,” but has done so by an even greater margin than normal following Conan’s move from 12:30am to 11:30pm.  We witness a “Conan Effect” in which Conan fans watched an additional 0.5 episodes of “Tonight Show” per episode of “Late Night” following the programming change.

The concept of loyalty clearly plays a role in viewing habits.  Genre, program, daypart, and network loyalties, among others, all affect how viewers choose their programs.  The Conan case allows us to isolate program and daypart loyalty and investigate which one plays a more important role in viewing habits.

We first located people who had watched “Late Night with Conan O’Brien” in January 2009 (the last full month of the program) and then segmented these viewers based on frequency of viewing the program.  We then looked at the viewing habits of these specific segments across three different programs: “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno” in January 2009, “The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien” in June 2009 (the first month of the show), and “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon” in June 2009.

NBC’s “Tonight Show” consistently outdraws “Late Night,” since “Tonight Show” is at a more desirable hour and generally has a more popular host.  The y-axis of the graph shows “Tonight Show” tune-ins per “Late Night” tune-in.  All values are greater than 1, since nearly any segment of viewers will watch more than one episode of the 11:30pm show for each episode watched of the 12:30am show.

The graph further demonstrates, however, that the preference for “Tonight Show” over “Late Night” became even more extreme following the programming change.  The green “Conan Effect” area shows that following Conan’s move to 11:30pm, the different segments watched an additional 0.5 episodes of “Tonight Show” for each episode of “Late Night.”  This area is delineated by two lines: the blue line, which shows that the different segments watched between 1.75 times and 1.1 times more Leno than Conan in January, and the red line, which shows that these same audiences watched between 2.25 times and 1.25 times more Conan than Fallon in June.

The red line is consistently higher than the blue line (except for one specific loyalty group with a small sample size), indicating that the preference for “Tonight Show” over “Late Night” became more extreme in June compared to January. This difference is statistically significant, as the 95% confidence interval for the difference between the two lines does not contain zero (which would indicate no difference).

For the NBC Late Fringe audience, program loyalty seems to matter more than daypart loyalty.  A preference for Conan (or perhaps a dislike of Jimmy Fallon) caused viewers to shift their television consumption across time toward the program that they liked the most.  In June, they watched an additional half-episode of “Tonight Show” for each episode of “Late Night,” compared to their viewing pattern in January.

Our goal is to drive viewership through data-driven promotions, and we feel that a better understanding of our viewers will improve our targeting and response rates.  The Conan case is just one example, but further study could validate the program vs. daypart conclusion and suggest new directions of study.  Perhaps we can reach an audience more efficiently and cost-effectively by placing spots on popular shows during off-peak hours, rather than on primetime shows for which the audience hasn’t shown much interest.  We could also try to separate program loyalists from daypart loyalists, which would help guide the appropriate promos to show to each group.  Viewers are pulled by various forces when choosing a program, and clearly a preference for certain programs plays a strong role, perhaps even stronger than the show’s time of day.