Attentiveness and loyalty to a program are positively correlated, as explained in an early blog post.  Viewers who enjoy a show will watch a large number of minutes in a given episode and then return for future episodes, while viewers who do not enjoy the show will exhibit low attentiveness when they are watching it and will likely not return for additional episodes.

One interesting consequence of the relationship between attentiveness and loyalty is that the future viewing behavior of an important segment of a show’s viewers can be predicted by simply analyzing data from a single episode, such as the series premiere.  Viewers of the series premiere will return for a predictable number of future episodes based on their attentiveness to the premiere.  This information could be used by advertising sales teams looking to sell sponsorships based on expected future ratings.

To further investigate these ideas, we selected several new programs on broadcast networks and divided viewers of the series premieres into groups based on the number of minutes of the premiere that they watched.  For each of these series premiere attentiveness groups, we looked at the number of additional episodes watched during the season.  The results support the original hypothesis of a positive correlation between attentiveness and program loyalty.  The results were fairly constant across programs, and are shown for one program in the graph below:

Viewers who watch only a small portion of the series premiere are far more likely than other series premiere viewers to tune in to zero additional episodes during the season.  Viewers who watch a large percentage of the series premiere, on the other hand, are much more likely than other series premiere viewers to return for a large number of additional episodes.  The graphs below combine data from the several programs to summarize these observations:

One key variable to consider is the relative distribution of low, medium, and high attentiveness viewers within a series premiere or other episode.  In the programs analyzed, viewers qualified for the highest attentiveness category if they watched 42-60 minutes of the hour-long premiere.  On average around 55% of series premiere viewers were placed in this category.  If a certain series premiere yields a high attentiveness group that is significantly larger or smaller than the 55% baseline that we have found, marketers and advertising sales teams might choose to act accordingly.  A very large high attentiveness group, for example, would suggest that viewers will be unusually loyal to the program, which might mean that fewer promotions need to be run.

What is still unclear is whether marketing should be targeted toward high-attentiveness viewers or low-attentiveness viewers.  Are the high-attentiveness viewers going to tune in to future episodes regardless of promotion?  If so, perhaps the low-attentiveness viewers would be a better target.  Further study would help clarify these questions.

Data based on a nationally-projectable DIRECTV dataset from TNS Media Research’s InfoSys data product.

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.

This idea of availability plays a key role in promotional campaigns for TV shows.  If a marketer’s message reaches people who don’t watch TV when the program is scheduled to air, there is the potential for wasted impressions and low response rates.  By focusing messaging on people who are available, marketers can improve the performance of their marketing campaigns and increase viewership for their programs.  We find that casual viewers of a program tend to be available when the program airs, and could be driven to watch additional episodes via well-placed promotions.

A previous blog post looked at program loyalty and concluded that “low loyalty” viewers (people who watch only one episode during the season) would be ideal targets of promotion.  Most shows have large numbers of low loyalty viewers, as shown in the table below.  The implication was that these one-time watchers had attention that was “for sale,” and that effective promotions could increase the number of episodes that they watch.

The analysis did not consider, however, whether these viewers were actually available for additional episodes.  It is hard enough to compete with the huge variety of programming available on TV.  If the low loyalty viewers tend to not even be loyal to the daypart, and tend to be doing something besides watching TV when the relevant programs air, it is likely that their response rates to promotions will be low.  In other words, it’s much easier to drag a channel surfer over to Rescue Me than to convert someone who tends to be away from the television during that time.

We looked at the availability of the low loyalty audiences of three specific programs, and in all three cases, over two-thirds of the audience was in front of the television for at least three additional episodes of the relevant program.  These low loyalty viewers have high daypart loyalty, even if their program loyalty is low.  This combination of “attention for sale” and availability means that these viewers are indeed ideal targets of promotion.

Additional analysis could focus on the optimal way to reach these viewers.

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.