The last blog entry introduced the spot TuneAway metric and showed how it varies by month, along with some prior research on the topic.B Now, we can use the metric and other variables to answer the question of optimal spot position within a pod.B Marketers seek to maximize the return on investment of their promotional campaigns, and since viewership varies by spot position, the specific placement of an ad within a pod can have a meaningful impact on ROI.

A bpodb is essentially a commercial break, a break in the middle of the scheduled programming.B Pods contain bspots,b or advertisements, which can vary in length but tend to be 30 seconds long. B Pods vary in the number of spots that they contain.B A commercial break during a 20-second timeout of a close basketball game will probably contain only one spot, whereas a pod between two movies on a movie channel could have 10 or more spots.B As a point of reference, we can look at the distribution of pod lengths in the original dataset, which looks at major broadcast channels for the last four months of 2009:

In this dataset, the average pod had 7.5 spots, while 85% of pods had between 4 and 11 spots.B Spot length is not considered in this graph; an interesting point for future study is whether average spot length changes depending on the number of spots in a pod.

Next we can investigate the best position in a pod.B Conventional wisdom says that the first position is the best, since viewers will tend to watch at least some of it before changing the channel.B Does the data tell the same story?B Here is the graph for TuneAway by pod position, using the same dataset as before:

The first spot in a pod has by far the highest TuneAway.B Conceptually, this finding makes sense.B Active viewers who are most likely to change the channel will do so during the first spot in a pod, which raises the TuneAway value for the first spot.B These active viewers are no longer on the channel for subsequent spots in the pod, so those spots have lower TuneAway values.

Does the high first-spot TuneAway value mean that the conventional wisdom is wrong?B Are later spots actually more valuable than the first one?B TuneAway is an interesting metric, but what marketers really care about is how many people actually watched the advertisement, or how much of the advertisement was actually watched.B In fact, what we find is that regardless of pod size, the first spot tends to have the highest TuneAway but also the highest viewership, as demonstrated here, with pod size held constant at eight:

The first spot gets watched more than any other spot, even though it also has the highest TuneAway.B This conclusion may seem counterintuitive, but it makes sense when we remember that the TuneAway metric does not have a concept of volume.B In other words, there tend to be more people watching the first spot in a pod than later spots in the pod, so even though the first spot has the highest TuneAway, it can still have the highest viewership, as the graphs show.B Assuming constant cost across spots, marketers seeking to maximize ROI should try to place their ads first within their respective pods.

An upcoming entry will look at TuneAway from other angles, including how the metric varies by day and time.

Data from Kantar Mediabs DirecTView product.

Our recent work focuses on more of these factors influencing promotional effectiveness. B As has been previously discussed, we find a strong lead-in effect. We also confirm that promos placed in the first commercial break (pod), as well as those in the last pod tend to be most effective.

The Serial Position Effect first documented by a German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus may help explain why, all other factors being equal, promo position within a carrier program has an important effect on subsequent response rates.

Ebbinghaus found that people are better at recalling items from the beginning (bprimacy effectb) and end (brecency effectb) of a list rather than the middle. Primacy effect is attributed to the fact that the short-term memory is less crowded by additional items and more attention may be dedicated to processing the first item and storing it in the long term memory. B Recency effect is explained by the easy retrieval of the last item still from a short-term memory.

In our study we compared tune in rates in response to promotions placed at different points within the same carrier program. In the chart below we present tune in rates to the September 23, 2009 premiere of ABCbs Modern Family as a function of promotional exposure in different spots within The King of Queens on TBS earlier the same day.

As we can see, the spots at 4:07pm and 4:55pm outperformed other spots within The King of Queens. The King of Queens at 4:07pm spot is placed in the first pod of the program. The higher response rate for the viewers exposed to the promo within this spot may be explained by the primacy effect. The 4:55pm spot is placed in the last pod of the program and leads in to Friends episode at 5pm. Thirty-six percent of the 4:55pm spot viewers tuned in to Friends at 5pm. Interestingly, only one-third of the audience exposed to the promotion at 4:07pm overlaps with the audience that saw the promo at 4:55pm. Most of the audience at 4:55pm is a fresh pool of viewers who are exposed to the Modern Family promo for the first time within their The King of Queens viewing session. Therefore, the primacy effect again may be used to explain the higher subsequent tune in to the promoted program.

In another example below, we compared tune in rates to the first episode of Glee on FOX after promo exposure on TLCbs Cake Boss two days prior. Once again the promo positioning within the first pod proves to be advantageous.

Not surprisingly, the response rates to promotions directly leading in to the program on the same network are the highest. However, this might be in equal measure attributed to the recency effect of promotions and to the fact that the viewers are available on the network at the right time and would tune in to the program anyway.

The data reported here is based on a nationally projectable dataset of DirecTV subscribers from TNS Infosys.