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.

Approaching loyalty through our personal television watching experience, we start with the programs to which we are loyal, the programs we eagerly await each week.B In light of our attitude toward those programs, we can’t help think that everybody that watches our programs is like us, that our programs’ audiences are as devoted as we are.

Extending to other programs, we think that all programs have a similarly loyal audience.B All these other programs that we’re not watching, they have their loyal audiences.B Other viewers are making dates to watch these programs and are eagerly awaiting their start times.

Dominant promotional strategy bolsters this perspective on television viewing.B Networks focus their marketing efforts on their loyal “core” audience – typically a demographic. B By concentrating their promotional arsenal in their own programming, networks endeavor to extend their core audience’s viewing to the next program.B If network’s loyal core audience is consistent and large, then the standard promotional strategy makes sense.

It turns out that we’re wrong.

Program loyalty is the exception, not the rule.B Only a minority of a program’s viewers is faithful and watches every installment.B Most of any program’s audience is just passing through.B They tune in to a program once or twice in the course of a season, and then go their merry way.B We touched on this subject in a previous post on primetime loyalty, and further analyses of individual programs have reinforced the pattern.

And if we hadn’t been looking at set top box-level viewing data, if we had analyzed per-program demographic composition in time series, we never would detected the sizeable churn in program episode viewing from week to week.B Looking at panel-based data, we would have seen the same or similarly demographically composed audience tuning in to each episode and failed to see that the larger part of a program’s ratings is attributable to transient viewers.

This makes more sense as we go beyond how we feel about our favorite programs and think through the implications of broader trends in television watching.B The fact is that we watch a lot of television.B The latest installment of Nielsen’s Three Screen Report has the average U.S. viewer watching a 151 hours of television in the home each month.B While we, personally, may watch less than the average, we recognize that we don’t dedicate all our viewing hours to programming to which we’re loyal.B We spend time surfing, sampling, and checking (and re-checking) programs we’ve heard about from friends and seen promoted.B In aggregate, our time on the hunt adds up and, from the perspective of ratings, accounts for a majority of attention to programming.

Our emotional approach to program loyalty now tempered by intellect and data, we can work though what this means for improving program promotion.B Immediately, we recognize that enticing one-time program viewers to commit another episode represents a significant ratings opportunity.B If we can find the one-time viewers that are receptive to watching again – whose attention is “for sale” – we can devise an effective promotion strategy.

At Simulmedia, we like to say “we have a segment for that”.

The fact that a program’s audience demonstrates observable differences in loyalty and in attentiveness (the volume of program minutes viewed) implies a program-specific segmentation.B We conceptualize the segmentation in the Loyalty-Attentiveness Matrix below.

a conceptual segmentation framework

This Loyalty-Attentiveness segmentation is unique for each program and independent of the Genre Segmentation we introduced last week.B Where we crafted the Genre Segmentation to explore notions of audience preference and their impact on what people watch, the Loyalty-Attentiveness Segmentation explores how people watch.

We find viewers tuning in to different numbers of a program season’s episodes.B In the matrix, the segments tuning in to more episodes find themselves in the right quadrants.B Collectively, these are the “Rooted” audience having demonstrated loyalty to the program.B The segments tuning in to fewer episode are placed in the left two quadrants.B These are “Rovers”, demonstrating less loyalty.

We also find viewers watching different volumes of program minutes.B In the matrix, the segments watching more minutes find themselves in the top two quadrants; segments watching less, in the lower two.

The Rovers with high attentiveness should be the focus of program promotion (the red box in the Matrix).B Though relatively less loyal, these are the viewers who have sampled the program with relative vigor.B Their higher degree of attentiveness to the program is a signal of their preferences.B Exposed to more program promotions, they may be more likely to return to the program for more episodes, helping the program’s ratings as they do so.

One of the challenges is to convey the nature of audiences based on a deeper examination of viewing preferences in a manner that make them easy to understand.B With the assortment of data views compiled in the Audience Profile below, we attempt to do just that.

We combine general descriptions of the audience with a Geographic Distribution, a Genre Tune-in Index and the Primetime Loyalty heat map (which we covered in greater detail in a previous post).B The Geographic Distribution shows where the audience is located,the volume of audience present in different geographies (size of the circles) and the audience concentration relative to the general population (circle colors; red is highest).B Genre Tune-in Index measures the likelihood of tune-in to differently classified programming compared to the general population.