This September, CBS and FOX each used early-season NFL games to promote various new programs, including the following:

For each promotional campaign, networks placed a small number of promos during NFL games, and the reach of these spots was very large:

NFL games draw huge numbers of viewers, so a tiny number of promos wound up reaching a significant portion of the total audience reached by the entire campaigns.  Moreover, a large number of these NFL viewers—over 700,000 STBs in each case—was unique, and did not see the promotion at any other time during the campaign.

It is clear that NFL games allow program marketers to efficiently reach a huge number of viewers.  Better yet, these viewers often have not otherwise seen the promotion, so new people are exposed rather than simply hitting the same viewers over and over again.  The final question deals with response rates.  Do football fans exposed to promotion respond positively, or are they poor targets of promotion who watch lots of football but nothing else?

The answer appears to be the former: NFL fans respond positively to promotions for new shows.  Series premiere response rates for promos during NFL games are nearly as high as response rates for all promos.  If we exclude same-day promos, NFL viewers actually had higher response rates than average among all exposed viewers (in three of the four examples):

As we see, NFL games are a great opportunity to reach large numbers of new viewers who will respond positively to promotion.  Networks value these viewers so much that they pay the NFL billions of dollars for game rights.

Targeting low loyalty high attentiveness viewers is an ideal way to drive ratings for established programs. We define low loyalty viewers as ones that watch only one episode of a program in a season. As we previously determined, most shows have large numbers of such low loyalty viewers and their attention is for sale. Imposing the additional requirement of “high attentiveness,” we ensure that our target is more receptive to a particular program.

Our recent study examined whether exposure to promotion makes the highly attentive low loyalty segments more likely to tune in to subsequent episodes of a program.

We isolated high attentiveness low loyalty February 2009 audiences for ABC’s Lost and FOX’s 24.  Any viewer who saw at least thirty non-consecutive minutes of Lost on exactly one out of four possible occasions in February was included in the high attentiveness low loyalty audience for Lost. The same criteria were used to create a high attentiveness low loyalty audience for FOX’s 24.

Subsequently, we split the February high attentiveness low loyalty audience into two segments based on their exposure to promotion in the first week of March, prior to the first March episode. We then examined first March episode tune in of the promo-exposed and promo-unexposed highly attentive low-loyalty viewers and compared their rates. The results for both programs have confirmed our hypothesis that promotional exposure moves highly attentive-low loyalty viewers to tune in at higher rates.

Additionally, the graphs below illustrate that the high attentiveness low loyalty audience is a more effective target of promotion than the general set-top box audience. In fact, the high attentiveness low loyalty audience exposed to promotion is more than three times as likely to tune in to the program as the exposed general audience.

In our future analysis we plan to investigate whether exposure to promotion made the low loyalty viewers more loyal, and determine the persistence of the effect.