Live vs. Live+SD ratings argument: Round 10…
This New York Times article by Alex Mindlin has an interesting bit of information regarding DVR playback…
Shows with content that can be quickly eclipsed by the news, broadly speaking, do not do well in DVR playback. Sports and news, for example, have almost no deferred viewing. That goes for contest shows, too.
“People know the next day that Sanjaya’s been voted out,” said Brad Adgate, senior vice president for research at Horizon Media, an ad-buying agency. “So there’s an immediacy to watching it live, or as close to live as you can.”
There are those of us who do record just certain parts of shows; or skip through boring parts. For instance - just the last 10 minutes of the Wednesday American Idol (the results); or the first 2 minutes of Countdown; or the Worst Person in the World (always shown between the 40th and 50th minute of Countdown); and there are those who skip through commercials.
But there are ways to combat this:
1) Mix the show up. Put the Worst Person at a different part of the show every night.
2) Not spending 30 seconds announcing that you’re going to commercial.
3) Shorter commercial breaks; by the time I realize we’re in a commercial break, the commercial is over.
4) And the most common one: making commercials more compelling and entertaining to watch.
#4 has been going on for years. The others I see in fits and starts. In the future, advertisers will wise up and spend their dollars on the channels that use these tactics. MSNBC running the ticker through commercials, as contemptible as it seems, is one tactic that works.
Comment by erljr — April 30, 2007 @ 11:55 am
Not for those of us who already hate the ticker. More ticker is no reason to not commercial skip.
Comment by Spud — April 30, 2007 @ 12:15 pm
I hate the ticker too. I was trying to look at it from a marketing point of view.
Do you know why MSNBC added the ticker during daytime commercials, but eliminated it totally from 8PM to 5AM?
Comment by erljr — April 30, 2007 @ 12:39 pm
MSNBC doesn’t usually run the tiker in primetime or late night. The commercial ticker is probably a tool to play up their Live+SD ratings but that’s just a guess. FNC has been playing around with a commercial crawl as well but hasn’t gotten serious about it like MSNBC.
Comment by Spud — April 30, 2007 @ 4:46 pm
Actualy since I wrote that, I noticed that the commercial crawl on MSNBC disappeared today.
And also on the crawl topic: I noticed a few months ago that the crawl goes away on FNC whenever Newt Gingrich appears on FNC. It’s there in the segment before and the segment after. Are there any other guests that have deals like this with the cable news nets?
Comment by erljr — April 30, 2007 @ 4:58 pm