Following up on their initial Superbowl ad results TiVo used Stop||Watch to look at the past success of this year’s advertisers - and issued a press release with their analysis, of course. For example, Superbowl top-place advertiser GoDaddy.com had 35% of their primetime ads skipped during 2008. While perennial Superbowl advertiser Coke had 46% of their broadcast primetime spots skipped. I don’t want to recreate the press release here, so check it out if you’re interested in how DVRs impact advertising.

Following the Superbowl, TiVo released their usual summary of ad viewership. The graph to the right (click for larger version) uses TiVo Stop||Watch data to track viewership on a second-by-second basis. When viewers rewind a section and repeat it this is additive and increases the total viewership. Note that most of the spikes during the first half came during advertisements, while in the second half most of the spikes came during the game itself.

TiVo, of course, put out a full press release with all of the details. Former top ad the E-Trade talking baby was dethroned, not even placing in the top ten this year, while GoDaddy.com jumped to the top spot for the first time.

The top ten rated commercials of this year’s game were:

1. GoDaddy.com: “Enhanced?”
2. Bud Light: “Summer to Winter”
3. Careerbuilder.com: “It May Be Time”
4. Doritos: “Crystal Ball”
5. Transformers: “Revenge of the Fallen”
6. Monster.com: “Moose Head”
7. Bud Light: “Man Thrown out the Window”
8. Pepsi: “MacGruber/Pepsuber”
9. Dennys: “Thugs”
10. Coke Zero: “Mr Polamalu”

See the full release for more.

The Huffington Post is running a column by Jack Myers entitled The TiVo Imperative: Educate and Entice Viewers to “Want to Watch” Commercials and New TV Series. It is about the erosion of ad viewing as DVR use increases, and the urgent need for TV executives and marketers to address this looming crisis through new and creative marketing efforts. And the focus is, unsurprisingly, on TiVo, including a strong push to use TiVo’s unique advertising offerings:

In this context, I am urging marketers and TV executives to adopt The TiVo Imperative. For marketers, commit a small percentage of your TV advertising budgets, and for TV programmers, commit a small percentage of your promotional budgets with TiVo to engage DVR-users and educate them to want to click their remote to watch advertising and to test-view new TV series. The multiple options and research capabilities that have been developed and implemented by TiVo make it the most viable option available for marketers and networks to begin addressing the imminent crisis facing the industry.

And for TiVo owners there was an interesting piece quoting TiVo CEO Tom Rogers:

Rogers believes “there are many ways to catch the viewer’s eye to entice them to click into an ad. There are many ways to engage the fast forwarding viewer: with tags, with full screen billboards, with entry off the user interface, with insertions when a viewer is asked if he wants to delete a show when he is finished watching… any of which can lead to incredibly effective advertising. There are many more forms of inventory to come, including making product placement immediately actionable right off the remote control.”

I’m especially interested in that last sentence: There are many more forms of inventory to come, including making product placement immediately actionable right off the remote control. That sounds like what I’ve been saying TiVo should do for a long time, most recently when they announced the ‘Product Purchase’ feature with Amazon. I think it should be something the user can enable and disable at will, but I think it would be interesting to be able to get more information on products that appear in a program and purchase them if wanted. The example usually cited is to be able to buy outfits worn by the characters - but I’m a typical geek. I own several nigh-identical pair of black Timberland hiking boots, several pair of nigh-identical black denim pants, and an assortment of T-shits and polo shirts. A GQ model I’m not.

Personally I’d be more interested in the music I hear in shows. I love music, and I often hear songs in shows and ads and wish it was easier to track down the artist and check out more. Even when shows include the “Music in this episode by” tag at the end I admit I rarely manage to jot down the info and then track it down later. But I’m a sucker for impulse buying, they’d definitely get me with a link to iTunes or maybe the Amazon music store to download. (CD’s are just an inefficient transport mechanism to get the music into iTunes for me.)

If you’re interested in this kind of thing, read the entire article.

One of the things I missed covering during the week when I was swamped was a press release from TiVo about timeshifting and the series premiers in October. Using data from their Stop||Watch service they made some interesting discoveries. For example, while it had been expected that more people would watch premiers live, in actuality they experienced up to 54% timeshifting. And cable saw a year-over-year increase in viewership.

Six of the seven new network series that premiered in October drew 50% or more of their audience on a timeshifted basis. The highest rated premier, ABC’s Life on Mars, had 52% timeshifted viewing. NBC’s My Own Worst Enemy had 54%, CBS’s Eleventh Hour and NBC’s Kath & Kim both 51%, and CBS’s The Ex List and CW’s Stylista both had 50%. And the news isn’t good for advertisers, as five of the seven premiers had 60% of more of their ads fast-forwarded or skipped, Life On Mars had a 65% skip rate, showing that ratings alone may not be the best measure of ad viewing. Though My Own Worst Enemy and Kath & Kim had the highest skip rates with 67% - not good for NBC.

Todd Juenger, Vice President & General Manager, TiVo Audience Research & Measurement, said, “We would expect to see this level of Timeshifting for an older show with an established fan base, and a new series premier to get most of its viewing Live. The fact that these new series got upwards of 50% of their viewing on a Timeshifted basis indicates that viewers are growing accustomed to recording programs and watching when they want - thereby increasing a program’s total viewership. However, Timeshifting audiences also have the ability to skip commercials, which impacts the efficacy of the ads and the economics of the program, and can have long term effects on how networks evaluate their success going forward.”

There is a lot more data and analysis in the press release, check it out.

Remember the link to Swivel Search that showed up on the pause screen with the new 9.3.2 update for the Series2 recently? Yeah, that was the ground work for TiVo’s real intention - ads. Interestingly the new 11.0 release for HD units lacks this new feature, though I fully expect it to show up in 11.1 or the like. I suspect it was developed in parallel and it was too late to roll it into 11.0 without delaying the release, and they needed it out there for Netflix.

I’m sure this move, putting ads on the pause screen, will upset some users. I mean, there are always those who dislike all forms of advertising, so any ads upset that group. But beyond the hardcore ad haters, I think a number of more moderate users are getting a little annoyed by ‘ad creep’ as advertising finds its way into more and more areas of the TiVo interface.

Personally, I have mixed feelings about this. I understand TiVo needing to boost revenue, and I’m in favor of TiVo becoming profitable and sticking around. I also understand advertisers looking for new ways to reach DVR users who are increasingly skipping commercials - myself included. At the same time I’m a bit concerned about TiVo diluting their famed UI with ads, but for now I have some faith that they’re not going to tart things up like a lot of cable boxes which look like a bad MySpace page. (I was going to go with GeoCities, but most of my readers probably don’t remember them.)

I don’t really use pause very much, so I doubt this will impact me personally (and not at all right now as I mainly use my S3), but when I due pause a program it is generally to get a better look at something on the screen. So as long as I can clear the overlay this probably won’t bother me. Of course, the rest of the time I pause it is so I can leave the room, so I don’t care what’s on screen anyway. I actually mind this implementation less than some of the existing advertising.

The ads inserted into groups in the Now Playing List still grate on me. I don’t see them a lot since I don’t tend to let recordings build up to create a folder in the first place, but there is something about the NPL that is my area, while the rest of the UI isn’t as personal. It is emotional and not logical, but whenever I go into a folder and see an ad lurking at the bottom I just kind of roll my eyes and make a point of not clicking on it.

I don’t think anything is going to stop the addition of ads to the TiVo interface, it is too important to TiVo’s business and survival. So I’m not going to rail against it too hard, I pick my battles and I don’t see this as a winnable one. And I still feel that TiVo is leaps and bounds better than other DVRs, so I don’t believe there is a viable alternative. I’d sooner live with these ads than use another DVR, and I’m sure TiVo knows that as well. Still, at times I wonder if I may be a boiling frog.

What do you think about this new ad addition?

The press release:

Read the rest of this entry »

According to an article in TVWeek, research firm Magna released a report saying 44% of US households will have a DVR by 2014. They believe this will lower viewing impressions across all dayparts by 4%, but will also increase TV viewing so in the end total viewing impressions will be up 20%. They also say that video-on-demand will increase from 40.4 to 68.8 million households and broadband from 68.3 to 86.2 million by 2014.

This probably doesn’t come as a surprise to anyone who uses a DVR, or anyone who regularly reads this blog, as I’ve posted on this before, but DVR viewing is having a growing impact on television ratings. USA Today highlighted this in an article Monday.

According to Nielsen Media research’s numbers, these are the five most time-shifted shows for the week of September 22-28.

Those are some pretty significant increases over the number of people who watched the episodes ‘live’. 28% of homes now have DVRs, up from 20% last fall. While new DVR users are reportedly not as fanatic about recording their programs, the sheer increase in numbers is having a growing impact on network programming. And the biggest impact is from viewers in their 30s, a prime audience. While the seven day numbers look good, networks still sell advertising based on lower three day ratings numbers. The industry needs to accept that DVRs are not only hear to stay, but rapidly consuming the market, and largely in the most valuable demographics, so advertising sales will need to adapt. It is really up to the networks to collectively take a stand and force change on the ad industry.

With the growth in DVR usage and commercial skipping, marketers and advertisers have increasingly turned to alternatives to the 30-second spot, with product placement being a common option. Now Nielsen is reporting that product placement dropped a cumulative 15% in the first half of the year while showing a distinct shift - broadcast network placements were up 12%, but cable placements were down 20%.

I found the report interesting reading just from the data on the numbers of actual product placements. I was surprised by just how many placements there are. For example, in the first half of 2008 American Idol alone had 4,636 product placements, followed by Biggest Loser with 4,364. Coca-Cola was the top brand, with 2,990 placements. The market was bombarded with 204,919 product placements in just the first half of 2008. So if you thought there were a lot of products slipped into your shows, you’re right.

Not surprisingly, reality programing has the most product placements as its easier to work products in than it is in a scripted show. But with the deluge of reality shows clogging up the airwaves, there may be too many programs to go around. Audiences can only take so much, and with more shows on the air advertisers may not get as much of a concentration of viewers.

Personally I abhor most reality shows and do everything I can not to watch them. I guess I few shows I watch, like Iron Chef America, technically fall into the category though. But even avoiding the big reality shows, I’ve noticed a growing amount of product placement. One of the shows I enjoyed last season, The Big Bang Theory, had a lot of product placement worked into the program. Characters made very obvious use of Dell laptops, and one character works at The Cheesecake Factory, as is mentioned repeatedly. This season of Eureka is partly sponsored by Degree antiperspirant, which includes fairly intrusive, annoying product placement in the program itself. It is so clumsily handled that it’d be better if the characters just stopped and pitched the product for 30 seconds. It is annoying enough to make me want to never use the product.

I wonder if the increasing ‘in your face’ aspect of product placements is a symptom of the same saturation effect. It reminds me very much of web-based advertising, and how ads became increasingly aggressive with pop-ups, pop-unders, sound, animation, etc. Desperately trying to attract consumers, while in reality it was increasingly driving them away. Unfortunately I don’t expect an ad-blocker for product placements any time soon.

Spotted through Silicon Valley Insider.

A TV ad for TiVo Australia:

Picked up from TiVo Blog.

TiVo put out a press release Wednesday with the headline TiVo Launches Power||Watch™ Ratings Service, Teams With Starcom to Release Initial Findings, which struck me as odd since they already announced the launch of Power||Watch last November with a release entitled TiVo Launches Power||Watch™ Consumer Panel with Starcom Partnership.

From the release it just sounds like they’re releasing the first results from the Power||Watch service, which they started putting together last November. Power||Watch consists of a panel of 20,000 TiVo users who have opted in to having personal information gathered. This allows TiVo to associate the viewing data from the TiVo with the known demographic data from the household to provide more valuable data than the anonymous information provided by their Stop||Watch service.

May 2008 Power||Watch(TM) Ratings Service Highlights

– The Power||Watch(TM) ratings service research indicated that, contrary to popular perception, subscribers who have used the TiVo(R) service for more than three years, the “early adopters,” are no more likely to avoid commercials than those who have only been TiVo subscribers for one to three years. Essentially, there is no meaningful difference in the amount of Timeshifted viewing or fast-forwarding between these subscriber groups.

– All demographic segments Timeshift and fast-forward commercials at a high rate, although the specific commercials viewers choose to skip varies. For example, there are significant variances in the amount of time households with children under 12 spent watching commercials for certain product categories during Timeshifted viewing compared to households with adults over 50.

The full press release has more data and more of a breakdown of the initial Power||Watch results.