Younger people have adopted the DVR a lot faster than the baby boomers. A perfect example is the CW network, which has 44% less live viewing during primetime than CBS. CBS skews toward an older viewer (with programs like 60 Minutes), who tends to watch more shows live – all because of habit. My father records PGA Tour golf events and when he plays them from his recorded list he sits through the commercials without fast-forwarding. Is he lazy? Charles Duhigg might argue his behavior is related to habit. In contrast, the younger viewer watching Gossip Girl on the CW is in the habit of recording his/her favorite TV show and speeding through the commercials.

It made me think about the implications over time, as newer generations grow up with the DVR, streaming video, etc. What habits and expectations will they have? Will they even be willing to tolerate advertising in their content? Or will they be habitualized to skip over ads or avoid ad-driven content entirely? What new business models will work with the new audiences coming up? Check out the full post.

Also at MediaBizBloggers, Alex Petrilli, senior manager of audience research at TiVo, talks about a potentially surprising finding from TiVo viewing data. TiVo data relating to viewing of movie ads seems to be a fairly strong predictor of future box office performance. In other words, if users stop and watch the ad, the movie will do well in the box office. But the more users who skip through the ad without watching it, the worse the film will perform.

During the past year TiVo has been studying box office performances in relation to the fast-forward rates of movie spots – and the correlation between the two is undeniable. Fast-forward rate is simply the percent a spot is skipped during live plus seven days of time-shifted viewing. On average the fast-forward rates for movie spots, which are traditionally some of the most popular commercials on television, range from 12-17%.

We first took notice of this correlation in September of 2011 when the latest “can’t miss” Sarah Jessica Parker film I Don’t Know How She Does It was set to open. The fast-forward rate almost jumped out of our TiVo Stop||Watch portal with a 20.4% rate. This was unusually high for a theatrical release. Not surprisingly, the box office followed suit opening at #6 for the weekend of September 17, 2011, scrounging up $4.4 million. The Avengers amassed a total of $4.4 million on a Tuesday afternoon… in Des Moines.
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Fast-forward rate can also work the other way too and reveal a hit. A successful fast-forward rate will drop below 12%. Two recent examples are The Hunger Games which scored an 11.8% fast-forward rate in its initial broadcast campaign and The Avengers delivering a 10.3% fast-forward rate. Although expectations were high for these films there are no guarantees.

Of course, no system is perfect. It seems that children’s films and horror films don’t follow the same patterns, for example. Children’s film’s ads tend to run during children’s programming, and they don’t fast-forward ads. I’m not sure about horror films – perhaps people skip the ads because they’re scary? Or do more people watch the ads but then not see the film because it is scary? Either way, these’s more info in the full post, so check it out.

The post seems designed to cast further doubt on the value of Nielsen’s C3 (Live+3 days) data, the mainstay of today’s ad buying. It does this by raising questions seemingly designed to generate a little fear, uncertainty, and doubt in the mind of the reader:

Changing Channels In 2008, according to Nielsen, the average TV household received 130.1 channels. Today, a midrange DirecTV package includes 225+ channels. Is the C3 metric and the Nielsen sample size equipped to handle this increased fragmentation?

Tablet Time In April of 2010 the first iPad was released and second screen viewing began to accelerate at a rapid pace. In fact, according to a recent study commissioned by Viacom, tablets have surpassed computers for full length TV show viewing and now account for 15% of all viewing. The industry doesn’t currently have a viable way to measure data for second screen viewing so where is it going to come from in the future? Nielsen’s cross-platform measurement plan cuts their NTI sample in half leaving approximately ten thousand homes to interpret what is occurring on the second screen, hardly a robust sample size.

DVR Domination And then there’s the DVR: According to a number of research studies, DVR penetration has more than doubled since 2007, going from 22% to over 45% today. The C3 metric was produced in an attempt to assuage the affect DVRs had on viewing in the home. C3 measures average viewership during the specific times when commercials are aired on a minute-by-minute basis. There are a couple of flaws in this formula, the most prevalent of which is minute-by-minute analysis. If a commercial break during Modern Family begins at 9:14:46, as I understand it, 9:14 is included in the C3 calculation. Bucketing this way can cause data which doesn’t paint the real picture of viewing. Let me show you what I mean.

He then goes on to highlight the increased accuracy of TiVo’s own Stop||Watch service. And they continue to pick on poor Modern Family as their example show:

At TiVo, our Stop||Watch rating service tracks viewing on a second-by-second basis and when analyzing a top rated show such as Modern Family, the time-shifted ratings in DVR homes can drop as much as 60% over a 14-second interval in the moments after a commercial break begins. 60%! Including those 46 seconds into the C3 calculation inflates the viewership levels for almost half of all U.S. homes. There are other factors that further complicate the equation – pod busters, commercial-program integrated spots, network promos, etc. – none of which were contemplated in the construction of the C3 metric.

TiVo really seems to be gunning hard for Nielsen’s spot as the ratings provider used as the basis for ad buying. Of course, they do seem to have a superior offering that provides much more accurate data to ad buyers.

Via MediaBizBloggers.

In January, during CES, they put out a press release about OTT content and recorded TV overtaking Live TV viewing. They reported that, on web-connected units, live viewing was only 38%. And among users who use OTT services like Netflix, Hulu Plus, and Amazon Instant Video it is only 27%. The source for this data? Stop||Watch. That’s a bit of indirect marketing – “Look at what we can do with this data. Imagine what you could do with it.”

Last month they made a direct pitch when they announced the launch of ‘Next Day’ data services in Stop||Watch. Of course, they used the Academy Awards as a ‘hook’ for the announcement, as they released it the next morning and included viewing data from the previous night’s broadcast. Which is a clever marketing move as the popular press doesn’t care about the next day data service, but it got a lot of press because of the Academy Award data that was included.

Last month also saw the announcement of the deal with AT&T AdWorks to incorporate their data into Stop||Watch. Last week we had CEO Tom Rogers’ letter to the editor in The New York Times. And while he never mentioned Stop||Watch by name, it was obviously a stealth pitch for the service.

But that’s not all, over the past few weeks TiVo bloggers at MediaBizBloggers.com have really been beating the drum. MediaBizBloggers’ target audience is made up of industry members, not the general public, so the posts are tailored accordingly. Back on March 5, Jonathan Steuer, TiVo’s Vice President, Audience Research & Measurement, blogged in response to the same NYTimes article on the Modern Family ratings that Tom Rogers’ letter was in response to. It basically says the same thing Rogers said, only in much more detail with the data and graphs to back it up. All of it pulled from Stop||Watch, of course.

Then on Monday Greg DePalma, TiVo’s Vice President of Audience Insights, blogged about marketing executives basing their ad buys on gut feeling and historic behavior patterns instead of hard data. He never mentions Stop||Watch by name, but he does call out“TiVo and other STB data” in making the argument that buying based on the data produces better results for advertisers.

On Wednesday Alex Petrilli, senior manager of audience research at TiVo, blogged a very tongue in cheek post entitled“All I Really Need to Know I Learned from Nielsen“. The whole post is a little bit snarky in a fun way, relating stories about lessons he’s learned via the examples set by others. As in, what not to do so you don’t end up like them after they screw the pooch, as it were.

For example, he snarkily points out how ridiculous Nielsen’s rating system is, in areas such as sample size:

I discovered that 1,200 diaries can accurately represent the viewing of almost seven million people in the San Francisco DMA. Nielsen taught me that 500 household meters will equate to the two million plus households for the same DMA. And when people meters arrived, 800 was the magic number to capture both household and demographic viewership. As far as Nielsen’s NTI sample goes, 21,000 will be sufficient to represent the 114 million U.S. households thank you very much.

He later goes on to, of course, extol the virtues of Stop||Watch:

Thanks Nielsen, lessons learned. Here at TiVo our anonymous daily Stop||Watch sample consists of 350,000 set-top boxes. We also recently signed a licensing deal to incorporate the more than 8 million AT&T U-verse set-top boxes into our system which will significantly increase our sample size. In terms of DVR playback, based on TiVo’s 4th Quarter Stop||Watch data, 44% of all programs viewed were time-shifted. 54.6% on broadcast television and 37.8% on cable. In prime those figures jump to 63.4% for broadcast and 46.5% for cable equating to 56.1% overall. Based on other information I have seen regarding DVR usage, these figures appear more realistic than Nielsen’s 16.7%. But in the end, it is all about sample size, and Nielsen will be the first to tell you they have it covered.

It is nice to see a non-dry tone from a corporate blogger, honestly.

I know there have been other direct and indirect Stop||Watch pitches I’ve encountered, but I think these will suffice. Maybe it is just my unusual travels on the net; I do cover TiVo as a blogger (obviously), so I have various agents scouring the net for TiVo news and I monitor many different sources of TiVo info. But it definitely feels like activity surrounding Stop||Watch has picked up as of late.

End users may wonder what this means for them and really – not much. But services like Stop||Watch are part of TiVo’s diversified business model and success in selling these services is good for TiVo’s overall health. In the longer run, data-based advertising can lead to more meaningful ads. And evidence of problems reaching audiences who time shift can steer advertisers toward TiVo’s related offerings in interactive advertising and on-box promotions.

Lately it feels like TiVo is making a more concerted effort to raise awareness of Stop||Watch among industry decision makers. It has the feeling of an organized marketing push. It is nice to see TiVo being more aggressive in marketing these services. Of course, maybe it is just my skewed perspective.