Research
Real victims of DVRs: Newer products
By Diego Vasquez
Mar 25, 2008 - 1:10:27 AM

Digital video recorders may indeed be the advertising bogeyman that media people have long feared. A study comparing DVR and non-DVR households released yesterday from Information Resources, a Chicago firm, suggests that ad-skipping may be cutting into new product purchases. The research found that households with DVRs purchase about 5 percent fewer new package-goods products than households without DVRs. Further, 20 percent of the more than two dozen brands surveyed had lower sales volume than in the non-DVR households. Interestingly, when brands diversified by spending at least 20 percent of their media budgets on non-TV media, there was no difference between DVR and non-DVR household purchasing. The wide-ranging study also found that Friday is the most-DVRed day of the week and CBS the most time-shifted network. J.P. Beauchamp, senior vice president of panel and testing services at IRI, talks to Media Life about what the study means for media people, what products were most impacted, and why diversifying is a good idea.

What is the most important thing for media buyers and planners to take away from this study?
 
DVRs do bring in some uncertainty as it relates to brand sales. They do have an effect. Importantly, the effects seem to be much greater for new products versus established brands. When we saw an impact on new products, that impact was three times as great volume-wise as that on established brands.

Repeat rates and all that sort of stuff didn’t change at all. So if you did try the product, DVRs didn’t affect sales. It was that initial trial phase.
 
Thinking about it from a planning perspective, the playbook usually goes out with heavy television. But the DVR acts as sort of a screener in some households, and that message may not get across to them. For new-product advertising, you may want to reconsider that playbook. That to me was one of the key findings.

What does this suggest about DVR ad skipping and how it ties into product purchasing?
 
I think in general what it’s saying is that we saw the impact with new products, not brand extensions. We really didn’t see an impact there.

It was where a new product was using the power of the moving image, etc., to promote it. The message was getting filtered on many occasions, and the product didn’t become top-of-mind.
 
In general, if you had a TV-centric plan, with more than 75 percent of gross rating points on TV, that plan was most likely to be impacted. So the conclusion is, “diversify or die.”

How can advertisers try to avoid this potential pothole?
 
The biggest thing for a planner to think about in navigating a DVR world is whether to start moving to more and more other media beyond TV. It could mean more print or in-store.

No one is saying, “Oh my God I need to get off TV.” You just need to use it more effectively.
 
We asked power users--heavy DVR users--some questions about DVRs, and the No. 1 reason they liked DVRs was the ability to steal time back.

They’d say, “We’re busy households that have lots of different time restraints, we need to multitask, and it allows us to watch TV on our own terms.”

One side effect of that is that people skip commercials. Good, bad or indifferent, that’s what people do.
 
In another question, they said they would stop and watch a commercial if they thought it was funny or entertaining, but that infers that they’ve already seen the ad before. 

Which networks have the most- and least-time-shifted programming? Why?
 
The traditional broadcast networks are more likely to be time-shifted than cable networks, and I think the reason is they have the most popular shows.
 
It was genre that really made big difference. News and reality shows were less time-shifted. People didn’t seem to skip through animal shows and documentaries as much.

News makes sense because it has a short shelf life. Some of reality has the water cooler cachet to it, and documentaries people are interested enough to learn about something, so they’re more likely to be involved and less likely to skip around.
 
Something network executives can take away from this is that if your programs are more likely to be time-shifted, it says something about those programs. People want to see them.

What night is the most time-shifted and which is the least? Why?
 
This was a pretty stark one. Weekend was less likely to be time-shifted because people are at home and had the opportunity to watch live. I think the most time-shifted night was Friday night, which makes sense too because people tend to be going out on Friday nights.
 
As you went through the week, the time shifting increased, until you got to the weekend, when it dropped off.

What sort of variables are involved in ad-skipping? That is, are there some types of commercials that are less likely to be shifted? How does positioning within a commercial pod play into it?
 
From a commercial perspective, we didn’t really look at creative, although we controlled for it. But on the pod position, you certainly saw less skipping in the beginning and at the end, with much more in the middle.
 
Which makes sense if you know how to use the device. From a physical standpoint you might not push fast forward right away, and then you slow down at the end. But you usually keep your eyes on the screen. But it was consistent that the A and E pods were much less skipped than B through D.