At the broadcast network upfront presentations this week, media buyers are hearing the big sell on the coming fall schedules, especially the new dramas, but the lingering worry remains: Will viewers also be seeing the ads that run with them?
Probably more than they have been led to think, suggests a new British study.
Researchers learned two interesting things about TV watchers, their digital video recorders, and time-shifted viewing.
First, TV watchers say they time-shift way more than they actually do.
Second, while viewers in fact do fast-forward through many ads in the programs they do time-shift, they still continue to pay a high degree of visual attention to commericials, even stopping to watch ones that appeal to them.
“The research suggests that the impact of DVRs on viewing of commercials may not be as extreme as some had previously thought,” says Mark Bunting, strategy manager at the British TV regulator Ofcom, one of the groups involved in the study. The others were ACB, a research group, the London Business School, Initiative Media, and British broadcasters ITV, Channel 4 and Five TV.
The study involved actually watching the participants as they interacted with their TVs by using a combination of in-home cameras and microphones. All the participants had been using DVRs for at least a year.
The participants, 23 people in eight homes, were asked how they used their DVRs before the study began, and then interviewed again after the study about their behavior.
It's one of the first times that actual behavior with DVRs has been monitored in this way, believes Sue Moseley, managing director for Futures at Initiative.
While the full results will not be released until next month, the early findings showed that a majority of programming in DVR households (just over 6 percent of households now have DVRs in the UK) is actually watched live and is not time shifted.
While the exact percentage has not been released yet, Moseley says that it is in line with the 13 percent figure that she has found in her analysis of recent data from BARB, a key provider of TV audience measurement figures in Britain. BARB initiated coverage of DVR households in March.
The study found that while most commercials in time-shifted viewing are fast forwarded, viewers are still watching them, and in no small part because they must do so in order to stop fast forwarding when the programming returns.
But also, reports Moseley, the filmed footage of the way the participants behaved shows viewers even stop the fast forward function to watch commercials they are interested in. Sometimes viewers will even watch a popular commercial more than once.
“It is acting like a filter,” says Moseley, of the DVR. “People chop out irrelevancy.”
The tendency to watch ads in a fast-forward mode is something that Todd Chanko, an analyst at JupiterResearch, has also commented on in a recent report. It is inevitable, he believes, that the viewer still has to pay attention to the ad in order to determine when the programming restarts.
“So what I argue for in my report is that everybody is all freaked out that people are fast forwarding the ads. But I say, ‘wait a minute’,” says Chanko. “This is a great advertising opportunity. Just create different kinds of ads that work in a real-time environment and can still get the message across in a fast forward environment.”
Another media expert, Graham Lovelace of Lovelace Consulting, a convergence media specialist, believes that this study demonstrates that there is still a lot of mileage in the broadcast model. This latest study, he believes, suggests that so far “the effect of the DVR may have been exaggerated.”
However, his view is that the TV landscape will ultimately be transformed by such new media tools.
“The DVR is not sounding the death knell for broadcast TV, but it is the first step in changing to a world where the TV shows are watched when viewers want them, not when schedulers dictate,” he says. “The advertiser has to get in the mindset of a very different form of behavior.”
