Tags: advertising, economy, industry, marketing, of, state, the
•Cable networks would do much better in Digital Cable-only homes - as we would expect - with some networks getting a lift of 20+% in audiences. •The Fox broadcast network would do 4% better with Digital Cable-only homes, while the CBS broadcast
network would lose 6% of its audience.
•American Idol would do 12% better with Digital Cable-only homes, but 7% better with Satellite homes.
•Ratings for Desperate Housewives would be 12% higher with Digital Cable-only homes, but 6.5% lower with
Satellite only homes. That is a swing of 18.5% for a single show.
•The Mentalist gets slightly lower ratings with either Digital Cable-only or Satellite only homes.
•If all these types of changes were aggregated, the financial impact would be profound, with hundreds of
millions of dollars shifting hands. For example, at the June 24 Advertising Research Foundation conference
on audience measurement, Alan Wurtzel, NBC’s President of Research and Media Development, reported
that NBC had asked multiple set top box providers to generate ratings for the final episode of Heroes.
According to Mr. Wurtzel, “We gave them the same request. What we got back were different answers.”
The difference in ratings from the same data source was six percent, which translated into a variance of
$400,000 in ad sales for a single episode.
•To look at it in a broader perspective, we looked at ratings and ad spending across multiple platforms, using
the Nielsen’s NPM and Monitor Plus services. Our estimate of the inappropriate result would be as follows:
•If C3 ratings estimates were based upon viewing only from Digital Cable homes, it would have cost the
broadcast networks approx. $340 million in ad revenue so far this season. If ratings estimates were based
only on Satellite homes, the broadcast networks would have 4% lower ratings and would be $730 million
poorer.
•Cable networks, as we would expect, would benefit from using Digital Cable homes only - to the tune of
$2.5 billion in additional ad revenue. If Satellite homes only were the basis for rating, it would have
generated $600 million in additional ad revenue for cable networks.
• These differences are a direct result of different viewing patterns between STB homes and non-STB
homes. And that is all before one factors in the various gaps associated with STB data.
1. Larger samples are not always better than smaller samples: Usually when comparing a larger sample to a smaller sample, increased size provides a more stable estimate and a lower the standard error around the estimate. HOWEVER, this is true if the smaller and larger data sets being compared are of comparable
quality - in terms of the completeness in representing the population and the accuracy of the data. A high
quality smaller sample will provide more accurate information than a larger sample with systematic biases.
2. STB data is NOT Census Data: STB data is simply not available from all TV households. 11% of US homes
have no cable, satellite or Telco service. They continue to have their entertainment and information
needs adequately met by free, digital, over-the-air TV (obviously without set top boxes). Another 19%
have analog cable with no set top boxes. Altogether, non-STB households account for about a quarter of
all TV viewing. We also know that in homes with access to viewing through STB, full TV viewing from the
home would not be captured in the reported STB data. There is on average one TV set in such STB
homes that currently do not have an attached set-top box, and therefore, such non-STB viewing in such
a home would not be reported. This non-STB viewing in STB homes account for nine percent of total TV
viewing.
3. Homes that view television thru cable, satellite or Telco are different from other homes: While
representing a very large data set and covering a major portion of US households, using STB data to
deduce the overall viewing can be misleading because the viewing in these households is different from
other HHs.
•STB homes have more TV sets - 2.8 sets per HH vs. 2.4 for the average home •STB homes watch more TV - approximately nine hours a day vs. 8 ½ for the average home or approximately six hours for broadcast only homes.
•STB homes are larger HHs and make more money
•STB homes do more time-shifting
•Set on/off. Determine gaps between tuning records and TV set on/off from Nielsen’s NPM sample to inform the STB data. This ensures that the overall tuning levels in the STB data are accurate. The industry is referring to this as ‘cap and edit’ rules.
•Viewers. In a very simplistic example, if 40% of the viewers to a show are men 18-34 making between
$100K-$150K from Nielsen’s NPM sample, then that probability, demo and income level can be assigned to
tuning records coming from the STB data.
•Viewing for environments not covered by the STB data. This would include TV sets within cable homes that
don’t send data back (which tend to show higher levels of viewing to kids’ networks) and over-the-air only
homes (which constitute about 10% of the total homes and by definition, have much higher viewing to
national broadcast and local programming). Again, the NPM panel data would provide the basis for modeling
these gaps from STB data.
559 members
407 members
403 members
231 members
191 members
© 2012 Created by Steve Hall.