A few weeks ago, my co-bloggers were doubtful that it is possible to watch 36 hours of television in a week. The main factor that makes television viewing on this scale possible for me is the DVR, which allows
me to tape two shows simultaneously. It also allows me to easily fast-forward through commercials, and because of the DVR, the only commercials I see anymore are when I’m watching live sports. While the ability to easily record a show and watch it later (and fast forward through commercials as you watch it later) has improved the quality of life for my roommates and me, I’ve often wondered how it affects advertisers. After all, it’s their money that pays for my favorite shows.
A recent study in the Journal of Advertising Research addressed this very question. Erik du Pleiss of the South African advertising agency Millard Brown gathered 68 average TV watchers for an experiment on ad recall.
Participants were first shown a series of ads at normal speed, and then were shown the same ads fast forwarded. They were asked if they remembered the ad and how much they liked the ad. Here are their results as presented in the Harvard Business Review article on this topic:
As it turns out, if you’ve seen an ad before, even seeing it for a split second while fast forwarding will make you think of the product. I know that this works on me- when I’m fast forwarding through a show and see an ad for Wendy’s, I crave a baconator even if I don’t see the whole ad. Mmm… baconator.
Interestingly, whether people watch a show at normal speed or fast forwarded doesn’t seem to affect how much they like the ad. Though fast forwarded scores were always lower, they weren’t significantly lower.
Du Pleiss correctly points out that fast-forwarding through commercials to get back to your show requires paying pretty close attention to the TV. I can attest that it’s very easy to go too far and miss some of your show. This increased attention might actually benefit advertisers if they create an ad designed to be viewed very fast with no sound.
DVR’s are here to stay. They are just too convenient- thanks to our DVR, I can now leave my house during “Shark Week”. Advertisers must adapt to this new technology instead of just complaining about it. I’m very interested to see what they come up with, and how I can learn to skip it so I can watch my show.
DU PLESSIS, E. (2009). Digital Video Recorders and Inadvertent Advertising Exposure Journal of Advertising Research, 49 (2) DOI: 10.2501/S0021849909090345
They’re already adapting to it. I read somewhere they’re already using ads that work at both speeds.
For your next question, will you take on whether recording commercials at louder volume than the program and inserting them after quiet portions makes people hate the brand?
Or how about “If a tree falls on a marketing executive in the forest, does anybody care?”
fast-forwarding through commercials or not, 36 hours of TV watching is still 36 hours of TV watching. That’s nearly a full-time job.
I have no conceivable idea how it’s possible to watch that much in one week. Does Charleston have an extra day that the rest of us don’t know about?
“”Does Charleston have an extra day that the rest of us don’t know about”
We don’t like to discuss that with outsiders.
I don’t actually spend 36 hours per week watching TV. There isn’t that much on that’s interesting.
However, I interpreted that original article that you and Bora were discussing as “watching 36 one-hour shows per week” rather than “spending 36 hours per week watching TV”. There’s actually a big difference. With a DVR and fast forwarding through commercials, 36 one-hour shows only takes 24 or so hours of actual time to watch. The average one hour program has about 18-20 minutes of commercials. You can see how much time is saved by fast-forwarding through them.
Also, my research is field-based this time of year. That means that either I’m busy from 6:00 a.m. until dinnertime, or I’m essentially doing nothing all day except catching up on reading papers and writing grants. On any given day there is something that you can be doing in the lab, usually something that takes an enormous amount of time. That’s not really the case with my project (at least in the phase where it is now), which gives me some time that you don’t have. I’ll have busy days again at the end of the summer.
Finally, I’m almost always doing something else while the TV is on (dealing with the mountain of e-mails I get every day, checking my google reader feed, etc), so it’s not keeping me from doing anything else.
fast-forwarding through commercials or not, 36 hours of TV watching is still 36 hours of TV watching. That’s nearly a full-time job.
Not quite. An hour-long program only has something like 45 minutes of actual content, the rest being ads and credits. I suspect that that 36 hour figure is based on the nominal time of the programs, rather than the time actually spent watching. So, 36 hours of programming, with commercials fast-forwarded, would work out to something like 27 hours of actual viewing. Still remarkably long, though.
I have no idea what commercials are on that I’m fast-forwarding through, but that’s probably because I almost never watch TV, so I don’t have the association mentioned in this article. Almost all of the commercials I fast-forward through, I’d never seen before.
The average one hour program has about 18-20 minutes of commercials.
Oh, wow. My 45 minutes of content estimate was quite a bit off, then. How much longer until it reaches the point where ads take up more than half the programming?
Also, 4 “hours of programming” that I watch each week are The Daily Show and the Colbert Report. More often than not, the interviews are lame so I skip them entirely, which cuts an extra half hour or so off of my total actual time spent watching television.
If you watch shows on Hulu or ABC.com or something like that, the total time in the lower right usually says between 41 and 43 minutes.
Apparently Skargsday comes complete with it’s own dictionary as well.
The original article reports that Americans watch an average of 151 hours of television per month, not 151 hour-long shows, or X-blocks of content. It makes no claim as to how much of that viewing is commercials or content, so I really can’t see how you would interpret that as anything but 151 hours of television. Which means you don’t watch 36 hours as you self-reported.
The article even attributes this rise to “the increase of digital recorders, DVR and TiVo devices, which allow viewers to watch programs at their leisure rather than during the show’s slated time slots. Nielsen has dubbed such viewing timeshifted TV.”
So why in the world would you report that you watch 4 hours of television when you’re watching less than 3 hours?
This is the reason social scientists have complex models to account for people being incapable of assessing their personal habits.
I usually don’t report the number of hours I watch. I usually talk about the number of shows I watch.
“This is the reason social scientists have complex models to account for people being incapable of assessing their personal habits.”
Though I enjoy keeping social scientists on their toes, I would be much more precise if I were responding to a scientific survey than I am when joking around with you and Bora on Twitter.
So why change the units when discussing this article?