Friday, July 28, 2006
Big TiVo is Watching What You’re Not
byDo TiVo users watch commercials or skip them? TiVo is forming a research division to study that very question, and by doing so, is weighing in on the debate between advertisers and the TV industry on how to measure viewership of those using digital video recorders, according to a July 26 article in the New York Times.
The research, according to the New York Times article, will analyze second-by-second viewing patterns of a nightly sample of 20,000 users. As the article states, TiVo already knows that its users spend about 50% of their time watching recorded shows and skip about 70% of the commercials in those recorded shows.
Now, however, TiVo aims to get more granular, in an attempt to help advertisers better understand how to get these users to watch recorded commercials, either by changing the ad content or running the ads during certain kinds of programming.
For example, one new study by TiVo suggests that commercials containing animals, when shown during animal-related programs, were skipped less often, according to the article.
Some advertisers welcome a fresh look at viewership data from TiVo recorders, which appear to offer details not found on the industry standard ratings by Nielsen.
Still, the debate rages on. Even in its infancy, many marketers agree that better data will help marketers make better decisions. Others say that the data doesn’t provide a better and more broad form of measurement.
Like it or not, TiVo is watching what viewers are not.
Meanwhile, this debate is just heating up.
