Game of Thrones is over and summer is coming.
The May sweeps have ended and summer repeats and reality will once again take over the broadcast airwaves. Many viewers will turn to cable, with its increasingly robust menu of original scripted series, as they do every year at this time. They will also turn to streaming services such as Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime Video to watch full seasons of new and returning shows.
All cable networks, of course, do not air original scripted primetime programming during the summer. Even the ones that do don’t do so all the time. Nevertheless, there are now enough cable networks airing at least one or two original scripted series that viewers could watch cable for two or three hours every night in the summer and not have to watch any repeats. Between May and September, there will be 8 returning or new first-run scripted series on the broadcast networks, compared to roughly 30 on ad-supported cable networks, 7 on premium cable, and more than 30 on streaming services (15 on Netflix).
Many households across the country are similar to mine in that we will watch little broadcast TV this summer. Rather, I will be watching season 5 of Bosch and season 3 of Sneaky Pete on Amazon Prime, season 3 of Stranger Things and Designated Survivor on Netflix, season 3 of The Good Fight and season 2 of Star Trek Discovery on CBS All Access, as well as several returning ad-supported cable series, including AMC’s Fear the Walking Dead, Paramount’s Yellowstone, TNT’s Animal Kingdom and Claws, FX’s Legion, and USA’s Queen of the South. There are also a number of series on various streaming services I will enjoy discovering.
Things That Matter and Things That Don’t
As the annual round of upfront events and presentations come to an end and the networks start promoting their new content throughout the summer, here are a few things that should matter to networks, media agencies, and advertisers.
The Most Loyal Program Viewers are the Biggest Commercial Avoiders
If you look at all primetime original scripted series on broadcast and ad-supported cable, most have between 25% and 50% of their reported adult 18-49 and 25-54 viewing played back via DVR (significantly higher if you look at time-shifted viewing beyond just seven days). Since DVR penetration is roughly 60% among these key demos, this means that in DVR homes, between 40% and 80% of viewing in primetime is time-shifted. Since roughly 75% of commercials are fast-forwarded during playback, that means for original scripted series in primetime, between 30 and 60% of all commercials among DVR owners are skipped. That’s a lot. The best research I’ve seen on the subject (and not just because I conducted the study) indicates that brand message recall is about three times greater for shows viewed live than those played back on DVRs.
The quandary, of course, is that DVR viewers are the most loyal viewers. DVR playback is the essence of appointment viewing, and research has shown that people do less multi-tasking when playing back a show on DVR than when watching live TV. So, a program’s most loyal viewers are also the biggest commercial avoiders. The long-held belief among many industry experts and researchers that the most attentive program viewers are also the most attentive commercial viewers is no longer true (or rather, if true, only true for live viewers). The key for advertisers, aside from in-program product integration, is continuing to innovate commercial messages in ways to get people to temporarily stop fast-forwarding. The best I’ve seen are when commercial messages include in-character cast members of the show they appear in.
Pre-Season Buzz Doesn’t Matter…Unless it Does
I’ve been analyzing this subject for more than 20 years. From the time that the major sources of pre-season buzz for a new series were syndicated news magazine shows, such as Entertainment Tonight and Access Hollywood, and print magazines, such as Entertainment Weekly, to the time when the big Comic Cons in San Diego and then New York joined in, to the time when social media became a significant source of chatter about new shows, one thing has been abundantly and consistently clear – there has been virtually no correlation between the amount of pre-season buzz a new TV series receives and whether the show actually succeeds (the success rate of the most buzzed about shows is virtually identical to that of all series in general).
It is also true that many shows that have received little pre-season buzz have become long-running hits (NCIS and Grey’s Anatomy being just two examples that immediately come to mind). More recently, NBC’s This is Us and ABC’s The Good Doctor became instant successes. The former received a good deal of pre-season buzz, the latter did not.
Shows that are already on the air and receive a lot of positive social-media buzz can get a rating boost, expanding word-of-mouth, which has always been effective for current series.
In September, I will be releasing an updated analysis on this subject, looking at different types of pre-season buzz over the last 20 years, and what impact, if any, it had on new series success.
Promotion Matters, Cross-Promotion Matters More
How many people heard of ABC’s excellent legal drama, For the People, or Whiskey Cavalier (another good mid-season drama), or Fox’s mutant hero drama, The Gifted? Not many I would guess. All have been canceled. There are several shows each season that don’t draw the audiences they deserve, and are often axed before most people even know they exist. I remain convinced that if new broadcast TV shows were cross-promoted on other broadcast networks, ratings would improve dramatically, and new shows would have a much better chance to find an audience.
There’s a reason why a show like CBS’s mid-season entry, The Code, will draw the typical CBS older audience but hardly anyone else. Because the only broadcast network it can advertise on is CBS. There’s also a reason why a series like Criminal Minds gets a much younger audience on Netflix than it does on CBS or ION.
Cable networks long ago realized that the best way to get viewer sampling for a new show was to promote it in similar programming on other networks (cable and broadcast). But the broadcast networks still foolishly refuse to accept advertising from another broadcast network. More than half the shows I regularly watch on cable, I found out about through promos on a different network. I can’t say the same for anything I regularly watch on a broadcast network. This is even more important for a mid-season show. While new fall series are primarily promoted throughout the summer, mid-season series are promoted more on first-run episodes of other shows.
There’s another reason the broadcast networks should cross-promote one another’s series. Cable networks tend to have programming that appeal to several different audiences – many cable networks have median ages that vary widely by program. Since the broadcast networks air many more original scripted series, they tend to schedule programming that fits in with surrounding series, which limits expanding their audience profile. For example, a show about serial killers, with a diverse young cast, should draw a reasonably young audience. But because Criminal Minds is on CBS (with repeats on ION), it appeals to an older audience. If it was promoted beyond CBS’s older audience, let’s say on FOX or CW, there’s no reason why younger viewers wouldn’t at least check it out.
Unfortunately, the broadcast networks continue to think as though it is still the 1980s, when their only real competition was other broadcast networks. Today, they should see one another as allies. When an Empire, This is Us, or The Good Doctor becomes a hit, it benefits all the broadcast networks because it reminds everyone that aside from the rare exception such as The Walking Dead, only broadcast networks are capable of reaching such a large audience with a single episode.
It continues to boggle the mind that broadcast networks will happily accept ads from their real competitors, but not other broadcast networks. No wonder streaming services are gaining tremendous ground each season. And just watch, the broadcast networks will continue to promote Netflix, Hulu (despite now being fully owned by Disney), and Amazon Prime Video, but they will not do the same for CBS All Access or Disney +, simply because they have another network’s name in the title. If CBS All Access changed its moniker to simply All Access, every broadcast network would probably accept their advertising dollars.
The broadcast networks need to understand that 30 years ago, the average broadcast rating was 10 times as large as the average of the top 10 cable networks. Twenty years ago, it was 6 or 7 times as large. Today, its only 3 - 4 times as large. And the average rating of the top 10 cable networks has changed little over that time. There’s no law that says broadcast network ratings need to decline every year. But when they take ads for cable networks and streaming services, but not from one another, what do they expect? The broadcast networks just spent upfront week selling us on the idea that they are the most effective advertising vehicles out there. Maybe they should start taking their own advice.
Choosing to simply not advertising to the largest group of potential consumers, who are dead center of your target audience, is nothing less than promotional malpractice.
Rating Gains or Losses Should Matter, but Won’t
If you asked network executives whether they would rather have their average rating rise by 10% but slip in the standings, or lose 10% of their audience but move into 1st place (for broadcast) or into the top 10 (for cable), they would all prefer to lose viewers and move up in the standings. As the upfront process rewards rankings over ratings, and big data continues to highlight indexes over audiences, this is not likely to change. And it will continue to be one of the reasons primetime broadcast audiences will continue to decline.
The upfront season creates an artificial demand for what is essentially an unlimited supply of rating points, which allows the networks to charge more each year regardless of whether average ratings go up or down.
OpenAP and the Like Will Eventually, Maybe, Matter
I have an instinctive bias against sellers getting together to propose a “better way” of evaluating programming or advertising. This type of thing is often designed to simply mask the fact that the traditional age/sex ratings are declining. But I’m reserving judgment until I can evaluate exactly what they are doing. There is so much data out there these days, and so much of it is bad, that having some top-notch researchers involved and having the data vetted and reported by a third party, may be a good idea. Advertisers are rightfully concerned about digital ad fraud, dubious viewability metrics, etc. It may not be widely accepted for a while, but you have to start somewhere if you want to change the world.
As more data becomes available from more sources, there will continue to be more differences among them. Both buyers and sellers need to understand what all the data means, where it comes from, how it is derived, and whether it is projectable (much of the data aside from age/sex is not projectable). Don’t just use data because it’s big, or because someone reports it, or aggregates it for you. Don’t be lazy. Do the work.
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