August 01, 2006
A Premium for Prime Time!
Television – The Most Important Medium
It is the most important medium for viewers, on an average it reaches to 80% of homes (NWE India ) and those who watch it, watch six hours of it everyday. The key issue for a broadcaster is to aggregate audiences and maximize the realization from the sales of these audiences, whereas the key issue in media selection is selecting combinations of programs most likely to be viewed by the targeted product user or owner group at cost effective rates.
Repeat Audience and Double Jeopardy
 Majority of prime time television programming of Mass Entertainment Channels consists of episodic content broadcast at regular interval. These are arranged on the programming grid; either as weekday /weekend strips or are scheduled using checkerboard programming. Strip programming is the most deployed strategy to enable viewers to follow the story regularly and develop long-term loyalty. This is an effort on the part of television programmers to retain the viewers for successive days and also keep them within the channel for upcoming programs of a similar genre.
Though most of these programs have a steady level of ratings, it is not the same viewers that coming back for consecutive episodes, within or across the week. Ehrenberg and Barwise (1988) concluded that only 40-50% of the audiences for a week come back the next week for any serial. Also, lower rated programs have low repeat viewership levels resulting in Double Jeopardy for low rated programs.
In effect meaning low rated programs also attract lower repeat viewing. This contradicts the notion that low rated programs cater mainly for devoted minorities of selective viewers.
Using these studies as a base Erwin Ephron (1997) related this to opportunities in media planning and buying and exhibited that lower ratings present an opportunity to break out of the demand and supply mode of media buying wherein lack of inventories for top rated programs drive the CPM up and ridiculed the notion of “prime for reach and daypart for frequency”
| “The big reason we mistrust low ratings is that we have been taught low ratings are less effective television. But if you think about it, whatever advertising does, it does one consumer at a time. As long as the message reaches enough different consumers, the average rating should not matter.” - Erwin Ephron (1997) |
Using fragmentation to buy better
 Andrew Green (OMD USA) in an article published in Admap (September 2003) tried to counter the notion “Buying higher rated programs build reach more quickly and efficiently” by studying four real advertiser's schedules and replacing Prime Time spots (broadcast) with cable spots with no major change in the reach levels at various frequency. The lower rated cable programs increased the number of spots but the cost of buying those lower rated programs pulled the CPT's and CPRP's down.
Dispersion in Television – Being everywhere
Three mainline channels have been taken with a target of achieving 200 GRP's across similar dayparts 9:00 PM to 10 :00 PM for Channel B, 10:00 PM to 11:00 PM for Channel A and C. Top three metros (Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata) in NWE were taken as the base with CS House Wives as the target group.
The results are tabulated as follows:
Channel |
Insertions |
GRP's |
Cum. Reach |
OTS |
Impressions |
Channel A |
58 blocks |
198 |
28.8 |
6.9 |
58 mn. |
Channel B |
100 blocks |
206 |
21.0 |
9.8 |
60 mn. |
Channel C |
336 blocks |
199 |
20.1 |
9.9 |
58 mn. |
Target levels of GRP's were achieved in this pre evaluation exercise and also the OTS levels also did not rise exponentially proving the Double Jeopardy effect of Ehrenberg. The pre-condition of achieving the required GRP's from one single daypart is also responsible for higher OTS.
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After the break
September issue of Oxygen will be sixth issue and will have a detailed run down on all the topics covered in the previous issues, and also talk about optimizers.
Periodicity
Oxygen is mailed to its subscribers on the first working day of the month. If you
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