January 20, 2009

The Brilliance of Appreciation

‘Audience appreciation' is qualitative information about viewer's evaluation of programmes; it is different from TV ratings.

A qualitative evaluation or audience appreciation indicator is usually undertaken in a separate survey where respondents are asked to give marks to programmes based on their appreciation. This is necessary because the degree of enjoyment obtained from a program cannot not be judged from the size of its audience.

In case of advertisers, it is imperative to focus on selecting television programs that are more likely to involve a viewer . This helps them to decide their target audiences as highly appreciative viewers are more likely to recall their ads. A study suggests that advertising is 70% more effective when it is seen by people enjoying the programme . A show can be much appreciated even if it has low TV ratings (See chart 1&2). This highlights the importance of monitoring audience appreciation, which is often measured through program gratification data.

The basic advantage of an audience appreciation score is that it provides a measurement dimension that goes beyond audience size. Audience appreciation does not count the number of viewers, but gauges opinion on the programmes themselves. It is a measure through which accurate audience feedback is reached to the program makers, channel broadcasters, advertisers and the media planners. This allows them to assess their success in achieving their creative objectives. It also helps them in understanding the way audience preferences and attitudes work.

Various research firms and broadcasters have, over the years, produced their own appreciation measures in an attempt to enhance audience-size measures, by measuring viewer attitudes to, preferences for, and involvement levels with programs.

Here we will discuss two ways to estimate appreciation of a television program. One is ‘to collect' and the other one, we propose, is ‘to derive' .

Collection method of audience appreciation involves interviewing or surveying people who watched the program, to understand the reasons and strength of their appreciation. This method makes use of dairies. The diaries are questionnaires that people mark appreciation on a six-point scale for each program that was watched. Although these measures examine the reasons for liking a program, the method is very expensive and time consuming.

Peoplemeter panels like aMap's can effectively leverage this method as their meters are already equipped to collect appreciation scores as and when a program is viewed at the panel homes. The panellist can indicate like and dislike by using the remote pad; it has dedicated keys for this.

Overall, the collection method may also have issues as viewers might not admit to liking the "non-worthy programs" they regularly watch or declare liking "worthy programs" they watch very little.

Deriving audience appreciation from viewing data rather than by asking people to declare it helps overcome these issues. Minute-by-minute data available from peoplemeters is explored to develop behavioural measures of program appreciation rather than the subjective approach of previous measures which uses attitudinal measures of a program appreciation such as declared enjoyment, interest, appeal, or personal emotion. A sample analysis is presented here.

We have selected a few prime-time programs of 30 or 40 minutes in length. They are regular, weekly shows so that uniformity of commitment scores across episodes could be assessed.

Four or more consecutive shows of each program are used and averages taken. The data recorded for each episode and each person, includes the number of minutes of the chosen program viewed and the duration of the designated program. For example, if a person watches a comedy show for the entire 30 minutes duration of telecast, then it is likely that they enjoy the comedy more than someone who watches just 15 minutes of the comedy and 15 minutes of other programme in the same 30-minute period.

The appreciation rate is calculated as the ratio of program minutes that a person watches over total duration of the program aired and is averaged over all viewers of the show. However, in order to calculate the average, a person must watch at least a threshold percent of the available minutes . The casual viewers, who watch just a few minutes of the show, to avoid ads on other channels are not included in the average.

Chart 1&2: Appreciation scores brings forth programs that normally would have appeared low when ranked based on the size of its audience (e.g. Kahani Ghar Ghar Kii)

Chart 3: Ideally we should look at audience size as well as appreciation of the program. Remember advertising is 70% more effective when it is seen by people enjoying the programme

The proposed viewing-data based method of audience appreciation has many methodological and practical advantages. They are:

• The adoption of viewing-data based method will give accurate evaluations in less time as compared to the conventional methods.
  
• There will not be any demand for additional respondent burden and are non-obtrusive.
  
• This will eliminate respondent recall difficulties, as with diaries.
  
• Apart from its accuracy, it will also built confidence in the consistency of the behavioural measures of appreciation, when put next to traditional attitudinal measures.
  
• It would be less expensive as there won't be any additional cost because it is derived from existing/current viewing data.
  
• There will be a logical comparison between different shows, program types, viewer demographics, and between episodes in contrast to traditional appreciation measures.

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