TV researchers proudly boast - "it doesn't matter which way you ignore our ads!"

Intrigued to read this morning over at Terry Heaton's blog that NBC has published research to show that people who fast-forward through TV ads with their PVRs are just as engaged as people who watch the ads.

(If your first reaction to this was anything like mine you're now thinking "eh? Did I read that right?" so let me reiterate - the research does indeed claim that people who ignore TV ads by fast-forwarding through them are every bit as engaged with those ads as people who actually watch them. Seriously. That's the claim.)

From the NYT article (due to a strategic error on their part, sub req’d);

"Whether people watch or not is not a useful measure of anything,” said Joe Plummer, chief research officer for the Advertising Research Foundation. “Exposure has very, very weak correlation with purchase intent and actual sales, whereas an engagement measure has high correlation and are closer to what really matters, which is brand growth and creating brand demand.”

Terry calls bullshit: "It’s like researchers for the whale oil industry announcing that electric light bulbs enhance the quality of the light given off by oil lamps." And of course it is bullshit - people who aren't watching ads aren't engaged with those ads. Ads don't have some sort of magically diffused, homeopathic branding effect on people who happen to be in their vicinity but looking the other way.

But in another way I think NBC is dead right. I think people fast-forwarding through ads with their PVRs are no less engaged than people without PVRs who are "watching" the ads, precisely because people without PVRs aren't watching the ads either. To reproduce my comment at Pomoblog:

"People are using DVRs to avoid the ads where previously they’d have skipped channels, read a magazine, chatted, made a cup of tea, played gameboy or gone to the bathroom to avoid the ads. He’s not saying anything about the absolute effectiveness of ads on fast-forward - just that ads ignored in this new way are relatively no less effective than ads ignored in any of the existing ways."

I've quoted before the line from PVRblog "PVRs don't kill commercials, people kill commercials". It's still true. We know that before people had this ad-skipping technology they were leaving the room during commercials, because the BBC reported how the national grid prepared for the upsurge in electricity demand at half time during world cup matches. So I'm happy to accept NBC's findings at face value. PVRs just help people skip ads a bit more efficiently than they did before. In a world with remote controls, that doesn't make the ad's effectiveness measurably worse.   

Comments

[botogol]

There is one way that DVRs paradoxically DO make you pay more attention to the adds: zooming through the commercials at x30 speed, thumb poised over the play button, you have to pay very close attention indeed for the end of the commercial-break, lest you overshoot.

Hence of course the extremely important 'sponsors slot' - the brief 10s ad that marks the end of every commercial break for that show - for this is there precisely to catch the DVR users: it's what you are specifically looking out for.

I concentrate on them so hard that I can even remember them:

ER: 118 118
House: Comfy Rubber Gloves
Desparate Housewives: Herbal Essences
That thing on ITV with Max Beasley: Ask.com

Now that's a powerful thing, isn't it? At the end of anyone of those programmes I'd b hard pressed to list even a single advertiser with a regular ad - I fast-forwarded them - but off the top of my head I can list the sponsors.

[Seamus McCauley]

Hee hee. Good point. Eventually TV networks will be running five minutes of blank screen with the sponsors bookmarking at either end.

[Rick]

Botogol makes an excellent point about the "sponsors slot" - but for me it works in reverse. Whenever I hear the AXA Insurance jingle now I immediately think of 'Lovejoy', which ended its rerun 12 months ago.