Calls for TV industry to address audience measurement as viewers continue to tumble

The traditional free to air commercial TV model isn’t breaking – it’s broken. Prime time, 6 pm to midnight, is virtually unwatchable now with every ad break topped and tailed by screaming promos for the various channels’ upcoming confected reality rubbish about cooking, dancing, singing, dating or fat people. These abominations seem to be on some sort of continuous loop and they’re played all night. Why would any self-respecting advertiser want to get thrown in with this lot? Even the worthwhile dramas have become unwatchable, chopped to bits as they are to fit in all this crud, plus ads.
. The news services are reduced to “if it bleeds it leads” endless parades of car crashes, suburban crime and funny animal stories. What passes as current affairs is a bit better, but not much – again, sliced and diced by promos and ads. More often than not, programs don’t start on time or are chopped and changed in and out of schedules, seemingly on a whim.
About the only thing the commercials have left is live sport where the run of play, be it AFL, NRL or cricket, dictates the breaks. But then there are the on-the-run promos of upcoming shows that are a cringing embarrassment. Wow, I really bet Ray Warren and Phil Gould can’t wait to get home from the footy so they can watch Channel 9’s latest cooking contest!
Thank god for the ABC and SBS – that don’t mind a bit of promoting themselves – and then there’s downloading, legal or otherwise, and even good old Blockbuster just around the corner.
Bottom line: Free to air commercial TV is where newspapers were a decade ago, but at least the better newspapers still manage some worthwhile content. Commercial TV is all but running on empty in that regard.

Look, there is no doubt FTA aggregates large audiences. Its just that the ‘large’ is getting smaller.
The issue here is how will the FTA operators address the escalating CPM issues? The answer is in the added value of the catch up platforms pure & simple. They need to sell us reach and guarantee it for an agreed CPM. That’s what it needs to look like to underwrite FTA’s commercial imperatives. They’ve made the content, so that cost is fixed. The platform has additional costs – but those are way less than the threat of the contraction of CPMs and the inevitable commercial fallout.
It’s still, by far, the best medium to build reach quickly. Its just not as cost effective as it was and the Networks need to address that and quickly.
Didn’t we all love reaching 2m+ people on a Sunday night?

I think the issue for the TV stations (read content providers) is context and relevance – like it is for any business that wants to build or keep a community.

The problem we have is that the TV Networks haven’t realised this and are unfortunately wrapped up in the myth that ‘spectrum’ demands revenue flow, aka I’ll put what i want and they will come, and are consequently still in the business of ‘selling’. They also can’t build a business like their competitors on UGC – so they are development cost laden to an audience that they know or care less and less about.

To compensate for this the ‘buyers’ chase all the other areas where the audience is going, they demand lower CPM’s as the mass gravitis doesn’t exist, don’t work with the Networks as that would be collusion (vs helping their clients) and then have sprays like this when it comes to negotiation time – awesome work if you can get it!!

What is needed is change, thinking that goes beyond the ‘trade’ and starts working toward how as an industry we can have a healthy mix of mass reach and perception building as well as niche reach and context, by target by channel in a holistic and sustainable way. I know a few are working down that path (Match and Razor/Joy, maybe Bohemia) but the US started on this in 1998 with the Family Friendly Programming Forum…maybe that kind of thinking should be adopted here as no individual part of this market can do it alone.

Why is no-one mentioning the fact that TV audience measurement has never been accurate in the first place, due to the minuscule sample size? Saying there’s no doubt TV has big audiences, the whole audience is just getting smaller is not correct; all it takes to make it LOOK like less people on the whole are watching TV is for a few hundred out of the 4000 viewers with people meters to get Netflix instead. The industry needs to change, for sure, but I would like to hear more conversation about how true audience measurement can be applied to FTA TV.

From a technical perspective this stuff is HARD!

Sure we can count streams, video starts, likes, tweets and re-tweets but if what we truly want is a unified system in which ‘a person’ in the non-linear online download/streaming environment with the more traditional linear TV measurement then we have A LOT of work to do.

Throw in the issue of multi-device access and it gets several orders of magnitude harder.

One thing that many people have lost sight of is that the quantum of in-home television viewing is only very gently declining. For example, last year was the first time that Total TV Viewing in the combined Metro markets dipped below 3 hours per day by around 30 seconds (yes, the average person still spends one-eighth of their day watching TV!). When I first measured this in 1991 it was 3 hours 14n minutes a day. So in a quarter of a century it has decreased by a quarter of an hour. A touch of the Mark Twain’s in that.

What indisputably is happening is that that quantum of audience is fragmenting – and fragmenting rapidly. There were five FTAs and no STV back in 1991. Now there are 16 FTA and over 100 STV channels. Throw in OTT, SVOD, etc and there is little wonder that the number of #1 programmes that achieved over 2 million has basically halved in the past 10 years.

So how DO we measure ‘video’ holistically? How do we measure the ‘anywhere, anytime, any device’ online viewing with the ‘household, linear/time-shift viewing’ and put them together into some meaningful system?

Despite what appears to be inertia regarding this, the duck is paddling rapidly underneath the waterline. Methods and systems are being designed hear in Australia which other countries are watching closely. No-one has cracked this nut yet, but Australia is doing some of the most promising work.

And speaking of holistic … why not go beyond just video measurement?

Well, how deep are your pockets.

Please excuse my many typos and spelling errors in my prior post. More haste less speed.

Tim, Nic etc. Is there any way of popping up an ‘on-screen’ preview to check a post before you submit. Scrolling up and down is not fun, and clearly I still missed some real screamers.

Cheers.