Loved-up TV
At the recent MRS annual conference, Nick North, chief marketing officer at GfK Media, took a look at why attitudinal research is still key to understanding audience engageme… and why watching your favourite show is a little bit like falling in love…
A great deal of effort has been spent over the years by media researchers to understand and measure engagement, the secret ingredient to convert a passive viewer into a loyal fan, to convert non-buyers into life-long brand champions. Working within the limitations of the available research, proxies for engagement have been established, systems developed to infer attention from audience measurement data, from which to derive ‘purple grps’ and the like, inferring engagement from behaviour to prove a relationship between positive TV programme involvement and business outcomes – commercial recall, attitudes towards a brand, even sales.
More recently, single source media exposure and purchase panels have enabled researchers to question whether the ‘construct of engagement’ as an antecedent to outcomes can be put to one side, and that our attention should focus on the outcomes themselves, namely the sales effects of advertising exposure. There’s no doubt that some of the claims about engagement are dubious, that consistency bias within surveys may undermine the significance of correlations of different metrics within a single interview, and that – as Jennifer Taylor very persuasively argued at last year’s ESOMAR:WM3 conference – the lack of connection between attitudinal or awareness measures and the business outcomes has left some of these traditional metrics looking rather lame, as they seem to be rarely predictive of future behaviour.
However, while the behaviourist model gets us so far – very far if our purpose is to deliver accountable quantification of past success – it may lack diagnostic and predictive power, because it lacks an emotional dimension.
To explore this, we need to look beyond measurement of exposure, to a measurement of emotional engagement. To this end, GfK conducts audience appreciation research on behalf of public service and commercial broadcast clients, in the UK, in the Netherlands, Germany and other markets. During 2010, over 10 million surveys were conducted, asking respondents to register their appreciation of what they watched on television yesterday.
If we think about the traits we find most attractive in a prospective partner: attractiveness; a sense of humour; intelligence; power or status; thrill and danger; and compatibility; we see strong similarities between these traits and what appeals to people in the programmes that they choose to watch.
In the studies, engagement with TV (and radio) programme content is measured across a number of dimensions, including an overall rating, attention, recommendation, and an emotional response relevant to the genre, such as ‘gripping’ or ‘funny’.
In relation to the overall rating of a programme, GfK’s previous research has shown that the strength of preference is exponential, and at its greatest, a respondent’s commitment, loyalty to and enjoyment of a programme is best described as love.
Other dimensions reflect our human relationships: humour can form strong bonds; thrilling drama creates a passionate, loyal audience. Romance, sexiness and style creates desire, aspiration and devotion. We also see evidence that our commitment and loyalty to a programme grows over time. As with people, so with television.
This may all seem pretty obvious. But it’s important for a number of reasons. For the media owner, first, in a highly competitive media environment, it is the ‘must-see’ loved programmes that will deliver cut-through and drive audiences to a channel, which are increasingly reliant on a small number of high profile shows. Sky’s acquisition of the rights to Mad Men is a good topical example: it’s a programme that audiences love with a passion, and as such is an excellent choice by the operator to feature in a campaign to drive new subscribers to the platform and to the new Sky Atlantic channel.
High quality shows that appeal on a rational level, but not on an emotional level, will not have the same power to effect subscription decisions.
Second, the information can be used to guide our future choices. In a cluttered media schedule, finding programmes I will like is difficult. I cope well enough shopping, on Amazon for example, as it’s got a smart recommendation engine, and I can sort the recommended options by the ratings that other buyers have given. This helps me find something that I will be happy with. When I’m choosing what I want to watch, it’s not so easy. It’s also difficult to build recommendations based on what I watch, because too much of what I watch is someone else’s choice. (It’s not unlike the problem I have with Amazon every January – I’m inundated with recommendations for children’s books, hair straighteners and kitchen utensils, as a result of over-reliance on online shopping for Christmas presents.)
The integration of a measure of my own emotional engagement into my TV viewing history would provide a much more meaningful recommendation engine. Such an approach – work in progress at GfK – can yield insight to schedulers, commissioners, but also to platform operators developing next generation EPGs.
It is also worth noting that the bond with content grows ever stronger in a digital world.
It is evident that the PVR strengthens programme bonds. We know that on-demand viewing of recorded content attracts much higher appreciation. GfK conducts a cross media study to understand the audience appreciation of all live and recorded viewing, listening and usage of a broadcaster’s digital content across a week. We see statistically significant differences in appreciation of recorded content, as may be expected, indicating the increased value delivered, and the stronger emotional bonds formed with content by means of greater consumer control.
In a digital world, we spend more time watching more programmes we love. Taking this one step further, from our most recent studies in the Netherlands, which GfK will be presenting at the MRS Media Research conference in May, we see evidence that the programmes we watch in a loved-up mood have a positive effect on our reactions to the products placed within a show, the sponsors of a show, and indeed the advertised product broadcast within and around a programme.
These findings provide hard evidence of what many advertisers have known for many years: television packs an emotional punch, and an emotionally charged context – along with emotionally engaging content – delivers more effective brand communication: there’s no effect without affect.