MRG Evening Meeting Hears About ELVs
The MRG Evening Meeting, held last night, heard two papers concerning television research which focused on ELVs (Elusive Light Viewers) and the measuring of audience appreciation of programmes.
Sue Read from Laser presented a paper on the value of ITV peaktime for advertisers, entitled “ITV is Not a Commodity Product”, and Richard Windle from RSL spoke about measuring audience reaction in the UK.
Sue Read said that as well as considering CPTs and viewing figures, advertisers should also consider the programme loyalty of ITV’s peaktime viewers. She said that ITV not only produces the highest rating programmes but these programmes hold viewers the most. The importance of this for advertisers is that attentive viewers are more receptive to advertising breaks. Research has shown that drama and light entertainment have the greatest loyalty viewing: a programme is considered to have a loyal audience if that audience watches at least 75% of it.
Speaking about people’s use of TV, Sue Read said that 16% of the adult population were ITV ELVs (those viewers who watch less than 15 minutes of television per day) and 55% were Channel 4 ELVs. Light viewing is more typical among young and upmarket groups: of ITV’s ELVs 21% are ABC1 adults while 22% are 16-34 year-olds; of Channel 4’s ELVs 59% are ABC1 adults and 65% are 16-34 year-olds. High rating programmes have the highest number of light viewers (over 70%) and prime time is especially popular among these viewers, with 77% of ELVs watching. Research also showed that ELVs on Channel 4 can be reached via ITV but not vice versa.
The best performing prime time evenings were Monday, Wednesday and Saturday and, among ELVs, the most popular programmes were Cracker, The Beatles Anthology, The Big Story and Crime Monthly. It was also pointed out that people view ITV for longer viewing sessions. In conclusion Sue Read said that ELVs are a very attractive audience and that overall ITV prime time is undervalued.
Richard Windle then spoke about measuring audience reaction to television programmes, pointing out that the size of audience is not the only criterion that is important. He said that while it has been argued that people only watch programmes that they enjoy, previous studies have shown that there is not a correlation between audience size and audience appreciation: therefore, any study of appreciation would create a ‘complementary currency’.
The Audience Reaction survey consists of a panel of about 4,000 individuals aged 16+ which is representative of age, sex, social grade, educational background, weight of viewing and TV region. From this survey an Appreciation Index (AI) is calculated from panel members marking programmes on a scale of 1-10. The AI is then expressed on a scale from 1-100.
Mr Windle pointed out that the average AI is about 77, while just under 20% of programmes achieve scores greater than 82 and just over 20% achieve scores of less than 72. On average, women tend to give higher appreciation scores than men and older people tend to give higher scores than young people. In terms of genres the differences in AI is relatively small, though information programmes such as news and documentaries tend to achieve higher scores (of around 90) than entertainment programmes.
The relationship between the AI and audience size continues to be elusive: research shows that many long-running series achieve large audiences but a low AI. It is also true that programmes with a high AI have small audiences. Mr Windle also put forward the hypothesis that an AI may be used to predict the success of new series: if a first episode had a small audience but a high AI then it may be expected that the audience would grow as a result of early viewers ‘spreading the word’.
Problems with the research include the fact that respondents can only give their appreciation for each episode immediately after they have watched it and scores may fluctuate from week to week, making interpretation of trends difficult. It is also true that everyone who likes a programme does not give it ten out of ten and everyone who dislikes it does not give it nought out of ten.