MBP Overview: The Coming Conversation on TV Viewer Engagement, Updated 3/19

Among the many topics that will complicate this season’s upfront marketplace is the topic of viewer engagement. While commercial ratings will not be ready to be used as currency during the upfronts, leaving Nielsen’s program ratings to be used as usual, commercial viewer engagement guarantees based on IAG Research data will likely play a role.

NBC will offer advertisers guarantees based on IAG Research engagement data, following a test using the data that it did for Toyota earlier this season, writes Mediaweek. While other networks are not likely to follow NBC’s lead - the network, having slipped by $1 billion in the upfront over the past two years, must do whatever it can to lure more dollars, says a broadcast sales executive - some cable networks are planning to offer engagement guarantees.

Those that have agreed to discuss the possibility of offering engagement score guarantees (or have already agreed to offer them) include Court TV, The Weather Channel, AMC, WEtv, Discovery, A&E and Lifetime, say media buyers.

IAG data has gotten mixed reviews from media agencies in regards to its engagement data. IAG has 150 people come into the company’s NY headquarters each night to watch everything on the broadcast networks as well as shows on 20 different cable networks. A portion of the group separately watches every commercial. Then they put together a detailed questionnaire that is posed to an online panel of 5,500 people the next day. Based on the answers, an engagement score is assigned to each show and commercial.

Nielsen has also created an experimental engagement panel, made up of former TV meter households who have agreed to participate in additional surveys on engagement after they leave Nielsen’s official ratings sample.

Some media executives have said that the IAG’s practice of incentivizing consumers for their participation may compromise results, but others, like Lyle Schwartz, executive vp, director of research and marketplace analysis for GroupM, said that IAG data is a tool clients and agencies can use for individual deals. He believes, however, that it is unlikely to be used as industry wide currency.

Another broadcast sales exec believes that measuring viewer engagement has limited value, saying that it all comes down to the quality of the commercial.

But Dave Marans, executive vp, IAG, says that history has shown that the more engaged a viewer is in a program, the more engaged that viewer will be in the program’s commercials. Marans added that engagement scores are higher for original episodes than for repeats, and that a cable net can achieve as high an engagement score as a broadcast net, though the program rating for the broadcast show will invariably be higher.

Perhaps muddying the waters is new research that shows just how important engagement scores may actually be. Some of the highest rated shows are less engaging to viewers than their ratings would lead most to believe, according to data from Marketing Evaluations Inc., creators of the Q ratings.

The Q ratings, which have long been used by TV networks to program their schedules, includes Impact Q Scores, which Marketing Evaluations calls the “industry standard for measuring familiarity and appeal of performers, characters, sports and sports personalities, broadcast and cable programs as well as company and brand names.” Based on the company’s “One of My Favorites” concept, Q Scores summarize the various perceptions and feelings that consumers have, into a single, “likeability” measurement.

These likeability scores show some surprising data. For example, the Impact Q Scores show that programs such as Desperate Housewives, known to be a favorite based on Nielsen data, may not actually be as popular as it has been thought. The show falls out of the top 10 to No. 11 based on Marketing Evaluations’s Impact Q scores, while NBC’s ER, which ranks near the top of Nielsen’s ratings, is only 16th in Marketing Evaluations’ database.