Who Watches Commercials Anymore

 

“Oscars for the advertising industry” 

Jura Liaukonyte, Cornell professor, on Super Bowl Ads

Forgetting about the egregious cost of producing the commercial in the first place, a 30 second spot on NBC’s February 13th Super Bowl telecast cost a cool $7 million, a record. Those ads often become viral, are reviewed as if they were full-fledged programming and are often the very reason some folks who are not football fans watch the event on television. And while old-world television panders to old-world viewers – as the litany of prescription drug ads attest – for the most part commercials are losing traction more than ever. Not only is there a commercial-free streaming alternative, but the effectiveness accountability that advertisers are now requiring makes the value of commercials increasingly questionable. While Super Bowl ads may be special… the rest are generally not.

The first big slam to advertising was the set-top cable box that allowed viewers to record their favorite shows and scroll through the ads when they played the program back. Sports were more valuable as their commercial breaks were generally shorter, programmers learned to leave content on the screen somewhere… but mostly because who wants to record a competitive sport but miss the actual moments of scoring triumph? Sports were not nearly as hot on playback.

The Internet, smartphones and to a lesser extent radio provided advertisers with alternatives, frequently very, very trackable, and in many cases very customizable for individual viewers’ demographic susceptibilities. Metrics were increasingly focused on more than simple CPMs (cost per thousand viewers). Commercials were now measured as to how effectively they reached the consumers most likely to use or by the advertised product or service. Some advertisers simply wanted their “brand” to be familiar to potential consumers in case they stumbled on the relevant product or service in their world. It enhanced consumer confidence. 

But to answer the title question posited in this blog, researchers at Cornell University decided to find out. The study – How Viewer Tuning, Presence, and Attention Respond to Ad Content and Predict Brand Search Lift written by researchers from the University of Delaware, the University of California (San Diego) and Cornell University and led by Jura Liaukonyte (professor at the latter) – was published on February 9th of Marketing Science. Writing for the February 12th FastCompany.com, Connie Lin summarizes their results: “[The researchers] literally tracked those eyeballs in 1,155 households, across 4 million TV ads, over the course of a year… So, what did they find? Nearly a third of all commercials play to an empty room.

“And when the rooms weren’t empty, viewers were doing everything they could to avoid actually watching the commercials. Strategies varied by age: Older viewers were more likely to switch to another channel, while millennial and Gen Z viewers turned their eyeballs to a completely different screen, checking their phones, tablets, laptops, or other screen-centric device. Or, they got up and left the room, which viewers, in general, were four times more likely to do than change the channel…

“Liaukonyte’s research was inspired ‘to quantify whether the current industry standard is doing a good job predicting what advertisers care about,’ she said. But even if it’s not, the team’s methodology is far from a viable alternative. It involves extensive high-tech monitoring installed in willing participants’ homes, which could track when human bodies (sets of heads, shoulders, and arms) were present; plus facial recognition algorithms, equipped with infrared sensors to see through low light—and then identifying each viewer and determining if their eyes were open and watching the TV screen, based on head orientation… 

“Whatever the behavior, those distinctions matter to the TV-spot industry. Currently, prices for brand advertisements are gauged via the Nielsen measure, which logs whether a commercial gets splashed across a screen—but there’s no way to know whether those commercials are making a splash with any potential viewers. In Nielsen numbers, a commercial broadcasting to an empty room costs the same as one with a rapt audience of 40 people. This also suggests, based on Cornell’s data, that many brands are overpaying…

“As for the ads in [the above Cornell] study, they weren’t all created equal. Commercials for recreation like hunting, fishing, and casinos captured the most attention, while those for prescription drugs (especially for severe illnesses like Alzheimer’s, cancer, and bipolar disorder) had the worst effect. It sort of makes sense: One’s fun, the other isn’t.” 

Considering that ad-supported television (in all of its formats) is literally financed by companies’ seeking to maximize their marketing reach, any major determinant that they are overpaying is likely to depress the market and perhaps even pull the rug out from under telecasters and their content suppliers… which impact a whole lot of people from shareholders to men and women wearing toolbelts on set, making an hourly wage.

I’m Peter Dekom, and as we are seeing in the explosive political world we live in, change both impacts us all… requires adaptation… and is downright scary and disruptive.