DVR viewer behavior
July 31, 2006
For those following Digital Video Recorder (DVR) usage with interest, Mediamark Research Inc. (MRI) released results of their Spring 2006 Research study and suggests that adults in households that have digital video recorders watch less TV than adults in the general population.
Excerpts:
“More Than 11% of Adults Live in Households That Have DVR’s.”
“U.S. adults whose households have a digital video recorder (DVR) are more upscale than those that do not and are more likely to be heavy readers of magazines and newspapers.”
“20% of all adults who watch 44.5 or more hours of television per week.”
“15.7% of adults in DVR-owning households who watch that many hours.”
“36.8% of adults with DVR’s have a college education and 17.1% have average household income exceeding $150,000.”
“Of adults with DVR’s in the household, 15.7% have home values exceeding $500,000.”
Methodology:
In-home interviews conducted by Mediamark with 26,000 adults between March 2005 and May 2006.
Concerns:
Advertisers worry about viewers time shifting/skipping past commercials.
Researchers for the major networks told advertisers in November that people in households with a DVR watched 12% more hours of TV a day than those without.
CBS says the Mediamark numbers were unreliable, because they were derived from people’s often-low reports of their own TV watching. The figures suggesting that adults who use a DVR watch more television come from Arbitron’s 2,000-person machine-recorded survey in the spring of 2005, but it covered only the Houston market.
CBS further maintains that their own research indicates that whatever their level of TV viewing, viewers tend to watch more television after getting the devices than before.
Links:
- Mediamark ResearchPress Release
- NYTimes.com: Does a DVR Boost Viewing Hours or Not?
Roland Reinhart is an interactive marketing professional. His observations can be found at NewMediaSandbox.com and Chaos365.com.
©2006 Roland Reinhart. All Rights Reserved.
Marketing inspiration is everywhere.
July 28, 2006
I tend to ignore online media ads. (Shh, don’t tell my clients) Being in the advertising business so long and having to troll through so many Web sites daily, my attention span is limited. I usually do stop for animation, eye poping colors or out of banner actions.
So why did this static media unit on the Seattle Times catch my eye?
Smart marketers have been using forms in rich media units for years to perform a basic function (e.g. loan calculator) or capture a few key pieces of contact info. I realized this one also specifically called attention to Washington drivers and posted in a Washington media site. Again, nothing startling. But just something I hadn’t seen executed before. It’s smart.
A geo-targeted ad, customized to the audience most likely to read the publication. Capturing key data points in the ad allows the user to get prescreened and directed to an appropriate solution. It’s also beneficial for the advertiser since it prescreens/prequalifies prospects early on. Smart and efficient!
I get inspired in other ways too.
- Podcasts (Ask A Ninja, TikiBar TV, TWiT, DL.tv)
- Professional Blogs
- Exploring new “Web 2.0″, social networking, and AJAX apps
So, challenge yourself. Stop and look around you. Something might catch your eye and spark your imagination. Marketing is more fun when it’s challenging, smart and measurable.
Enjoy!
-Roland
Roland Reinhart is an interactive marketing professional. His observations can be found at NewMediaSandbox.com and Chaos365.com.
©2006 Roland Reinhart. All Rights Reserved.
Canadians do have a sense of humor!
July 26, 2006
I learned that U.S. Airways had announced it’s intent to place advertising on airsickness bags.
As I researched the story, it became apparent that the U.S. media outlets all are a bit too cautious about how they phrase things, like airsickness bags.
CBS News Canada (CBS.ca) was the only one to call a barf bag a barf bag.
“Barf bags have a lot of shelf life - people aren’t barfing as much in planes as they used to.”
“But having an advertisement for a barf bag, especially if it’s for something like Dramamine (a motion sickness medication), now that’s brilliant.”
Go Canada!
Roland Reinhart is an interactive marketing professional. His observations can be found at NewMediaSandbox.com and Chaos365.com.
©2006 Roland Reinhart. All Rights Reserved.
A contest doesn’t have to have a prize
July 19, 2006
As advertisers struggle to come up with ideas to engage the elusive and fickle youth market, the incentive is always a topic of debate. What do you offer: free iPod, music, Sidekick, game console, cash?
How about… nothing? Or put a marketing spin on nothing and make it “bragging rights”? Here’s an example:
http://obey.msn.com/
Obey is a mobile scavenger hunt. Each week, participants must take a photo of an object and submit it.
The fact that Sprite is the brand behind this is not obvious. The only obvious hint is the lemon-lime theme. (Put that and the name “Obey” together and you might recall Sprint’s old theme “Obey Your Thirst“) Hidden links take the user to more content where Sprite connects with consumers in the offline world via their Urban Games.
What’s most important is engaging your audience in a meaningful way that they will want to participate. A fun challenge without overt branding will be accepted. Allowing marketers and legal folks to muddy the concept with cross-sell messages, pages of legal disclaimers and all around bad judgement will surely lead to failure.
What are your thoughts? Is a prize incentive critical to success?
-Roland
Roland Reinhart is an interactive marketing professional. His observations can be found at NewMediaSandbox.com and Chaos365.com.
©2006 Roland Reinhart. All Rights Reserved.
Using MySpace to engage consumers
July 11, 2006
The media likes to bash on MySpace as a site where predators prowl. As a result, major brands have shied away from leveraging the opportunity to reach and engage with consumers. But not everyone is running scared.
Here’s an interesting example I just discovered. On July 8th, the Luann comic strip promoted a url to a fictitional character’s (Tiffany) My Space page:
I finally checked that page 3 days later and there were 585 other MySpace community members that had linked to Tiffany (aka “Sheraton”) as a friend. That doesn’t include however many visitors that had viewed the page but didn’t leave a message or link to her.
Plus, these “friends” leave comments that play along with with fictional character.
Tiffany has posted her modeling photos and several blog posts. The comic strip suggests that arch-rival “Luann” may make discrete posts to Tiffany’s site, thus compelling readers to follow the drama from the newspaper to the Web and back.
Pretty impressive for such a minimal investment, don’t you think?
-Roland
Roland Reinhart is an interactive marketing professional. His observations can be found at NewMediaSandbox.com and Chaos365.com.
©2006 Roland Reinhart. All Rights Reserved.
