Calls for TV industry to address audience measurement as viewers continue to tumble
Baxter
Some of Australia’s most powerful media buyers have urged the TV industry to adopt a more “holistic” measurement of video consumption as audiences for linear TV continue to tumble.
The calls came after an interview in today’s Australian Financial Review with GroupM chief investment officer Danny Bass who asked if the traditional TV model is “breaking”, noting metropolitan television audiences are down six per cent this ratings year between 6pm and midnight.
Last month OzTam set up a tender for the contract to measure TV audiences, which currently sits with Nielsen TAM, inviting global measurement firms including Ipsos, Kantar and GfK to set out how they would set up the service for the future.
CEO of UM Mat Baxter told Mumbrella: “I don’t think we will ever see the audiences we used to see in free-to-air television. You will have to chase them in other places – be that in streaming services or online – to be able to meet the delta between what you used to get and what you now get.”
Most of the media buyers Mumbrella spoke to denied the issue was being driven by the rise of streaming video on demand (SVOD) services, such as Presto, Stan and Netflix, arguing there had been a broader shift away from terrestrial television happening for some time.
“It is not the SVODs,” said Alex Pekish group media investment director at Aegis Media. “They add a little bit but are predominantly consumed post 9.30pm and at weekends, whereas the majority of the television audience is between 6pm and 8.30pm.
“I think audiences per se is at a critical point. The way audiences are consumed off multiple devices is becoming more prevalent than what it was last year. It’s not just television.”
Baxter agreed adding: “We have seen a downward trend in TV audiences before the streaming battle started. It has been a continuing pattern that TV audiences have been moving away from traditional TV for quite a while.”
The UM boss argued that while the shift was not new there was a hesitancy on the part of the TV networks and their industry owned metric OzTam to measure audiences outside of traditional TV.
“It is unlikely that those audiences are going to be worth the same amount of money in other locations (such as tablet or mobile) because there was always a fairly steep premium attached to free-to-air television,” said Baxter.
“They should be giving you an aggregate measure to show you the true power of the show,” he said citing the example of Seven’s Home and Away which often pulls hundreds of thousands of viewers on Plus7.
“Home and Away is a great example where its viewing audience on catch up can often be as big as the people who are watching that show when its programmed on free-to-air,” he said.
“To not be showing that as an industry measure seems crazy to me. It’s not like this has crept up on the industry – it’s been well documented that these fundamental shifts are occurring.
“It is critical that they evolve the currency and that the currency become a more truly reflective measure and a more holistic measure of how pieces of content are performing in market.”
Official comment is being sought from OzTam, but a spokeswoman for the audience metric did note it is currently implementing a measurement system for the networks’ online catch-up TV services.
For Dentsu Aegis’s Pekish and UM’s Baxter this element was critical of measuring people on TV, tablet, mobile and computer was critical. “It is going to need to show more than just people sitting behind a TV,” said Pekish.
“We have passed a point of no return on this and it will be interesting to see how the (TV network) business models evolve to compensate and adjust for that reality,” said Baxter.
“We need to look at an aggregate of TV audiences rather than just looking at a platform.
“What you should be buying as an advertiser is an audience that watches a particular piece of content – where they consume that content is largely irrelevant.”
Another media buyer, who asked not to be named, took aim at the timing of the attack from GroupM’s Bass, noting it comes as Australia’s biggest media buying group launches into its annual upfront negotiations over ad rates with the TV networks.
“There are no surprises here. You can set your watch by it,” they added.
Coad
Mark Coad, CEO of Omnicom media agency PHD, took aim at the practice of committing large amounts of client budgets to upfront spends with media companies saying: “That doesn’t necessarily change the value of the commitments we make to commercial TV operators, more so structurally how and where we make those commitments.
“We continually suggest that should be with specific client to client focus, rather than at macro trading group level.”
In the AFR piece Seven’s chief revenue officer Kurt Burnette warned agencies not to move budgets away from TV saying: “For anyone who wants to make significant [budget] moves out of TV, knock yourself out.
“There’s going to be significant ramifications… Agencies want to push their own [media inventory] trading desks where there are a number of unclear perimeters of what the CPMs actually are. We’re going to have a tough discussion with some people but you can not deny the power of broadcast TV. They are the facts.”
Nic Christensen
The traditional free to air commercial TV model isn’t breaking – it’s broken. Prime time, 6 pm to midnight, is virtually unwatchable now with every ad break topped and tailed by screaming promos for the various channels’ upcoming confected reality rubbish about cooking, dancing, singing, dating or fat people. These abominations seem to be on some sort of continuous loop and they’re played all night. Why would any self-respecting advertiser want to get thrown in with this lot? Even the worthwhile dramas have become unwatchable, chopped to bits as they are to fit in all this crud, plus ads.
. The news services are reduced to “if it bleeds it leads” endless parades of car crashes, suburban crime and funny animal stories. What passes as current affairs is a bit better, but not much – again, sliced and diced by promos and ads. More often than not, programs don’t start on time or are chopped and changed in and out of schedules, seemingly on a whim.
About the only thing the commercials have left is live sport where the run of play, be it AFL, NRL or cricket, dictates the breaks. But then there are the on-the-run promos of upcoming shows that are a cringing embarrassment. Wow, I really bet Ray Warren and Phil Gould can’t wait to get home from the footy so they can watch Channel 9’s latest cooking contest!
Thank god for the ABC and SBS – that don’t mind a bit of promoting themselves – and then there’s downloading, legal or otherwise, and even good old Blockbuster just around the corner.
Bottom line: Free to air commercial TV is where newspapers were a decade ago, but at least the better newspapers still manage some worthwhile content. Commercial TV is all but running on empty in that regard.
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Look, there is no doubt FTA aggregates large audiences. Its just that the ‘large’ is getting smaller.
The issue here is how will the FTA operators address the escalating CPM issues? The answer is in the added value of the catch up platforms pure & simple. They need to sell us reach and guarantee it for an agreed CPM. That’s what it needs to look like to underwrite FTA’s commercial imperatives. They’ve made the content, so that cost is fixed. The platform has additional costs – but those are way less than the threat of the contraction of CPMs and the inevitable commercial fallout.
It’s still, by far, the best medium to build reach quickly. Its just not as cost effective as it was and the Networks need to address that and quickly.
Didn’t we all love reaching 2m+ people on a Sunday night?
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I think the issue for the TV stations (read content providers) is context and relevance – like it is for any business that wants to build or keep a community.
The problem we have is that the TV Networks haven’t realised this and are unfortunately wrapped up in the myth that ‘spectrum’ demands revenue flow, aka I’ll put what i want and they will come, and are consequently still in the business of ‘selling’. They also can’t build a business like their competitors on UGC – so they are development cost laden to an audience that they know or care less and less about.
To compensate for this the ‘buyers’ chase all the other areas where the audience is going, they demand lower CPM’s as the mass gravitis doesn’t exist, don’t work with the Networks as that would be collusion (vs helping their clients) and then have sprays like this when it comes to negotiation time – awesome work if you can get it!!
What is needed is change, thinking that goes beyond the ‘trade’ and starts working toward how as an industry we can have a healthy mix of mass reach and perception building as well as niche reach and context, by target by channel in a holistic and sustainable way. I know a few are working down that path (Match and Razor/Joy, maybe Bohemia) but the US started on this in 1998 with the Family Friendly Programming Forum…maybe that kind of thinking should be adopted here as no individual part of this market can do it alone.
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Why is no-one mentioning the fact that TV audience measurement has never been accurate in the first place, due to the minuscule sample size? Saying there’s no doubt TV has big audiences, the whole audience is just getting smaller is not correct; all it takes to make it LOOK like less people on the whole are watching TV is for a few hundred out of the 4000 viewers with people meters to get Netflix instead. The industry needs to change, for sure, but I would like to hear more conversation about how true audience measurement can be applied to FTA TV.
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From a technical perspective this stuff is HARD!
Sure we can count streams, video starts, likes, tweets and re-tweets but if what we truly want is a unified system in which ‘a person’ in the non-linear online download/streaming environment with the more traditional linear TV measurement then we have A LOT of work to do.
Throw in the issue of multi-device access and it gets several orders of magnitude harder.
One thing that many people have lost sight of is that the quantum of in-home television viewing is only very gently declining. For example, last year was the first time that Total TV Viewing in the combined Metro markets dipped below 3 hours per day by around 30 seconds (yes, the average person still spends one-eighth of their day watching TV!). When I first measured this in 1991 it was 3 hours 14n minutes a day. So in a quarter of a century it has decreased by a quarter of an hour. A touch of the Mark Twain’s in that.
What indisputably is happening is that that quantum of audience is fragmenting – and fragmenting rapidly. There were five FTAs and no STV back in 1991. Now there are 16 FTA and over 100 STV channels. Throw in OTT, SVOD, etc and there is little wonder that the number of #1 programmes that achieved over 2 million has basically halved in the past 10 years.
So how DO we measure ‘video’ holistically? How do we measure the ‘anywhere, anytime, any device’ online viewing with the ‘household, linear/time-shift viewing’ and put them together into some meaningful system?
Despite what appears to be inertia regarding this, the duck is paddling rapidly underneath the waterline. Methods and systems are being designed hear in Australia which other countries are watching closely. No-one has cracked this nut yet, but Australia is doing some of the most promising work.
And speaking of holistic … why not go beyond just video measurement?
Well, how deep are your pockets.
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Please excuse my many typos and spelling errors in my prior post. More haste less speed.
Tim, Nic etc. Is there any way of popping up an ‘on-screen’ preview to check a post before you submit. Scrolling up and down is not fun, and clearly I still missed some real screamers.
Cheers.
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