Why Ten’s ditching overnight ratings
From today, Network Ten will focus on seven day audience data, rather than overnight data, explains CEO Paul Anderson. Why? Overnight TV ratings have become "increasingly misleading and meaningless" and don't reflect actual audience behaviours. And so what we need, argues Anderson, is a new way of thinking about, and reporting on, TV ratings.
For decades, TV network executives waited with bated breath each morning for the arrival of the overnight audience numbers. It became a daily ritual; the numbers were how the networks were judged. But not anymore. The TV world has changed, and overnight TV ratings are increasingly misleading and meaningless.
The rise of new ways of watching TV content means overnight audience numbers don’t reflect how or when people are engaging with TV content. They misrepresent a TV program’s total audience. They don’t give advertisers the complete picture of how a program is performing. And they don’t give enough credit to the fantastic Aussie producers and actors behind, and in front of, the camera.
From today, Ten will shift its focus from overnight audience numbers to total audience numbers
The future of our industry is about providing brand-safe and brand-relevant content to our viewers on the platform they want, at a time they want, not in the way and at the time decided by a TV network. This is how we monetise it. This should be how we measure it.
Overnight TV audience numbers do not tell the whole story. It’s hard to think of another industry where incomplete data is given such attention and is reported on so widely. And, yet, we keep sending those numbers to media and boasting about our overnight successes.
From today, we’re going to start changing that. Network Ten will place a much greater focus on total seven day audience data (the combination of overnight viewing data and data over the following week). While we will continue to report overnight data, it will no longer be our main focus, and nor should it be.
The change in how people are watching TV was highlighted by Cord Audiences: A New Way Of Thinking About TV, a groundbreaking research report we released last week at Mumbrella360 to help advertisers and agencies understand what viewers are doing.
Based on a representative sample of 2,500 people aged 18 years and over, the research underlined how viewing habits are changing thanks to the rise of on-demand services. It identified four types of viewers: cord forevers, cord shavers, cord cutters and cord nevers. (If you’re wondering, a cord is either a free-to-air TV aerial or a cable connecting to subscription TV).
The cord forevers mainly watch TV in the traditional way and have little interest in broadcast or subscription video on demand services. In comparison, the cord nevers don’t, or rarely, watch traditional TV; instead, they mainly watch services like 10 Play, the ABC’s iView, 10 All Access or Netflix. Interestingly, all four groups are quite similar in terms of their age profile, debunking the assumption that all cord nevers are young people.
There’s a lot of great information in the Cord Audiences report, but one of its key messages is that the way people watch TV is changing and will continue to change. It follows that the way we report TV audience data has to change too.
Overnight data is an anachronism in a world where less and less people are sitting in front of a TV set to watch a program at a time dictated to them by a TV network. That just isn’t how people behave. Every month, our industry is setting records for industry BVOD viewing – new ways that our content is being consumed, new viewers, and new ways for advertisers to connect with our premium, brand safe content. Sure, linear viewing is still a big chunk of total TV viewing, but it isn’t the whole picture.
And just how misleading are overnight numbers? Well, it varies from show to show.
Last year, The Bachelor Australia had an average overnight audience of 1.15m nationally. But add in other forms of viewing over the following seven days and that audience climbed to 1.45m, an increase of 26% (the total number excludes encores).
More recently, our new local drama series Five Bedrooms has been scoring an overnight national audience of 611,000. But its total audience after seven days is 816,000, an increase of 34%.
Similar gaps between overnight and total audience numbers are evident with shows across all commercial networks.
We are all being hurt by the focus on overnight data.
And we all have a role to play in changing the way TV audience data is analysed and reported on.
At Ten, we talk about “the new TV”. At its core, the new TV means giving people the best content in the way they want it, finding new ways to engage and talk with people across all screens and beyond the screen, and giving advertisers the ability to personalise and target their consumers through rich data while still reaching mass audiences.
Achieving that requires a new way of thinking, a new way of talking about TV audience data. It requires downplaying the misleading overnight audience numbers and focusing on total audience numbers – a true reflection of the new TV.
Paul Anderson is the CEO at Network Ten
Ratings are bad for Ten so they will just stop focussing on them? It’s all very well to add catch up to your figures but as an advertiser if you are buying TV you are not getting that additional reach. And if you are including catch up in your buy you can’t pick shows anyway so you still won’t be benefiting from the combined reach.
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Sounds like someone’s ratings are back 20% YOY…..
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Ok.. now start the conversation about trading off MxM ratings instead of selling advertisers 1/4hr audiences which give wildly inflated figures and charge customers for eyeballs that aren’t viewing their ad.
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Paul Anderson is a joke, along with many in the failed Ten management. Everyone can see through his plan to disregard overnight ratings as Ten suffers on a daily basis. Now they can try to justify the endless “encore” screenings of just about every Aussie show they make across all their channels. No need to buy Ten All Access when shows are on four or five times over a week. CBS must be proud!
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Two points.
I agree that daily ratings are not the whole story but it’s unreasonable to believe that one network’s, or one program’s, cume would be any greater than another’s. Daily ratings at least reveal relative popularity. And linear viewing is not subjected to fast forwarding, unlike delayed viewing.
It’s the commercial content which advertisers want viewed, not programming.
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What rot. If am am a National Advertiser who is running a call to action campaign…and its failing, I need to see why and fast – not 7 days later?
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This would probably mean more coming from a broadcaster who isn’t tanking across virtually its entire schedule.
And a bizarre corporate PR move on their behalf…
When the overnights + 7 days (or even 28 day!) = still bad, why on earth would you draw attention to it?!
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Network 10 CEO Paul Anderson needs to focus on content. When his Network regularly runs fourth in the ratings, does he not question the quality, or content of the programming!
The ratings system, whilst not perfect, has been fairly reliable since the McNair, Nielsen and OZTAM measurements were in place, long before Mr Anderson arrived from New Zealand.
Mr Anderson your worst night is Saturday and you want a 7-day cycle!
I’ll give you a tip! Network Ten is languishing under your stewardship. You must down and give someone else, who won’t blame the “referee” for losing the game, a chance to bring some creative fresh programming to the market.
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Channel 10 – weekly ratings? It might look worse than the daily.
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For years the networks perpetuated the myth of “a win” based on just night-time viewing. In fact, they were the only ones who bothered to feed the data to the press.
Media buyers never/hardly ever paid a gnats dick of attention to the broadcasters PR. Each week you would get a PR release that in some way fashioned the data so that there were three winning networks. DIdn’t they know we had the self-same data and could calculate the data any way we needed.
So where did things go off the rails? With catch-up viewing, first through DVRs and then streaming. However, they are still content to look for the biggest number or “my dick is bigger than your dick” story.
As The Cynic points out, with catch-up the default behaviour is to fast-forward through the ads. As a media agency person my concern is that the actual programme rating is increasingly less predictive of how many people will have the opportunity to see the ad – which is more important commercially than the absolute size of the number. Pull your collective fingers out and start working on some industry-standard commercial solutions.
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Those who are trashing Ten would do well to look at the ratings by demo – sure All People are important as an overall yard stick but has anyone actually bought a campaign against All People ever? P16-39 and P25-54 are doing alright for them, even OG1’s are doing well.
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Makes total sense. Live and overnight ratings are totally dead outside of Live Sports, News and Weather.
The market reporting needs to catch up.
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Ch 10 should also drop those god awful overnight infomercials and start offering an alternative to the other ch’s, some classic Aussie shows like The Restless Years would be good for us insomniacs!
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Couldn’t agree more. Time for CBS to clean out the programming management at Ten ASAP! They’ve had more than long enough to fix the problems there
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“A groundbreaking research report – to help advertisers and agencies understand what viewers are doing”
Here’s my very simple understanding of what viewers are doing. Watching TV that’s better than what 10 is offering.
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I think the only way to improve your ratings is to dump Studio 10 immediately! KAK does more harm than good and let me tell you, nobody “is wondering what all the fuss is about”
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A really good idea! Who owns Number 96 and other classic Aussie tv?
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Why not keep out of the media and focus on letting yourself as a Network climb back up the ranks, every time Ten appears on media channels like this all it highlights is that they are talking big but not walking the walk
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The programming format for Channel Ten hasn’t really evolved much in decades. Having said that, they need to take a leaf from their former colleagues of the 80’s who made Friday night viewing a treat for the whole family! Though television has the potential to bring people together in the living room again, I’d hesitate to guess that the only people watching 10 after 8pm are the ones doing the survey! Surely CBS has an amazing archive 10 could tap into for content that will make them stand out from the crowd!
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Saturday nights need a huge revamp.Its the one night most people have an opportunity to watch TV but it’s the worst content for viewing
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tl,dr: Because it has none.
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Bring back Big Brother, it would fill a lot of empty time slots where Ten are just doing reruns anyway, it’s cheapish to produce & I think CBS even have the rights to the format.
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