The Remotely Armed Audience

THE AUDIENCE IS ARMED AND DANGEROUS
The Remote Control of Television Commercials

Carl Lewis, the legendary world-class runner, actually lost races in which he ran faster than his opponents. It seems that his reaction time was mediocre at best, so he was 20-25 milliseconds slower off the starting blocks. In a 100 yard dash, that is a lot of ground to make up. Some well-tuned athletes, with slower reaction times, would try to anticipate the starting gun to get a "jump" on their competition. Officials guarded against this by calling back a start if any runner took off within one-tenth of a second after the gun went off. They reasoned that no human could react faster than a tenth of a second. Wannabet? All they had to do was watch the average couch potato with a remote control in his hand.

Armed and Dangerous

Every good television programmer and advertising copywriter knows that the audience is armed with a weapon that could literally obliterate their work and by extension their professional survival, so they have developed strategies to shield their work from this weapon. But, how about the audience? The audience is not just capable of killing a show or commercial, it is arguably driving itself crazy.

By reaching for the remote control, the public is placing itself in an unfocused state of distraction. One network study found fully one quarter of a show's audience began scanning other channels as the end of a show neared,. By tumbling images from one station with another in rapid succession, the viewing public loses all sense of order. All beginnings, middles and ends get tossed around in a smorgasbord of experience. Prime position in a commercial pod probably has less effect on advertising today than it did in the past. The remote control device has become a means of expressing dissatisfaction and boredom, which in turn is measured in television ratings,or is it?

The Last Minute of Nesting

Nielsen measures television viewing with meters that record the viewing habits of each person in the household. The meters record what station is tuned into roughly every three seconds and then accumulates that information in one minute batches. If a set is continually being surfed to a new channel, all of that grazing time is attributed to the last station the viewer watched for a minute or more. Therefore, an individual could be surfing across channels for literally ten minutes, never landing or nesting any one place for more than a minute. All of that time is attributed to the last station viewed for 60 plus seconds. Ten minutes of purgatory erroneously assigned.

Some surveys in the early 1990s proclaimed that as much as 30% of a cable station's audience goes into transition during a commercial break. From what we know of Nielsen's best efforts to measure viewing, the traveling audience could very well exceed one-third of all people viewing. So whatever rating a program gets, it is quite possible that commercials in that show could reach an audience only two-thirds as large. Of course this does not even address the subject of the level of attention paid to commercials.

Keeping the Audience

Programmers have learned a few tricks along the way to retain audiences at breaks, particularly at the end of a show. On method is to squeeze credits into the right hand corner of the screen while running a promo over the center and left portion. One network produced nearly 10,000 new program promotions in a year, ranging in length from twenty seconds to two minutes. They reckoned that these expensive little devices would payoff by keeping audiences riveted to the same network for the next half-hour. Another method is to simply begin the next show before running the first pod of commercials.

Advertising copywriters, of course, have a more difficult problem because they never know which position in a pod their spot will run in. The best they can hope for is to write a great commercial, which of course is the whole point anyhow.