Ignoring TV ads is the norm, research shows
WHAT do people do during the ad breaks on television? Just about everything except watch the ads, according to Mark Ritson, associate professor of marketing at the London Business School. Ritson detailed the startling findings of his qualitative research to Australian marketers during the AMI’s final Certified Practising Marketer (CPM) webcast of 2004.
The webcast is a new technology being used by the AMI in partnership with Premiere Conferencing that enables members to participate in the CPM series from their home, office, or anywhere in the world via the Internet, and for the AMI to invite presenters from overseas without the usual constraints.
Ritson’s research focused on the size and behavior of the audience during the delivery of TV advertising messages. He used an ethnographic style of research, studying people in their own homes who were living their usual lives. “When you take consumers out of their natural context, whether it be into a focus group room or into an experiment setting or filling out a survey, I don’t believe that the insights generated are valid. They may be very interesting, they may be very rich, but I don’t believe they are valid. I think consumption is very much tied up in the context in which it happens,” he said.
Ritson and his research team recruited their study subjects by using newspaper articles. Of the responses, eight households were selected to represent each of the main household types, such as an empty nester, young family, students, single parent, and so on.
A large ‘black box’ was placed in the living room of each household. It contained a video recorder that took feeds from three sources: a micro-camera that recorded the household members as they watched the TV, a microphone that recorded conversations, and from the TV itself, which created a picture-in-picture showing what was on TV compared with what people were doing. “So we were almost looking out of the television set at them,” Ritson said.
The black boxes were left in the households for one week. Initially, it had been planned to leave them longer, but the researchers realised early that the study participants quickly forgot about the presence of the camera.
The 280 hours of video footage gathered was edited down to just the ad breaks. Then Ritson and his team watched every ad, transcribed every discussion, and detailed every movement to find out what happened when the ads were on during an average week in eight different households.
Later, the researchers visited each household to speak with each group about their relationship with advertising. “Now something interesting and unexpected came out of this hour-long discussion with each household,” Ritson said. “It was an interesting discussion, we learned a lot, but what was intriguing was that in every one of the eight instances almost everything they told us, although it was heartfelt and intriguing and rich, was totally and utterly inaccurate. It was only when the videotape of highlights was played and we began to discuss what we saw of their behaviors on the video that we got a much different level of insight. This has only strengthened my belief that interview data exclusively, without observational data, can give you a very strong picture that is not entirely valid.”
When the research findings were initially revealed — causing quite a stir in the process in commercial television and advertising — criticism was made of the fact that there were only eight households in the study. “Ethnographic research can never be representative because it aims at depth rather than width,” Ritson said. “But to disprove a theory you only need one case that breaks the rules. This research was designed to explore, not to produce law-like theories, and it is not representative to the British or any other market. But it really does show you how existing approaches [to audience measurement] don’t work. So in that sense it is a limited sample which cannot be extrapolated to the whole audience, but even learning from these eight households you will see some nice insights and certainly some valuable input.”
Ritson did a thematic analysis of the edited data looking for recurring behaviors and found six things that people did during the ad breaks that held up across all households.
1. Social interaction
This was defined as verbal and/or physical interaction with others and was one of the most dominant activities. “The key thing that makes advertising different from program material is not the fact that it’s short or that it has products,” Ritson said. “The big difference is that it is a non-welcomed medium. People choose to watch a program. The advertising is very different.
“What happened in our eight households for the most part was we had families or groups who didn’t see each other during the day, they came home in the evening, they all met together in the living room. Watching the program itself, you are physically next to someone but you are not actually engaging with them. What we saw time and time again from the hundreds of ads we analysed was that the ad break was a prime time to be socially interactive. We found many examples of husbands and wives who ignored each other during the program, but during the program break used this time for a little bit of physical attention or a very short verbal conversation. This is an incredibly social time in most households that we studied. So your ads are taking place in a time and a context within the households which is extremely interactive.
“So we are talking about low involvement processing of the lowest kind, because typically ads are being experienced while you are talking or kissing or touching another member of the household.”
2. Tasking
This was defined as the completion of professional or household tasks. Ritson said he found many examples in the interviews and in the observations of people who actually welcomed the program break. They did not welcome the advertising within it, by and large, but they did welcome the chance to get things done. Tasks undertaken included tidying up, preparing dinner, going to the bathroom, making coffee, and checking on the kids.
“We tend to design ads with the illusion of total attention on the part of the audience,” Ritson said. “In reality, we find that from these hundreds of examples we have observed, our target audience is looking at the ads while doing other things. When was the last time you saw an ad tested when it wasn’t the central focus of activity? That’s how the vast majority of ads are actually experienced.”
3. Reading
This was defined as reading of alternative textual sources.Most people in the study sample had a newspaper or magazine that they kept handy for the ad breaks. If they were not going to be doing anything else, they would read rather than sit in front of the ads. There were also two prominent examples in the study of people using teletext during the ad breaks. “In general, this speaks to what will happen next with digital television, access to the Internet, and goodness knows what else,” Ritson said. “The fact is that, again, your program break with your ads is an ideal time to go and do small tasks for two or three minutes.”
4. Channel flicking
Two types were noted: destination flicking, when a household has a specific channel it goes to when the ads are on; and surfing, using the up and down key on the remote to simply get away from the ads. “It was remarkable in both cases the ability of the households to have what we call a schema, for the amount of time before they have to return in perfect synchronicity for the return of the program material,” Ritson said. “Over the millions of ads people have experienced in their lifetime, they have developed, unknown to them, an extremely accurate internal clock for avoiding advertisements if they want to.”
5. Advertising watching, and 6. Advertising interaction.
People actually do watch ads, defined as ‘eyes on screen’. Ritson said it was “a minority activity”, but that it did take place. “In most of our audience you can see a very marked difference between watching a program and what they do when they are confronted with an ad,” he said. “The big exception was children. Before the age of five, all the children in our sample had no noted differences in their behaviors towards ads or programs. They sit there as if everything is the same. That was one of the most intriguing experiences, showing that to the parents and watching their kids sitting through hours of ads.”
Ritson said that the London advertising agencies, on seeing the study results, asked how to increase the percentage of people who watched the ads. “It’s intriguing, because the answer is ‘Don’t worry too much about the advertising itself’, although obviously the creative execution of advertising will have some impact,” Ritson said.
“From our research, it is very clear that this has a relatively small impact compared with the other more external factors, such as time and, most importantly, social context. Probably the biggest single reason in our sample why people did or did not watch an ad was based on who else was in the room at the time and what they were doing. The ad itself, the decision to watch the ad, wasn’t caused by the ad itself to begin with. It was caused by other external factors. People don’t switch off from advertising, they don’t avoid advertising. It’s the other way around. The default option is not to look at the ads.
“So the question we should be asking is ‘What external factors encourage an audience to actually watch an ad?’, because that’s more unusual. All this talk of advertising avoidance is nonsense, because it assumes we watch ads to begin with. We don’t. So it’s a reversal of that question. Why are people avoiding the ad is a stupid question. The clever question is why would you want to watch an ad in the first place.
“We don’t believe advertising watching is the ultimate for companies and practitioners. We believe that the ultimate effect of an advert is what we call advertising interaction. We define this as when advertising text enters the viewing context interaction between viewer and text. What that really means is if you really think your ad is going to have a big impact on the consumer from the TV set to the individual, then you have missed the key challenge. A much stronger place for an ad to be is to jump out of the TV set, get into the mind or awareness of one of your household members, and then for it to take part in a ritual, a game, a joke or just a simple conversation.
“There were lots of examples on the video clips. Perhaps the most notable was an example where a boyfriend and girlfriend were playing their ‘advertising game’ when they were bored at the weekend. They guess the brand, and it’s interesting because they pay total attention to the ads during the advertising game and they had nothing to do with the ad, nothing to do with the brand, and it was simply done for the social context at that particular ad encountered at that particular time.”
The researchers did observe instances where an ad prompted people to consider buying a product or service (e.g. a special deal on plane tickets to Barcelona), but this was overshadowed by a negative effect, where the ad cued people to talk about how bad a product was. There were many more examples of the negative word-of-mouth arising from the advertising.
“The only people who think that people welcome advertising in their homes are advertising agencies,” Ritson said “I think advertising is a great and powerful force, but it is not the powerful force that many in the industry think it is. We tend to dress it up and call ads films; they’re not, they’re ads and they’re not welcomed by the vast majority of households.”
Devising ‘footprints’
The next part of the research involved taking one individual from each household — the one who watched the most TV or was most interesting to the researchers — and recoding that person’s data for the week with which of the six behaviors they exhibited when the ads came on. Ritson emphasised that the data were not representative, so it cannot be reliably applied to anyone else, but it was statistically significant for that one person. “However, there are some patterns that would suggest there is a major problem with [current] measurement methods,” Ritson said.
From the data, a ‘footprint’ was devised, which measured what each person did during their exposure to advertising in that week. The first footprint was of a women in her mid-20s who lived in a household of three young women fresh out of university and all in administrative jobs. The breakdown of activity during the ad breaks was: social interaction 47%, ad watching 31%, advertising interaction 15%, channel flicking 4%, reading 2%, and tasking 1%. Despite this being a very social household, the woman still actually watched a high percentage of the ads (‘eyes on screen’). The sociability factor also contributed to the high percentage of advertising interaction. The more people in the room, the more likely they are to talk, the fewer people in the room the more likely they are to channel flick or read.
The empty nester — a retired bank manager — showed a more evenly distributed picture. The breakdown of activity during ad breaks was: social interaction 22%, ad watching 27%, advertising interaction 4%, channel flicking 22%, reading 17%, and tasking 8%.
Footprints were done for both the husband and wife in a young family. “They’re exhausted in the evening and they tend to watch a lot of ads,” Ritson said. “Their television viewing behavior is almost identical, but what’s intriguing is that their advertising watching is quite different from the wife to the husband. The husband proportionately watched a lot more ads, the simple reason being that he was far more likely to ignore the kids whereas she would talk with them or do things to help them.”
Their breakdown of activity was: husband: social interaction 10%, ad watching 70%, advertising interaction 6%, channel flicking 10%, reading 0%, and tasking 4%; wife: social interaction 23%, ad watching 55%, advertising interaction 4%, channel flicking 6%, reading 0%, and tasking 12%.
The friends’ effect
Ritson then looked at the data using a single independent variable: how many people were in the room. How did this change a person’s breakdown of activity during ad watching? In the case of the retired bank manager, when his wife was watching TV with him he had the option of social interaction, which immediately became a large component of his behavior.
“The social interaction takes place at the expense of some of the other more individualised activities,” Ritson said. “Here’s the intriguing one for the people meter measurement system. It’s what we call the friends’ effect.”
In the household of young women, there could be three or more people watching TV together. When the one woman studied was on her own, she watch 75% plus of the ads. “What’s intriguing is what happens when any other person is in the room with her,” Ritson said. “With two people in the room, the actual amount of ads being watched is less than half what it was when she was in the room on her own. Assuming the other person watches about the same proportion of ads, we reach an intriguing conclusion: in this case, more ads are seen by one person than by two people, so one is greater than one plus one.
“Why is that important? Because the fundamental basis of the people meter system sold by AC Nielsen around the world is based on the assumption that one plus one equals two, i.e. we know that not everybody sees every ad. There is this ‘opportunities to see’ calculation. But whatever that calculation is, whether we think people see 10% of ads or 40% of ads, the people meter system is predicated on the assumption that two people in the room is twice as good as one. This is nonsense. There is no direct relation in the eight households we studied between the number of people in the room and the number of people being exposed to ads.”
However, once there were two people in the room, advertising interaction began. “You could argue that although fewer ads are watched by two people than one, the conversation going on about one or more of these ads makes it more worthwhile and that’s probably a pretty strong argument,” Ritson said.
With three people in the room, the proportion of ads watch by the studied woman was less than one-third of when she was by herself, social interaction was much higher than for two people, and advertising interaction had fallen from the two-people level. “For me, the most intriguing finding is that in more than 100 instances in this particular household, when there were four or more people in the room there was not a single instance in that week of an ad actually being watched.” The dominant activity was social interaction, at about 90%.
Ritson said that if this sort of pattern was replicated in other households — and Ritson said he had no reason to believe that it wasn’t, as it showed up in all social households in the sample — then it was a major finding. “What this tells you is the very place where you pay the most money for your advertising is the last place on earth you want to be,” he said. “Because if you go to Friends, the sitcom, if you go to the grand final of the AFL, if you go to the Saturday night movie, what you are effectively doing is spending more money than anywhere else, because that’s obviously the most expensive media buy, where you are very, very unlikely to have any kind of exposure on the audience.
“Yes, people are watching the program, but no they will not be watching the ad as a result. So that has a major implication for the measurement systems.”
The late night curve
Ritson also described one other finding of his research, what he called ‘the late night curve’. The data was sorted by the time the TV watching took place. It showed a gradual increase in advertising watching taking place towards the later hours of the evening.
“In every one of the eight households we saw this, and we saw it for at least the final three hours before that household went to bed,” Ritson said. “The reason for it is pretty straight forward. If you look at the other five behaviors that you can do when confronted with an ad, they all involve some kind of physical/mental activity. As our households get tired in the late evening, they watch proportionately more ads. The trade-off is that cognitively there’s less activity going on.
“What we are saying is that later on in the evening there’s a strong probability that you will get multiple people watching your ads, albeit with limited cognitive processing. It’s the perfect place for low-involvement products, at least.”
Conclusions
Ritson wrapped up his presentation with some conclusions he had drawn from the research.
1. The first and, to some degree, the last ads in a pod are more valuable because the videos show clearly that audience members do not engage their advertising schema as soon as the program ends.
2. Extremely popular programs do not mean big advertising audiences, they mean big program audiences. “There’s a sweet spot that once you pass it I would suggest that the most expensive programs to buy in Australia or anywhere else are a total and utter waste of money,” Ritson said.
3. Are you attempting advertising interaction? Can you begin to make your advertisements interactive in the sense that they encourage an audience to talk about them? This will at least put the ads into the social arena rather than leaving them in two-dimensional television space.
4. The lonely viewer may be more valuable than it first appears. A small gross audience, if it consists of individuals alone late at night, may be better value for money. “We know they won’t be doing anything else. If they are tired, they will be watching the ad. It may be a place where you can realise some value for money.”
5. Poor targeting or positioning is costing you money. If you run an ad that engenders negative word-of-mouth, it’s going to be a waste of money and actively damage your brand.
6. Late-night audiences are much more attentive and bigger in advertising terms than they appear. A late-night audience share might be small for a program, but the amount of advertising they are going to watch would be significantly higher.
7. The people meter system has little predictive relationship with actual advertising audience size. Just because there is a huge program audience, doesn’t mean it is going to translate into a huge advertising audience. There are many other factors between the gross number of people in a room as measured by a people meter and the number of people who are watching, listening or responding to an ad.
8. Get out of programs like Friends and drive your media agency or let them lead you into a more productive return on investment.
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