RESTON, Va., Jan. 16, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Comscore (NASDAQ:
SCOR), a trusted partner for planning, transacting, and evaluating
media across platforms, is excited to be collaborating with
Syracuse University's S.I. Newhouse School of Public
Communications researchers to identify the key variables that
may determine advertising avoidance and audience dropoff during
commercial airings. The partnership has yielded a new study from SU
that applies their proprietary machine learning to Comscore's
signature TV Essentials® second-by-second television viewing data,
program ratings, and to Comscore's Exact Commercial Ratings® data
to identify key attributes and patterns that optimally predict
commercial viewership.
"Every day, consumers are inundated with thousands of
advertisements across the fragmented media landscape. More than
ever, marketers need data that explains what messages are working
and what makes viewers tune out or change the channel," said
Julia Johnston, Senior Vice
President, Regional and Local Agency Sales at Comscore. "Comscore's
collaboration with Syracuse University
reflects our commitment to provide data-derived insights that help
advertisers and their agencies reach their intended audience."
Are pod loads responsible for the decline in linear TV viewing?
Perhaps. A key insight from an analysis of the audience viewership
of The Big Bang Theory from September
2016 – February 2018 isolated
a number of factors driving viewing declines. The combination of
program originality/rerun, ad duration, number of ads in a pod, and
number of pods in a program had more than 80 percent accuracy in
predicting ad viewership declines. Furthermore, as summarized in
the following chart, the study was able to substantively confirm
that the number of ads in a pod and the originality of a first-run
program hold the greatest importance in maintaining ad viewership
with ad pod loads topping the list for most important.
TABLE 1. Relative importance of each attribute, extracted
from trained neural network
Attributes
|
Sum of
outgoing
weight
magnitudes
|
Sum of (outgoing
weight
magnitudes multiplied by
corresponding output
layer weight magnitudes)
|
Relative
Importance,
based on both
measures
|
# ads in a
pod
|
104.3
|
7682.0
|
High
|
Program
originality/rerun
|
97.3
|
7165.5
|
High
|
Ad pod
placement
|
85.9
|
6325.1
|
Low
|
Ad
duration
|
85.4
|
6287.7
|
Low
|
Ad pod placement or the placement position of the ad in the pod
and ad duration are still important in influencing viewing
declines, but less so. While these findings may not be new on
their own, they demonstrate that in combination, these four
attributes can accurately predict viewership declines of ads in
linear TV. Which means if you are a broadcast buyer, placing ads on
networks that have fewer ads during commercial breaks, placing your
ads in new programs, negotiating positions in the beginning and end
of a commercial pod, and using shorter ads like :15s vs :30s will
help to sustain viewing audiences for your TV advertising
schedule.
Marking an innovative synthesis of commercial data and academic
research, Syracuse University's S.I.
Newhouse School of Public
Communications and the College of Engineering and Computer Science
created a multi-disciplinary team drawing on the university's
advertising, television-radio-film, and artificial intelligence
expertise. The team applied artificial neural networks that
utilized hardware and algorithm processing devices to uncover
relationships and patterns, establish and define linkages among
numerous variables with large and diverse data. This work analyzed
the program audience viewership at the start of the commercial pod
and compared that to the commercial audience. Further work is being
carried out using a larger dataset and other machine learning
algorithms.
"We at Syracuse University have been
privileged to work with Comscore to gain access to this valuable
dataset which has allowed us to provide proofs to concepts that
have been long-held truths in the industry. We have also been the
beneficiaries of the generous support of a CUSE grant, an
intramural grant program created to enhance interdisciplinary
collaborations at Syracuse University,"
said Beth Egan, Associate Professor
of Advertising.
Comscore TV Essentials® provides television buyers and sellers
with precise, massive-scale measurement of national television
programming and advertising. Leveraging TV viewing from more than
60 million screens and more than 30 million households across the
U.S., TV Essentials offers a level of granularity and stability
absent from traditional television measurement services – including
more precise and more reliable ratings for large and niche networks
alike –all day, every day.
With more than a decade of experience measuring television
viewership from return path devices across tens of millions of
households in all local markets, Comscore is a trusted source for
television viewing data. Comscore is also a leader in advanced
audiences, which allow the industry to go beyond age and gender to
transact on consumer behaviors, interests and lifestyles. This
enables TV stations, networks, advertisers, agencies and media
companies at both local and national levels to effectively find and
reach their ideal audiences to maximize their revenues.
About Comscore
Comscore (NASDAQ: SCOR) is the trusted
partner for planning, transacting and evaluating media across
platforms. With a data footprint that combines digital, linear TV,
over-the-top and theatrical viewership intelligence with advanced
audience insights, Comscore allows media buyers and sellers to
quantify their multiscreen behavior and make business decisions
with confidence. A proven leader in measuring digital and TV
audiences and advertising at scale, Comscore is the industry's
emerging, third-party source for reliable and comprehensive
cross-platform measurement. To learn more about Comscore, please
visit Comscore.com.
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SOURCE Comscore