The Awareness Factor

It’s sort of an annual rite, to pore over the ratings in the early days and weeks of a new television season. With nearly sixty metered markets including 16 with LPM data, it gets to be a bit like chewing gum for the eyes and can take a good part of the early morning to get through all the numbers.  It’s hard to determine any real trends with only two weeks of ratings, but there are definitely some things that are popping off the pages.
 
First of all, in LPM markets, you can see how frustrated stations must be with Nielsen when one day they might get a 1 rating followed by a day with a .3. That kind of fluctuation is commonplace and a function of the number of meters, placement and technology. You just know that one of these days we’ll get it right but, in the meantime, it’s a head scratcher.
 
In major markets, stations are battling it out for .2 and .4 demo ratings in highly competitive environments. Take Los Angeles. Here’s a market with seven VHF television stations competing for around 40% of the audience in a local landscape best described as “decimalized.” It is commonplace to see a time period winner delivering less than a 1 rating against W25-54 in daytime and where a 1 could be the highest number against women for the entire day.
 
Clearly, one of the challenges in such a fragmented market is getting viewers to sample new programming. Competition is fierce, and not just from television stations - obviously cable and the Internet are also two important factors.  But so is just the cluttered space that we call “media” that, combined with changing demography and busier and busier lives with lots and lots of choices makes the challenge of grabbing viewer attention all the more difficult.
 
When we began developing “Marie” for syndication, certain data kept leaping off the page. In particular, the numbers showing Marie’s high awareness and likeability among viewers were off the charts. We did a poll with 1100 respondents revealing Awareness and Likeability in the 80+ percentile. Those numbers are dramatic by any measure. Stations would tell us that they considered 50%-60% to be a high number when it came to local news talent. By comparison, many other new and prospective talk show personalities actually came in at less than 50% in both awareness and likeability. Why is this particular statistic so important? Because, at the end of the day, we’re asking a lot of viewers to seek out something new and the promotional challenges are overwhelming. Talent with numbers like Marie reveals a high profile sufficient to capture the fascination of new viewers and encourage sampling. It’s really that simple. Awareness + Likeability+ High Profile= Sampling. And in an increasingly fragmented television world, that’s important.

Ritch Colbert
Program Partners