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STORY THIS WEEK: Americans Leaving Live Broadcast TV--Can Campaigns Adapt?
Broadcast television stations still remain the gold standard for paid voter communication efforts-there is still no way to reach so many people so quickly-but the advertising world is becoming fractured and splintered, and it will force political campaigners to keep adapting our voter contact strategies. Some of the trends we've seen in the last few years:
Viewership of the Big Four Networks is Declining
This is a long-term trend, much older than widespread digital media consumption. Network TV viewership has dropped steadily for decades-Pew was reporting on TV news' decline in 1996, for example. This trend is ongoing; last TV season, the big four networks were down anywhere from 5.8% (Fox) to 15.5% (NBC) from the previous season. NBC has as recently as two years ago set historic lows in the raw number of weekly viewers it has-despite the fact that Nielsen started precisely measuring viewership in 1987, when there were about 20% fewer Americans (and TV watchers) than there are today.
For campaigns, this means they can no longer expect to reach every one of its voters by placing a network TV buy and forgetting about it. Traditionally, high-budget statewide campaigns (Governor, Senator, etc.) have spent more than half of their total campaign budget on network TV ads: more than other media, staff salaries, polling, and everything else combined. Clearly this shift has serious implications for political campaigns.
Much of that Audience has Moved to Cable
As has been well documented, cable TV has grown substantially in the last 20-30 years. It has also started producing more original content-67% of cable's shows were produced for cable in 2008, compared to 59% in 2003-and the highest rated cable-only shows last week were not that far behind their network counterparts:
Top Broadcast Shows, week of Oct 16: Top Cable Shows, week of Oct 16:
While each cable program's viewership is lower than broadcast levels (Walking Dead would not have made the top 25 in broadcast viewership), the gap is closing. Political advertising has adapted to this trend-a couple decades ago very few consultants considered cable a serious campaign advertising venue, but now a cable buy is included in virtually all campaigns' budgets that buy TV time. It's no wonder cable advertising rates have seen a double-digit price jump in the last year as corporate advertisers have made the same decision.
Commercial-Skipping DVRs, Video On Demand are Mainstream and Growing
Technology is threatening traditional TV advertising strategies beyond just the broadcast/cable mix that campaigns are currently using. The most immediate threat: a sizable percentage of Americans now use a DVR to record live TV shows and watch them later (often while fast-forwarding the commercials). Additionally, most TV owners use a video on demand (VOD) service like Comcast's On Demand. Comcast finds 62% of Americans have used VOD and 60% own a DVR, while a similar survey from the Leichtman Research Group last year found that 40% of households had a DVR last year (up from 32% in 2005) and 52% watched VOD in the last month. Other interesting facts about DVR and VOD:
- VOD and DVR users skew male, younger, white, and above-average income. For example:
- Adults 25-49 watch more than 13 hours of VOD + DVR per week, compared with 7 and a half hours for adults 65 and older. This is despite those older voters watching about 60 hours of extra TV per week than their younger counterparts
- Hispanics (6:27 per month), Asians (8:08 per week) and African-Americans (7:44 per month) all watch much less time-shifted TV than whites (11:35 per month)
- Entourage, a show that has an audience that skews to the DVR owning population, averages 1.78 million live viewers a week, 1.87 million DVR views a week, 1.66 million on-demand viewings, and 2.3 million viewings during the week after each episode's initial airing.
To be clear, Video On Demand and DVR aren't a substantial share of the TV-viewing market today on a per-hour basis-most people who have these technology continue to watch a lot of live TV. The same Leichtman Research Group study finds DVR and VOD combined for less than 10% of total TV viewing time in 2010, and Nielsen finds that the average TV viewer watched about 10 hours of time-shifted TV (DVR + VOD) in the spring of 2011, about 7% of the time the average American spent watching TV. However, political campaigns ignore these technologies at their own peril-Nielsen has seen more than a 30% increase in DVR/VOD access and usage in the last three years.
The Internet: Not Just a Fad Anymore
For those of you still receiving our weekly newsletter via Pony Express or telegram, we are here to confidently inform you that the internet is here to stay and growing. People are also watching a lot of video online: As of last year, 53% of all Internet traffic by volume was video uploads and downloads. Nielsen reports that 143 million Americans watched video on the Internet in the second quarter of 2011, up 19% from three years earlier. ComScore finds even higher viewership, with 182 million users watching an average of 19.5 hours per person (for a total of 39.8 billion video views). Nielsen also found 30 million people watched video on a mobile phone in the second quarter of 2011 (up 200% from 2008).
Again, total internet viewing time is low compared to TV: the average viewer only watched 4 hours and 26 minutes a month, roughly the TV an average American watches in one day. However, online video watching is growing rapidly and is up from 2 hours 12 minutes in 2008.
Demographically, the Internet video group is different than the VOD + DVR group:
- Whites watch the least online video (3:50 per month), compared to Hispanics (6:15), African-Americans (5:58) and Asians (8:08). They also watch less video on a mobile phone per month than these two groups.
- While peak usage for VOD + DVR occurs among 35-49 year olds, peak usage for Internet video and cellphones occurs in the 18-24 year old age group
Like with cable viewership, we have seen good campaigns respond to this trend. Most campaigns are at the very least posting their TV ads on YouTube (and linking to them on Facebook and their websites), and many are creating web-only ads for fundraising and voter persuasion; the DNC, among other groups, has bought ad time on Hulu (which reported 800 million monthly ad streams last November)
Univision Booms, Defies Broadcast Trend
The one broadcast sector that has seen rapid growth recently is Spanish-language TV. During the week of October 10-16 Univision was in fifth place among 18-49 year olds with 3.24 million viewers for an average show (compared with 4th-place NBC at 6.24 million). This is not that far behind, though, and Univision was second in the 18-34 year old demographic, behind Fox but ahead of ABC, CBS, and NBC.
According to the above-linked Univision press release, Univision beat at least one of the big four networks among 18-34 year olds on every night of the week. Univision viewership also went up 6.2% between the 2010 and 2009 TV seasons while the big four networks all declined. A couple other key facts about Spanish language TV:
- Telemundo also registered double-digit growth in Q3 2011 and is the fastest growing network year over year
- Univision and Telemundo do not follow the typical Fall-Spring TV schedule and doesn't see the summer viewer drop-off. Spanish-language TV therefore becomes a more attractive option for summer advertising, something very common in political campaigns.
- Spanish-language media is heavily watched by English-speaking Hispanics. It's not the only way to reach Hispanics, but only 37% of Hispanics say they don't watch Spanish-language programming. Pew finds a 47% plurality of Hispanics get their news from both English and Spanish TV (compared to 27% who watch only English newscasts and 26% who watch only Spanish newscasts).
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