Jump to Content

Media Release

August 23 2006

Low repeat viewing for TV programs

While ratings for certain television programs might be fairly steady, with about the same number of people watching each week, researchers at the University of South Australia have discovered that week-to-week it is largely different people watching the program.

A study into repeat viewing in the United States, Europe and Australia looked at the proportion of people who watched any TV episode one week and not the next.

For example, in the US only 30 per cent of the people who watched a program one week had watched it in the previous week, according to the Director of Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science, Professor Byron Sharp. “Seventy per cent of its audience in any week did not watch it the previous week,” Prof Sharp said.

This has implications for marketers because, while the ratings are similar from week to week, the viewing audience is quite different each week,” Prof Sharp said. “This underpins TV’s continued ability to deliver cumulative reach – which is very valuable to advertisers.

“When people say they always watch a program, ironically, it’s like going to church – only a few go every week. They watch it ‘religiously’ every other week or so. They largely miss prime time episodes because they aren’t watching TV at all on that night in the next week because they have other commitments.

“We tend to overestimate our loyalty for lots of things so when someone says ‘I always watch that program,’ they mean when I am watching TV, and not watching something else!” Prof Sharp said.

“For prime time TV programs like CSI or Desperate Housewives, marketers expect that typical viewers would see about six episodes in 10. Viewers themselves estimate they’d see five out of ten, but the reality is that the average viewer of such programs sees only around three episodes in ten. That is the average, so a few are seeing more and many viewers are watching only one or two episodes.

“Predicting what any one individual will do on any day is impossible. It’s like predicting a win at the casino. But what a whole group of gamblers will do at the casino can be predicted with very high accuracy - overall they’ll lose a bit more money than they win. In the same way we can predict a lot about aggregate buying behaviour. And we can predict with astonishing accuracy the repeat rate for any television program in any country in the world simply by knowing its initial rating,” Prof Sharp said.

“For example, we can’t predict which fast food outlet or which bank people will go to but we can predict how many people will go there and how often, and how many will go regularly and how many will go occasionally if we simply know the market share of, say, McDonalds. This is the sort of fundamental knowledge being discovered at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute,” Prof Sharp said.

Research and development at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute builds such fundamental knowledge about buyer behaviour - insight and benchmarks that can be used again and again, according to Prof Sharp.

“To date we have delivered some dramatic discoveries, which the Institute’s corporate members around the world receive in reports and in-house briefings.”

Media contact

top^