Media Release
April 26 2007
The girl from Queens no longer reigns on Sunday night
It’s
hard to believe it was only a month or so ago that everyone was talking
about Ugly Betty – one of the highest rating program debuts in
Australian television. However, the ratings data from last Sunday
night’s broadcast showed that one of Seven’s star performers has lost
its sparkle.
60 Minutes took out the biggest slice of the audience pie, showing its resilience by winning the top spot for the third week in row, with 1.6 million viewers nationally. A good recovery considering that in late February TV’s soothsayers were forecasting a grim death.
Surprisingly, the much-anticipated return of Big Brother had the lowest opening night rating in its seven-year history, with an average of only 1.55 million viewers in the five metro cities.
Although, this 14 per cent decline in ratings may not have been a surprise to the competition, who undertook polling on the success of Big Brother at Yahoo!7.
Media researcher, Peter Hammer, from UniSA’s Ehrenberg-Bass Institute says the Ugly Betty phenomenon was a response to huge pre-screen hype and promotion.
“There was a huge promotional investment behind Ugly Betty,” Hammer pointed out, making note of the heavy cross-promotion with Deal or No Deal and Seven’s tennis coverage, “so it’s not surprising that it performed as well as it did originally. Consumers were bombarded with so much publicity for this girl; I think they just wanted to see what all the fuss was about.”
While Ugly Betty’s audience had dwindled slightly from its early rating success, Hammer does not attribute the more-recent bronze-medal performance to a loss in interest.
“Our research shows that the best predictor of any audience level for this week’s show is last week’s ratings,” he explained, “and on that basis, taking [Ugly] Betty off the air for two weeks over the Easter period was going to impact on subsequent screenings.”
Like most things in life Hammer says simplicity is the key and moving content around is confusing, and is likely to do more harm than good.
“It is important to be consistent and make it easy for people to tune in,” Hammer said. “We are all creatures of habit, so don’t change things unless you really have to.”
And so, while her looks may have faded, all is not lost for our heroine. But for now at least, it might be an uphill battle for the young girl from Queens if she is going to take back her Sunday night throne.
Contact for interview
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Peter Hammer office (08) 8302 9168 email Peter.Hammer@MarketingScience.info