Broadcast ratings are down for HEROES this year. As they are for many shows. But does that mean people aren’t watching these shows? Nope. In fact — it’s the opposite.
More people than ever are watching TV shows. Problem is — they’re not watching them on TV, and they’re not watching them when they’re supposed to. They’re watching them on DVR/TIVO devices, via DVD, official web services like HULU and ITUNES, and of course — Bit Torrent and its ilk. Let’s take DVR (or what I still call TIVO) —
Some shows are getting an almost 70% bump in their ratings via TIVO and DVR. A stat that is reported some three weeks after the airing of the episode.
That’s insane. Three years ago it was around 9%. That kind of audience shift is catastrophic for the traditional ad revenue models the networks and studios depend on to fund their business. With that many people supposedly skimming through commercials, the production budgets of shows that have a low on-air rating — but massive DVD sales, INTERNATIONAL audience, and WEB viewership will be hard to justify.
What’s going to save the TV business? Integrated advertising? Smaller budgets? New accounting practices? New biz dev partnerships between content creators and hardware creators? Probably all of the above.
As that’s getting sorted out, I’ll be watching my shows on HULU. I was a hater who couldn’t imagine that kind of media conglomerate tech enterprise could work. Boy was I wrong. HULU is amazing. The interface. The player. The sharing capabilities. They crushed that thing. It dominates. If you haven’t taken a look…
HULU.
There’s just too much good TV going on at the same time, especially on Mondays. (YMMV.) Obviously some shows are going to get time-shifted.
It’s a tricky problem. Theoretically, donations from fans might sound like a plausible idea – look at the lengths people will go to just to try and bring back cancellation-bound shows – but the long-term viability of any such scheme remains to be tested, never mind the revolutionary nature of any such hypothetical implementation or its instability.
Personally, product placement is a device that I abhor, but hey, I could live with Nissan and Sprint in my Heroes if it’ll keep the FX watchable and/or help future Matt move his new family out of his ex-boyfriend’s father’s apartment. ;D
Agreed on all counts! Thanks for the comment! LOL on the Matt note!!!!!
What’s funny is although we do skim past commercials while watching TiVO’d shows, we really aren’t doing anything different than normal.
While we’re FF’ing, if we see a commercial of interest, we go back and watch it. And, really, is this any different than what would happen before TiVO? You’d tune out when a commercial came on, unless you were interested, in which case you’d pay attention.
If anything, it’s better now, because we can go back and watch the whole thing…not miss any of it if we weren’t paying attention to the lead-in commercial.
Advertisers should see the value in this and take advantage of it…they should make sure that their ads are appropriate to the viewer (smart media buys) and they should make sure that their ads are appealing to those viewers.
But that aside, yeah, there are plenty of opportunities…especially when you’re talking transmedia programming, because some media are better than others in terms of making an impact for a particular kind of product and to a particular demographic.
Jesse, DUDE! I could not possibly imagine watching HEROES on Hulu when it can blaze across my flat screen in Sensurround! TV shows are more gorgeous than ever and I want to watch them at their max potential. Even FIOS 20up/20down Internet speeds are not good enough for me to watch a top quality TV show like yours on my desktop. But yes, I do confess it might take me a few weeks to catch up on Sarah Connor and that’s probably (sadly) contributing to the damage that show’s been taking.
Jeff –
I will tell my pal Josh Friedman to kick your HULU watching butt if the SCC ratings tick down any further. ;-)
Sure, but over time the commercials on hulu will force you into horrible depression. The Ad Council will force viewers back to TV with those heart-wrenching mortgage crisis ads.
LOL
Product placement gets a bad rap. It’s unfortunate. Product placement is such a vast pallet of color that one can use, that it helps provide the needed funding to produce the show is just an amazing synergy.
The reality is we drive cars, drink sodas and use computers that have brand names and marketing departments with budgets to pay for product placement in hit shows.
I never understood the notion of anticommercialism in commercial television. It makes the landscape seem more real, more immediate, more like the show takes place contemporarily if people are driving a Dodge and drinking a Pepsi than if the prop developer has to be paid to manufacture a can of some kind of fake soda brand that doesn’t exist in the real world.
Why adhere to an anticommercial ideological stance when it actually diminishes the ambient quality of the show and makes it more difficult for the producers to pay their bills?
Agreed. Well done product integration can make a story feel grounded in the real world. Poorly done — it can shatter the fourth wall of a story. I’m always up for the challenge. Thanks for your comment!
Yeah, I really think sensible integration is key here. I’m sure it grates tremendously on the director when he’s told to make extra sure he gets a good shot of the brand logo, on the writer who has to work the brand name into a line of dialogue, and/or on the actor who has to say it.
It seems to me, as a mere viewer of the finished media, to be a major obstruction of spontaneity.
The creative processes that drive good TV into existence have really nothing to do with commerce. I don’t think anyone who has any part in making it likes to think of their job as just selling glorified ad space.
(So we’re back to old Art Vs. Commerce debacle. Might as well be the chicken or the egg… lol)
Jesse, Adeline,
That’s why I prefer to see it as a confluence of art and commerce as opposed to some kind of battle.
Certainly there are difficulties to be had regarding trying to manage the personalities of Actors, Directors and Ad Men, but as you said when done properly it’s quite rewarding.
One of my favorite video games is “Rainbow Six: Vegas”, the premise is that terrorists have taken over a casino and you as the elite Counter-terrorist team Rainbow Six are meant to go in and take them out. One of my favorite things about the game was the real time update of ad-space that was programmed into the game. Unfortunately they didn’t use it to effect at all. The had “I Am Legend” posters and “Assassin’s Creed” (A game made by the same publisher Ubisoft) and one Axe bodyspray ad that was a permanent part of the landscape and not an auto-updating bitmap. That was it. Totally lost potential. A Casino landscape, or a subway platform, an airport a movie theater or Times Square are all lush spaces to go to town selling ad space.
A video game has an advantage that television doesn’t for treating ad-space with a transmedia mindset in that you can update the ads as time goes by so you can have contemporary ads in a game that’s a couple years old. With sites like Hulu you can sort of do that too, because you have commercial space that can be updated based upon ad-space purchases that are current in their contract rather than grandfathered in based on a pre-recording. One thing that they did with the ABC.com delivery system that was fabulous was they gave you the capacity to watch the entire show’s commercials all at once, and then watch the show unfettered. It made watching Lost much more pleasurable. I’ve only recently been watching Sons of Anarchy on Hulu and haven’t explored it’s full capabilities so I don’t know if it works the same.
(I apologize for the long-winded post but I like the topic)
One other thing:
An advantage of product placement over commercials is that you don’t fast forward through product placement. Vick Mackey’s Dodge Charger is always in plain view.
I drive a Dodge Charger just like Mackey’s. Actually — mines the SRT8 model. I wonder how much seeing that car on the SHIELD contributed to my choosing it for my ride. Quite I bit probably. Mackey rules. It can be escapist fun for fans to enjoy the same products as their favorite characters. That said — the FORD integrations I did while on ALIAS were brutal. We had very specific requirements for how the cars were portrayed — didn’t make anybody look cool, and certainly didn’t make anybody want a FORD.
That certainly is a dilemma. I can only comment on it in theory as I have never had the experience.
What is the possibility of bringing product placement under the control of the Director as a part of the creative process? How much of the culture within film and television view product placement as a creative pursuit vs those who see it as a dirty necessity?
Vick Mackey does make that Dodge Charger look good. You have a similar look, though you’re probably not cutting off 1-9ers in yours. ;)
I’m so glad you’re not sweating too much over the ratings dive. I’m addicted to the show and don’t know what I’d do if I couldn’t get my fix–hand puppets and crack are the only substitutes that come to mind.
My idea for the networks is simple, make shorter commercials to cram in a larger number.
I agree with lou, commercials only act as reminders for something we are going to buy anyway, with the economic crisis the Broadcast networks will have split into smaller bites.
I have another idea. You know how most episodes have to be cut down for time, so do a “Director’s Cut” for each episode that’s offered for download offered the same time as when the current ITUNE shows are offered and charge more for it.
I’m with Caitlin, having to watch the same commercial on Hulu 5-6 times for an hour long show, then once more if I power straight from Heroes to Fringe, having the same commercial be on repeat that often is soul crushing, but at the same time the convenience of having the shows I want to watch be available all hours of the day is liberating, especially when some days I have class pushing on through 10pm. Not to mention being able to upres the footage to a crisp 480, which is hard to pass up against the other grainy compressed footage floating around the web.
I feel like you laid out most of the alternatives the television industry is going to have to take to try to remain solvent, however I think there is a distinction to be made between content and delivery as far as what can be saved, or even needs to be saved. Television shows are a part of the American entertainment landscape, it would be staggering if the show as an art form were to dissolve because of a loss of revenue from using an outdated advertising model. It is simply too integral a form of entertainment to go quietly, and I know some whiz kid is out there writing up the new advertising model for the postdigital media landscape, so it’s not the form or the content I’m necessarily worried about, it’s the television as a medium going out of date and advertisers inability to effectively market products in the digital realm.
Product integration is definitely effective, but like you said it’s a very fine line to walk between seamless advertising and a jarring stab in the old suspension of disbelief. Maybe the industry could be looking for clues in another area that had been ailing from the digital revolution: the clothing industry. The situations are not completely unalike, with old guard companies relying on traditional advertising models being undercut by online presences that are able to offer more services on demand. Like how big name brands had to reshape their sales model to compete effectively with online retailers, maybe the point is to not think about how to try to save Television as a medium, but how to drive its evolution as a content distribution system in a way that continues to be sustainable for the businesses that produce the content.
Re-reading my entry, I’m realizing that I was really tired and mostly just reaffirmed the problem while writing myself into tired little circles.
Thanks for the post, Tyler. I’m not sure I got the apparel industry allegory — but it got me thinking about knock-offs, piracy, and the way brands make themselves valuable through exclusivity, celebrity designers, and the experience of shopping in a branded store. When you buy something crazy expensive in the PRADA store in NYG — you feel that you are part of something special. I wonder if there is an elite subscription and/or experience model for content viewing. At LOST — American Express card holders got to watch video content other folks didn’t. One of the real challenges with all this is having a corporate infrastructure that is designed to fix what’s broken and execute some of these new models.
Great news for Heroes Jesse:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/14/business/media/14ratings.html?_r=1&ref=media&oref=slogin
It seems Nielsen has finally factored in the DVR recordings and it gives "Heroes" at least 2 million more viewers than previously thought.
So 8 million + 2 million = 10 million. Right?
I'm still mulling over how I feel about "Angels and Monsters."
Pardon my ignorance, but how many viewers should a prime time slot expect on a major network?
Erek:
I work in showbiz and closely follow TV show ratings.
For NBC, ABC and CBS prime-time, less than 10 million viewers is considered a dismal failure. 15 mil is pretty good, but 20-30 million, which, if I’m not mistaken, is what Heroes scored in its first season, is considered a break-out success.
Kelly,
Thank you very much for answering my question.
-Erek