Although shows like Lost (with its genius viral marketing and online extras) and American Idol (with so many teenage girls’ phone bills through the roof from text messages in support of their favorite singers) prove that audiences can be invested in shows beyond the television screen, “television rankings, the actual viewership during the live broadcast, is still what television executives are paying attention to,” Mr. Bernoff said.
However, as the recession causes an ad-dollar hemorrhage, and as precious young viewers spend their time checking out clips on YouTube instead of the actual tube, execs might want to consider looking beyond numbers for their beloved rankings.
In fact, number crunchers at Nielsen Online, a division of the audience metrics company, say TV executives have been “making moves” to be more sensitive to social media by using tools like BuzzMetrics and BlogPulse, which scour the Internet to aggregate online views on the most-talked-about TV shows. “The [traditional] ratings obviously tell you what your audience looks like,” explained Jon Gibs, vice president of media analytics at Nielsen Online. “The BuzzMetrics data tells you a much deeper dive on what people are talking about around them—why people like specific programs, why they don’t. It’s more so much looking at a very large focus group, a focus group of a couple hundred million people, rather than sort of just looking at straight ratings numbers.”
For now, though, this data isn’t factored into those essential numerical ratings. Instead, social media responses and campaigns tend to be influential on the content level. “They educate script choices,” Mr. Gibs said. “If specific story lines are being talked about particularly favorably, maybe those story lines will be continued.”
That’s something, but it’s more exciting to think about the possibility that advertisers could also take this Millennial demographic—the hyper-networked 14-to-24-year-olds—seriously. “There have been cases where advertisers have looked to this data to understand sort of what is the core audience of this program being talked about,” said Mr. Gibs. “Are they talking about this program in a really good way, have they been talking about it in really impassioned ways, and do these conversations look like the type of conversations that an advertiser would want to associate their brand with?”
And executives can convince advertisers, Mr. Gibs explained, not only to join them in the live broadcast with traditional commercials, but with a multimedia package. When producers put together online supplements, advertisers can benefit by sponsoring plot-recap posts or live chats with actors or Facebook applications. A network can pitch the idea that all that glittery Upper East Side branding on Gossip Girl will rub off on, say, BMW, which could drive (get it?) the online conversation!
Mr. Gibs said Nielsen Online, not to mention dozens of other blog-and-buzz-monitoring start-ups, are working on fine-tuning these online metrics. There’s still a lot of work to be done on semantics—figuring out if all of this online chatter is positive or negative—and the exact demographics of who is saying what about these shows (is this tweet about Chuck written and read by 25-year-olds, smack dab in the middle of their target audience, or some 60-year-old with youthful tastes?)—all of which is important to advertisers.
Although it might seem urgent to Chuck fans, incorporating online chatter and viewership into ratings isn’t a front-burner issue just yet. According to Nielsen numbers released a couple weeks ago, 95 percent of audiences still watch TV shows live. Although there has been a 1,957 percent increase of online video viewership from 2003 to 2009, a measly 1 percent watch streaming videos online, leaving just 4 percent to cuddle up with their DVR or Tivo.
Still, Nielsen Online is trying to get ahead of the curve. Their new tool VideoCensus is already measuring TV rankings based on online viewership. In mid-February, Nielsen released its first public rankings of online individual TV programs. Shows on ABC.com (like Lost and Grey’s Anatomy) lead the pack (surprise!), followed by NBC’s Saturday Night Live, but Hulu was left out of the metrics because they don’t release individual program data to the public … yet.
Behind the scenes, Nielsen is working on building new tools and converging metrics for a different kind of television ranking—combining the buzz on social networking, online viewership and the live broadcast numbers to reinvent how we measure the popularity of a show, according to Mr. Gibs. It’ll be the Swiss Army knife for TV rankings!
With those kinds of numbers, maybe Mr. Levi’s superhero Chuck can be saved to save another day.
greagan@observer.com
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