Commercial Tuneaway as a Function of Message Frequency: What Can We Learn About Wearout From The Set-Top Box?
Abstract The analysis of advertising tuneaway can help us to understand many of the dynamics of advertising response, including advertising attention and wearout. In this paper we examine the relationship between advertising frequency and advertising tuneaway, and discuss the relationships in the context of attention and wearout.
IntroductionSince the origin of television advertising there have been questions about commercial attention and commercial wearout. There are several perspectives we can take on the topic of commercial attention and wearout. They include approaches that focus on consumer information processing and communication theory. These approaches are useful, and provide substantial context. But research of this nature offers directional advice that can be difficult to apply to a specific campaign. In contrast, we can take a behavioral approach and recognize that television advertising exposure begins with channel tuning and ends with commercial tuneaway. As a result, commercial tuning and tuneaway is a good place to start the study of commercial retention and wearout.
Set-top box (STB) data provide a perfect approach for examining the behavioral aspects of commercial exposure. The set-top box provides the volume of data necessary to support complex analysis of key factors including commercial messaging, commercial position, and commercial frequency.
While tuneaway is driven by a complex combination of factors, it’s generally best to break down a complex problem one dimension at a time and study a single factor. We can pursue the complex analysis after we improve our understanding of the individual factors that drive tuneaway. In this study, we have focused on commercial tuneaway as a function of commercial frequency. Our research is intended to answer a basic question:
- Do commercials reach a point where a viewer is more likely to tuneaway based on the level of past exposure?
In this paper we utilize Return Path Data (RPD) to explore the relationship between message frequency and commercial tuneaway, present key findings on this relationship, and relate those findings to ideas on a more complex model for understanding commercial audience.
The study is based on an extract of the Charter Los Angeles data set that measures second-by-second tuning of over 420,000 sets in roughly 270,000 homes. We have supplemented the analysis with a business case study featuring DIRECTView, a representative sample of 203,000 STBs that project to the national DIRECTV universe of 16.7 million households.
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