It may feel counter intuitive but people are watching more TV than ever.  Deloitte’s 2009 “State of the Media Democracy” report showed a 26% increase in the number of Americans choosing TV as their favorite type of media compared to 2008.  They spend nearly 18hrs per week watching TV programming – up from 16 hrs in 2008.  Millenials (aged 14-26) showed the highest increase – 15hrs in 2009 compared to 10.5 in 2008. 

Nielsen’s latest A2M2 Three Screen Report confirms this growth in TV consumption.  It shows that online and mobile video are not replacing traditional TV – consumers seem to be adding them to their schedules. ”Americans today have an insatiable appetite for not only content, but also choice,” says Nic Covey, director of cross-platform insights at Nielsen. “Across all age groups, we see consumers adding the Internet and mobile devices to their media diet — consuming media anytime and anywhere possible.”  The report also showed that while DVR and online video are showing solid growth, 99% of all video content is still consumed on traditional TV.

This is not just an American phenomenon.  In the UK for example, where 40% of households have 3 or more TV’s in their home, the number of hrs of TV watched per person is the highest since 1993.

So if people are still watching TV, are they watching the ads as well?  One of the common arguments against TV advertising is that people don’t notice the ads or skip them on their DVR’s.  Let’s have a look at the facts.  People in the US are exposed to more TV commercials than ever.  The average customer of Time Warner Cable (the second biggest cable company in the US) gets served 32 ads per hour .  That seems a lot but people still seem to engage with TV commercials.  Thinkbox and ACB in the UK did a very interesting study where they installed video cameras within the TV sets of 74 individuals.  They observed their behavior while they were watching TV commercials for a period of 3 weeks.  They supplemented the study with quantitative research.  Their findings were interesting.  They found that when responders were sitting down watching the ads, 68% of them recorded some observable behavior that was related to the ad.  Positive behaviors outnumbered negative by almost 2 to 1.

So people are watching a lot of ads and are often emotionally engaged when watching them.  What about fast forwarding then?  According to Nielsen the penetration of DVR’s among US households is 22.5%.  While this has grown significantly over the last couple of years it still means that more than ¾ of the US population does not have the ability to skip ads.  When we have a closer look at households with a DVR we see that they only 5% of their total time in front of the TV is watched timeshifted.  The majority of the DVR owners still prefer to watch live TV in the traditional way. 

When they are watching time shifted TV, 43% say they fast forward the ads.  But even then they still seem to process parts of the TV ads.  Neuromarketing company Innerscope did a study where they measured emotional engagement with TV content through the use of biometrics.  They noticed that even when people fast forwarded their ads they still recalled them afterwards.  During the fast forwarding viewers were also emotionally engaged, in a ‘hyper alert’ state and focused on the center of the screen. 

So it sounds like the two myths that people are no longer watching TV and that they are immune to TV ads are false.  In the next post I will take a closer look at TV’s effectiveness.