The Center for Media Design released a report Wednesday showing nearly half of advertising breaks are watched for one minute or less and-áone-third of all commercials are watched in their entirety.
The report, entitled "Remotely Interested? Observing Television Viewers' Advertising-Related Behaviors," allows advertisers to see just how people react to commercials during a night of prime-time television.
While advertisers will not be surprised that people leave during ad breaks, Michael Bloxham, testing center director for CMD, said it is interesting that one-third of commercials are watched completely.
The study was originally intended to examine how people use electronic TV guides, but after completing the tests, Bloxham said the researchers had more questions.
"It gives us a very rich database we can dig into," he said. "We found ourselves asking questions we hadn't really thought about. It's a great example of the kind of research you can do in academia because there was no deadline."
The observers recorded the different behavior in five-second increments using the Alphasmart Dana, known as Dana for short. It's a smart keyboard with a screen that responds to touch and allows observers to monitor behavior changes in the viewing subject. -á
Some of the changes include switching channels, reading something, leaving the room, muting the TV and carrying on conversation with others in the room.-á"This study was done objectively," Michelle Prieb, project manager for CMD, said. "The point was to bring advertisers up to speed on how people behave during commercial breaks. The advertisers can make their own conclusions from that."-á
The report was comprised of observations of 49 different subjects from Indianapolis and Muncie. The subjects were picked from volunteers who heard about the study through word of mouth. -á
Subjects were then asked to watch television as they normally would, while an observer would sit in and record different behaviors of the subjects.-áThis provided much more detailed information than surveys by Nielsen Media Research, Bloxham said.
"If you ring people up on the telephone, that can't give you the level of detail you have here," Bloxham, "What you don't get with those is the flip side, what exactly is going on in the room, where does the attention lie."
The report also serves as a pilot to see if the Danas can handle refreshing information every five seconds, Prieb said. The Danas normally refresh every 15 seconds, but Prieb said she and her team knew that would be too long for this study.-á
"We probably missed a lot with the five-second increments," Prieb said. "But it's a lot better than with 15 seconds."-á
More studies may use this observational method in the future, she said, because it was successful this time.
"We plan to conduct a study similar to this on a larger scale," Prieb said. "We would likely combine the observational method used in this study with some form of electronic monitoring to record TV content in greater detail.-áThis would allow observers to record even more detailed descriptions of non-TV behaviors like the nature of the conversation that took place, the specific other media that was used and for what was it used, etc."-á
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