TV Ads: Measuring Viewer Engagement

TV Ads: Measuring Viewer Engagement, by David Kiley, found in Business Week, describes new tools that measure how well viewers are actually paying attention to programs compared to just having the TV on (http://blackboard.rider.edu/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp?tab_id=_2_1&url=%2Fwebapps%2Fblackboard%2Fexecute%2Flauncher%3Ftype%3DCourse%26id%3D_56860_1%26url%3D.)

Proctor and Gamble, Toyota, and Home Depot are a few that are following up on this. With the recession going on lately, advertisers need to prove to their finance departments that viewers are actually paying attention to ads in order to keep them going, seeing that ads are not exactly cheap. Because advertisers are desperate to find out whether or not their clients are actually listening to the ads, they have convinced the networks and cable channels to pay for the viewer engagement as a program research.

Ford Motor is one of the newest companies to agree with viewer engagement.

They found that Discovery Channel's, Dirty Jobs, with Mike Rowe, had an engagement level of viewers that was off the charts. They found that because of the high number of viewers, Ford should advertise on that channel. They made a deal with Rowe. Rowe would be shown on the Ford ads saying how their trucks are great. Makes sense because trucks and dirty work fit together perfectly. Engagement ratings worked out. Engagement ratings are just like demographics. You want to place ads where they belong. You wouldn't put a Ford commercial on Nick for example.

"Name That Tune-In: Who Will Emerge as The Future of Radio?" - by Marc Fisher

In this article, by Marc Fisher, in The Washington Post, we find that radio listeners of AM and FM are declining when online music such as Limewire, Pandora and other music programs are growing. According to the article, this is our "next radio." The only problem with this generation of online music is that we all expect it to be free, which it's not.

The article I chose talks about Pandora being a music site in which listeners can basically create their own music station. People can pick and choose which songs they like and don't like by simply typing in either the artists name or the name of the song. The problem with this is the royalty rates.

Last.fm is another music site which works a little differently than Pandora does. This station collects music based on the listeners preferences. If a customer was to choose one artist, the program would give feed back on other artists' like the one they chose which the listen may like.

One of the newer media technologies, that I think sounds pretty cool, is a portable CD player that allows the user to play last.fm with Slacker, another music player, at the same time, by connecting your own music stations to a Wi-Fi internet connection.

In the article, Del Colliano talks about how he thinks Apple will only be able to produce the "next radio" because of all Apple's accomplishments so far. Him, along with other people, believe that the next radio won't be the type where you can listen whenever you want, but rather it will play short programs that work with other networks.

Basically the radio of the future will involve only music that you and you alone want to listen to. I think this would be a good and bad idea. It would be good because listeners would be able to listen to what they want. I am a listener and I know I would love that. On the other hand, radio will become less popular than it is right now. If people can pick and choose their music, there would be no one left to listen to the radio except the older crowd.

In our book, "What's Coming for Radio?" talks about radio in the future. Towards the end of the section it describes how wireless broadband services present the biggest threat of audiences to traditional radio, which is basically also what this article describes. It is true, because of the way technology keeps growing, soon it will be useless to even have a radio.