Focusing on the lack of depth in commercial ratings, the new free TiVo website highlights the high level of granular anonymous commercial viewership data it has made available for marketers. The site is powered by TiVo’s Stop||Watch ratings service and targets brand managers and CMOs who may want to analyze how effective a brand’s television spots are at retaining viewers and how well they’re performing relative to competing brands.
The Stop||Watch set-top-box product uses an anonymous sample of 375,000 nationally distributed TiVo DVR subscribers and joins second-by-second viewing behavior with commercial occurrence data, offering Program Ratings, Spot Ratings, and Commercial Viewership Index (Commercial Retention) for both live viewing and Time-Shifted Viewing out to 7 days from program airing.
Visitors to www.tivo.com/ad-scorecard can compare up to three brands with national broadcast and cable spots against each other to determine which one most effectively retains viewers over a timeframe ranging from one week to three months.
Once the desired brand names are entered, a click compares brands and deems the brand which saw the least amount of commercial avoidance the winner. In addition to revealing the brand which retained the most viewers, website visitors are shown the weekly performance for each brand broken out in a colorful, graphical chart display.
RBR-TVBR tried Toyota vs. GM vs. Ford over a 12-week broadcast week period. The winner was Ford. It appears that Toyota had a new campaign begin in Week 1 of the new broadcast calendar year, as it showed a big spike in the index. Of course, it could be other things as well. But significant changes in retention are usually associated with changes in media mix, placement, or creative. Ford’s best showing was Week 45 of last year.
TiVo recently ran sample comps involving a number of companies. In a head to head battle of the brands between fast food chains McDonald’s, Burger King and Wendy’s, it was Burger King who was able to retain the most viewers during recent commercials.
Additionally, TiVo looked at how promotional spots for major broadcast network shows perform against each other and between those ads aired by networks ABC, CBS, NBC, it was CBS who came out the winner by experiencing the least amount of commercial avoidance.
