Appointment viewing will live on

It was 1998. We were at a global conference of one of America’s biggest advertising agencies, Foote, Cone & Belding. The chairman of the holding company (True North) announced that we ad folks would have to rework our agendas since TiVo was going to destroy the 30-second television commercial. The digital video recorder had entered the market in 1997 and offered great features like recording any programme, playing back when you want, and lo and behold, you could skip the ads. Fortunately for the 300-plus gathered in the hall, the worldwide creative director, Geoff Thomson, allayed those concerns saying that he did not expect the 30-second ad to vanish anytime soon.

Today, a lot of television is consumed in the US in what is called a “non-linear” fashion. You don’t really watch the programme at a scheduled time. The only big programmes that get seen live are sports, big entertainment events (aka the Oscars) and the news.

In India, too, media planners have been obsessed with appointment television. So, channels that provide regular eyeballs score better in CPT (cost per thousand) terms compared to those that do not have the appointment effect. For example, the daily soaps on one of the general entertainment channels can offer you a viewership of a few million (four TRPs will translate into eight million homes or around 32 million impressions). This is regular viewership. It happens every day at a particular time. So, if I invest in this programme, I can provide 30-plus million impressions guaranteed.

Compare this with a television channel showing only movies, the cinema channels. They never score a four TRP but taken for a long duration, they can add up to that figure. The problem is that the 32 million impressions may actually be three impressions to 10 million consumers; or 30 impressions to one million consumers. There is no regularity to the viewership.

Advertisers are not happy gambling their money away on iffy propositions. So they pay a premium to daily soaps and seek deep discounts from cinema channels. That is the effect of appointment viewing.

In this regard, the Indian Premier League (IPL), with its 40-plus days of non-stop cricket excitement is a great funnel for delivering appointment viewing focused brand advertising. No wonder it commands a huge ad rate (plus the difficult-to-get male viewers).

We are now at the throes of the OTT revolution. The pandemic has turned even the humblest among us into binge-watching OTT addicts. There seem to be too few hours in a day to watch all the exciting stuff that is out there on various OTT platforms.

Will we see appointment viewing disappear in the near future? Will viewership of programmes develop its own viewership curve, with a long fat tail?

Reports point to the longevity of appointment viewing. You would imagine that the anytime availability of television content and other good quality independently produced OTT content will eradicate appointment viewing. The truth is that on-demand viewing has elongated the window of viewing. But consumers are still making appointments to view their content. A report by TubeMogul (Television Weekly, July 7, 2008) found that about 50 per cent of all views of online videos occur in the first two weeks of a video’s life. This seems strange. Why hurry and view when the video will be there for you to watch for months, if not years?

This is where it is important to realise that you consume content not just because you want to while away your time, but also because it gives you social capital. It gives you currency to speak about in your groups. And if you have not watched the latest, soon after it is dropped on an OTT platform, you miss out on scoring one over your friends and colleagues. This first-day-first-show craze is not something that will go away just because the show is going to be available for a long time. What OTT is, however, going to do is extend the life of the content. And if the show wins an award, it could once again see a spike in viewership.

You can apply the appointment effect to all that you see around you. People attend online concerts, fully knowing that the video will be available for weeks ahead. People attend book talks, even if the talk will be available for anytime viewing. The same is true of online courses and more.

Human beings are creatures of habit and appointment (viewing) is a habit that they have perfected over the many millennia they have inhabited this blue dot we call Planet Earth. Making and keeping an appointment will continue to be the guard-rail that will help us navigate the information deluge.

The writer is an independent brand strategist/coach, author and founder of Brand-Building.com, a brand advisory. 

He can be reached at ambimgp@brand-building.com