Paying the price of free TV

Is television in this region a charity?

That’s how one producer at the recent Abu Dhabi Media Summit said he ran his business — as a non-profit institution. Why? Well, in his view, it was because the advertising spend in the region is simply not big enough or diverse enough to support and fund a production environment in which more than a handful of companies can succeed.

And before I lose all of the technology folk reading this, don’t forget that spend on production means spend on crews, studios, equipment and everything in the production chain, so this is something that affects much more than whether an executive producer gets a new Audi.

And maybe he’s got a point. TV ad spend for the entire MENA region is about the same size as Turkey’s. On a per head basis, we compete with Cyprus.

Throw in the fact that the most popular content and the biggest productions on our screens frequently come from Turkey. See a possible link?

Markets are complex and there’s no single answer to any of this, of course. But there is one clear difference between us and Turkey, and one that is so directly related to advertiser funding, it is difficult to ignore.

Turkey has an established and widely-used TV ratings system that is based on electronic measurement, like the tview people meters that have just been introduced in the UAE.

For the first time, we can get accurate and reliable information about what people actually watch – not just programmes but also advertising.

This is the sort of data that matters to an EMEA marketing director in London or Paris, who is evaluating budgets. Why would he want to approve an increase when he does not know what returns it will deliver when the Gulf business is based on guesswork unlike most of the territories under his control?

That may seem like a problem for the people in the commercial department, but the effects will ripple through to entire channels and everyone will need to be involved in the solution.

Complexity

Take a look at the Top 10 channels in the week between Oct 7 and 13, 2012.

At the broad level of total day, it’s great news for MBC, and probably as anyone would expect. But that’s just one story.

Metering shows a much larger daytime audience than has previously been thought here, so cut the same audience into 9 a.m-5 p.m. and start looking at female only and the picture is different. Now we have the cooking channel Fatafeat at No.6, which would normally never claim to be a Top 10 channel. There are times of certain days when it is the most watched channel in this group.

Then look at Emirati males in the evening and you get another picture, possibly a surprising one. The top 10 programmes over the week are all drama episodes on MBC and Abu Dhabi Drama, and Zee Aflam is consistently stronger among males than females.

This may change from week to week, even day to day, but the point is the market now has a more accurate way to find niches, and match those niches to products and programmes.

Keeping Viewers

But it goes into much greater detail than simply looking at channels and programmes.

For example, consider a few minutes extracted from a mainstream UAE channel recently.

It’s nearly midnight and a programme is about to end. It has a good 4.2% share of household viewing.

The show ends at 23:57 and there is a three-minute gap before the next programme starts at 24:00.

What happens? The viewing drops by two thirds, meaning the new programme starts with a much lower share. Thousands of viewers have just been cast adrift.

Maybe the viewers weren’t interested in the next programme but were they given the chance to find out?

The break contained a series of channel promos for unrelated content, not even paid inventory. Suddenly something which seemed ‘free’ has a big cost attached.

Either way, it is a channel management issue. Continuity, EPGs,’coming up’ teasers and promos have to become clever tools that help keep audiences, not blunt instruments to frustrate them.

Ad Breaks

The effects are even more dramatic in long ad breaks. It’s not the total time per hour, although that can be excessive. Breaks of eight or nine minutes are not uncommon on popular channels.

The advertiser in the middle of the break will be lucky to attract half the viewers of the advertiser at the start. In some cases, it may be as low as 20%.

Breaks are so long we even see spikes where people come back to check whether the programme has re-started, although viewers seem to have got it down to a fine art.

Markets which have used this technology have moved to buying airtime based on total ratings. So it doesn’t matter whether you have 10 spots or 100 spots, it’s the number of viewers that counts.

That means a lot more planning and evaluation in both channel management and transmission is going to be necessary along with frequent interaction with commercial departments, like daily reviews of placement and corresponding adjustment to hit targets.

It will be up to the technology and operations people to help the business manage the airtime efficiently and effectively – ultimately, that’s the cost of securing funding rather than relying on donations.

Christopher O’Hearn is GM of Emirates Media Measurement Company, which has rolled out ‘tview’, the UAE’s new television ratings and audience measurement system, and the first in the Middle East