Last night CBS attracted an average of 106.5 million viewers during its transmission of Super Bowl XLIV, which effectively made it the most watched broadcast program of all time. While the Super Bowl has always been a major broadcast event in the United States its average audience has been growing steadily at around 2.3% since 2000. Last night’s broadcast was the final push, that finally broke the 100 million viewer mark.

This super-sized audience has always commands high ad prices since it offers marketers unique access to a concentrated mass audience. CBS reported that prices floated between $2.5 and $3.0 million, although certain slots went higher. If an average of $30 million is assumed, the effective CPM last night would have been $28.17.

Since CPMs for global viewers during broadcast primetime float around $15, the Super Bowl CPM would be roughly double. This would also be roughly parallel to relationship between broadcast primetime and the Super Bowl within the Household CPM, as reported by the TV Bureau of Advertising.

This is the 100% price premium is the value given by the market towards being able to reach over a third of the U.S. population at exactly the same time. This unique opportunity affords a brand message to effectively become common culture within the span of 30 seconds. Now, whether or not an advertisers use this time wisely is another matter. You can be the judge; see all the spots from last night here at Ad Age.

Last week Ad Age posted the spot prices for the new Fall’s season, based on a “survey of media buying firms.” Combining this information with ratings data for the top 20 programs I compiled approximate CPMs (Cost per Thousand) for the overall audience and the 18-49 demographic.

Most advertisers are not focused on overall audience, since they have far more precise targets for their products or services. In many cases, they also target younger viewers since it’s generally accepted that they’re psychologically they’re less set in their purchasing decisions and more likely to be swayed by marketing messages. This focus on younger viewers has been criticized as “simplistic” by CBS CEO Les Moonves, motivated perhaps to CBS’s dominance of the general audience market. Out of the 20 shows in the following list, 12 are on CBS.

Moreover, popular CBS programs such as NCIS, Criminal Minds and 60 Minutes come up with the lowest CPMs. On average CBS shows have a CPM of $9.76, about 10% less than the group average. Given this access to mass audiences and a efficient broad buy, some budget conscious advertisers opt for CBS:

Donna Spurrier runs Spurrier Media Group, which places ads for companies. One client, Identity Guard, which helps consumers ward off ID thieves, had a small ad budget and chose CBS because it has large numbers of loyal viewers. “When you have a limited budget, you have to fish where the fish are,” she says.

Within the 18-49 demographic CBS’ share of the market is not as strong. The network still lands the most spots, with eight shows in the top 20, while each of the other three networks have four shows each. This information should be taken with a grain of salt however since cue to data limitations for the 18-49 demographic I had to base my analysis on only two weeks of ratings during the month of October. In any case, CBS still seems to be the bargain in this demo, offering a $28.68 CPM, 9% below the average CPM of $31.49.

However, this CPM comparison is by no means the complete story. Advertisers could be interested in much smaller demographic targets which are not being compared above. If they’re targeting younger audiences a show like Family Guy could be more pertinent and more cost efficient. If an advertiser wants sophisticated audiences an investment in The Office or Grey’s Anatomy may make more sense. The latter scenario also ties into the limits of demographic targeting. As I mentioned before, many advertisers are interested in precise targeting, which may go beyond  the limits of age and sex demographics. As one advertiser explained in AdWeek, women 18-34 can mean one thing in New York City and something else entirely in Minneapolis. Therefore, CPM comparisons would be much more refined than what you normally see on a ratings measurement.

Another issue that a standard CPM comparison doesn’t account for is DVR resistance which is why NBC Sunday Night Football ranks so high in these two lists. Sports programs normally assure live viewing thus resulting in a price premium compared to other programs in the same time period. The apt attention of sports viewers is related to another issue affecting TV ad pricing called engagement, which is defined as “how closely viewers are paying attention to the programs.” At a certain level, engagement has already been priced into television slots. Higher attention in primetime is one reason why CPMs are higher there than in daytime. The industry is simply measuring this engagement more precisely now, which may lend it greater weight in commercial pricing standards in the future. But measurement, as they say, is another story.

Yesterday TiVo released the results of an examination of how political party affiliation differs among top rated news and primetime programs. The results are based on viewership for July, fed by TiVo’s Stopwatch ratings service, which compiles from a consumer panel of  35,000 volunteer households.

Most of the information released is categorized by either Republican or Democrat partisanship, so it is difficult to compare how a particular program performed across party lines. The full press release detailing the viewership of 40 programs between the two parties can found here. The partisanship strength for the shows is indicated by an “index,” which I roughly equated to being the 18-49 rating divided by the rating of how many Democrat or Republican households watched the program. The following graph lays out all the results with the  18-49 rating on the horizontal axis and the partisanship index on the vertical axis. The news programs, with their relatively low ratings form a cluster on the upper left while the primetime shows form a file in the lower right.

Unsurprisingly, given current polarization, the news programs as a whole had much higher partisanship indexes than the primetime programs. What was unexpected was to see the CBS Morning News have the highest index among any of the programs. Equally unexpected was to see Issues with Jane Velez-Mitchell, a program on HLN (Headline News) to have a higher ratio of Republicans in its audience than any program on Fox News, although Glenn Beck was very close behind. Among the primetime programming two shows made it into the top ten of both the Democrat and Republican indexes: The Closer and Raising the Bar, both on TNT. Perhaps TNT’s new motto should be “Where America comes together.”

Most of the new broadcast television shows have premiered during the past three weeks and I thought it was time to draw a comparison among the top performers.

The number one show in terms of overall viewers was NCIS, with a total audience of 18.9 million. Unsurprisingly, NCIS‘s lead-out and spin-off, NCIS: Los Angeles, also had a strong premiere with 1.74 million viewers and placed in third. In between at second place The Jay Leno Show drew 17.7 million viewers. ABC placed two shows in fourth and fifth place (Dancing With the Stars and Grey’s Anatomy), but CBS nabbed by far the most spots in this list with six spots.

The 18-49 demo ratings tell a much different and more important story. CBS loses its top position, placing half as many shows. The top spots here are for Grey’s Anatomy, House, The Jay Leno Show, Family Guy and The Cleveland Show. That’s three out of the top five for Fox.

In terms of overall performance I don’t have enough data to draw much information. TVbytheNumbers.com does have an excellent post comparing the broadcast network performance during the first week of this Fall season to last year. The only networks that are showing positive growth in overall viewership and within the 18-49 demo are MyNetworkTV and CBS.

I did draw a comparison between the network ratings by averaging out results within three time slots. While not indicating that a particular network is leading, these results do show that the highest ratings were drawn around 9:00 p.m.

This result probably has a lot to do with DVR viewership. These ratings are Live+SD (same day) meaning that time-shifted viewing before 3:00 a.m. the same “night” is included. Furthermore, it has also been reported that during this Fall season DVR viewing increased from two hours to four or five per night and given that shows in the 9:00 p.m. time slot have normally been the most popular for DVR use, these heightened ratings at 9:00 p.m. make sense.

The downside is that shows at 10:00 p.m. suffer, competing not only with shows in their own time slot but also with time-shifted programming from 8 or 9:00 p.m. There might be an exception to this trends and it’s The Jay Leno Show‘s whose timely content may stave the DVR push from earlier time periods and attract audiences for live viewing. The Jay Leno Show has lowered DVR viewing within its time slot from 70% to 46%. A higher proportion of live viewing may also mean that the show’s audience is opting away from watching other timeshifted programming, but that could only be proven by measuring overall timeshifted viewing at 10:00 p.m.

Back in May I published a post, Fall 2009 TV Lineup, which showed the new Fall lineups for ABC, CBS, Fox and the CW. During the past week the post has risen in popularity since the new Fall season is just around the corner. It actually begins this Saturday with the season start for Saturday Night Football on ABC, and then continues on Tuesday with the CW’s premieres of 90210 and Melrose Place.

Instead of writing out a long, tedious list of the shows’ premiere dates I’ve decided to publish an online calendar with all the information.

This calendar is an iCalendar Calendar Data file (.ics)  and can be easily subscribed to, turned off and managed in iCalendar, Google Calendar or Outlook. Here is the link to subscribe to:

http://betweenthescreens.com/calendars/Fall_2009_TV.ics

The calendar is currently updated with all the series debuts and season premieres for the five broadcast networks I mentioned before. The biggest clashes seems to be occurring during the third week of September when 33 new or returning shows will premiere during the span of five days.

I will be adding more networks in the near future; all updates will automatically be sent to subscribed users.

U.S. broadcast TV networks have always been engulfed in a ratings race, always trying to win the title of “America’s Most Watched Network.” Last week the ratings results of the 2008-2009 broadcast television season came in. Out of the “big four” networks CBS was the clear winner, with growth in total viewers and across all key demos. MyNetworkTV (MNT) saw the most growth, mostly as a result of the popularity of WWF Smackdown. Univision (UNI) also saw growth in total viewers and the 18-49 demographic, but slightly lost younger viewers in the 18-34 demo. I couldn’t get data on Telemundo and I’m curious about how they grew this season across the same demo categories.

While the CW had the worst stats, it seems in terms of media coverage that NBC is faring the worst. Interviewed at the All Things Digital Conference NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker admits that “NBC primetime has had four very difficult years.” The following chart illustrates just how much NBC’s stature has fallen in recent years.

Is this the bottom for the Peacock Network and could the it be on the verge of a comeback next season? Depends on whether you think it has to do with ratings or profitability.

NBC changed about 70% of their primetime programming; the biggest change is programming Jay Leno five nights a week at 10:00 p.m. The move is considered by some industry veterans to be nothing short of capitulation. NBC is touting Jay Leno’s show as viable alternative programming with a low price tag and a high resistance to DVR viewing. The lower cost results in a lower ratings threshold The show would be considered a success, as Jeff Zucker said, if it hits a 1.8 rating in the 18-49 demo, something far below the broadcast norm for the same time slot. Perhaps if the show makes their ratings objective, NBC will happily remain trailing the ratings race, and still consider themselves a success.

This week all the major broadcast networks held their upfront presentations, announcing their upcoming fall schedules and subsequently the new shows they would be presenting. I put together some handy-dandy color-coded charts to navigate the new landscape. It looks like ABC and NBC are going to presenting the most new material, while Fox has managed to do quite a bit of rearranging with their existing shows. CBS is making the least changes since they’ve performed the best this season.

Update: You may be interested in new online calendar that I’ve published for the Fall 2009 TV season. More about that at this posting.

Super Bowl XLIII is less than five days away and I am looking forward more to the commercials than the game itself . A Super Bowl commercial has be better than the game since it has only 30 seconds to grab a viewer’s attention and be as memorable as any play or touchdown that occurs between breaks. This year advertisers will be paying around $3 million for the privilege to air their messages. How did the price get this high and what is it really worth?

The Super Bowl is considered by advertisers be ‘super’ since it manages to draw the mass audience of yesteryear, and it’s still growing. Last year’s Super Bowl XLII between the New York Giants and the New England Patriots yielded a record audience of over 97 million television viewers.

While the Super Bowl audience size has grown, advertising prices have risen at a higher rate. Adjusted for inflation the cost of a 30 second spot has risen 795% between 1968 to 2008. The biggest single annual jump has been 42.5% (in 1985) but overall the greatest growth was seen during the late 90′s, probably an aftermath of the networks’ competitive bidding for the NFL broadcast rights that were then up for renewal. This began in 1993 when fledgling Fox snatched the broadcast rights from CBS with a $1.58 billion bid for four years. CBS then came back in 1998 offering $4 billion for the AFC games, while Fox paid $4.4 for the NFC, which then effectively shut NBC out of the NFL and ended that network’s 59 year broadcast history with the sport. Not until 2006 did NBC get back in the game, by gaining the rights to the Sunday night game, which has subsequently improved its Sunday night ratings. This bidding war demonstrates the power of not just the Superbowl, but of the entire NFL schedule.

But getting back to the Super Bowl, the reason that advertising prices are so high, and the reason that network vie to broadcast the event, is that it’s a unique platform to reach a concentrated audience simultaneously. It’s been shown that Superbowl viewers pay more attention to commercials aired during the event. According to this TNS study, viewers pay attention during the Superbowl at an index level of 100, while the average primetime show has a level of 90. Both advertisers and the networks understand these marketing benefits. Fox invested 44 minutes during last year’s Superbowl for network advertising, a new record. The event also affords a unique opportunity for advertisers to achieve a big splash in the marketplace. It is no wonder that between 20 and 25% of the Super Bowl’s advertisers each year are first-time clients, who probably want to break out of the clutter.

Advertisers will pay premiums for such benefits, which can clearly be seen by the higher CPM (Cost per Mille) for the Superbowl. CPM or Cost per Thousand is an advertising measure often used to measure the relative performance between two media vehicles. The following graph measure the cost of reaching 1,000 homes, either by advertising in the Superbowl or on network primetime television.

The network primetime CPM figures comes from the TV Bureau of Advertising website, and take into account all broadcast networks including the WB, UPN and Univision. Therefore, it might be a little low and not be as different as the Super Bowl CPM, which runs about twice as high. Given the benefits mentioned before, this CPM could therefore be comprehended. While it is difficult to judge whether the prices are worth it, the customers do seem the appreciate the opportunity and that says a lot.