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.

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.

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.