Lies, Damn Lies and Les Moonves: More Fun with Numbers

With apologies to Mr. Moonves, CBS crushed the competition last week, but I love a catchy headline.

One thing that’s always bothered me and always will because it’s not like it’s ever going to change is the way numbers get used. Misleading statistics make it out into the media stream and then there is this tendency to just start parroting the statistics because they’re out there. Recently I saw this Moonves quote:

"But DVRs are getting counted, and you're seeing that they are not as disastrous to commercials as everybody thought. Nobody would have thought that only [about] 45 percent of people zap commercials. Not only that, but commercials you zap through are still effective to a certain extent. When you see that Crest toothpaste logo, that goes into your brain. More and more people are going to be viewing [commercials] with the logo throughout,” said Moonves in a story on Jack Myers’ mediaVillage.

Wow, 55% of DVR owners don’t zap through commercials! At the risk of some perilous branding here: you have to be kidding me! Maybe it’s true. What I suspect is really the case is that only 45% always zap through commercials. I’m pretty sure the way the data actually works out is that most DVR users zap commercials most of the time when they are watching something time shifted.

That is not the song Moonves was singing here. I do believe that only a small % of DVR users always zap through commercials. I often find myself not zapping through them. Usually it’s when I wasn’t actually paying attention to what I was watching! I watch ESPN’s PTI religiously on the DVR, but I often watch it on my computer and am just listening while I surf the web or try to get the tvbythenumbers.com web site looking much better than what you see here before we launch next month.

I could be wrong in my assumptions and it could be Les Moonves is right. But I’ll tell you what, I’d bet $1000 that the data doesn’t show that 55% of DVR users never zap through commercials. I contacted Nielsen for clarity on the data, but so far my request has fallen on deaf ears (it’s been over a week and I asked more than once). I think the clarity is very, very important, but admittedly it’s far more important if you’re buying advertising based on the numbers that include DVR viewership than it is if you’re selling the advertising.

It’s not just the networks. When it comes to TV data, it’s just plain hard to get. I wanted to provide Bill Gorman with some numbers so he could make a chart on the growth of homes in the US with HDTVs. I tried to compile some data from the internet and it looks like this: (again, I am only talking homes in the United States, not worldwide):

March 2004 1.6 million homes (source = In-Stat)
March 2005 4.0 million homes (In-Stat)
Dec 31, 2006 27.7 million (source Global Analysis)
Dec 31, 2007 52 Million Homes (source CEA)

In the most recent data point provided by the Consumer Electronics Association is projecting end of year stats based on the sales of HDTVs during the first six months of 2007 that a total of 16 million additional homes will be added to the number of homes with at least one HDTV. I have 2, three if you count the plasma screen hanging on Michael Raneri’s basement wall – hey, I have a 61” DLP set, and bigger is better. Hanging the plasma screen on my office wall and using it as a computer monitor seemed excessive, besides it is five years old now and can only do 1024x768 resolution. If it could do 1920x1280, I’d have already ripped it off Mike’s wall.

Enough about me. I don’t take issue with the 16 million additional homes with an HDTV in 2007. But, they say that 16 million additional homes in ’07 brings the US Total to 52 million. I couldn’t find any data showing 36 million homes at the end of 2006 which is more than 8 million more homes than with the data I could find.

It doesn’t mean the data doesn’t exist, only that if it does I couldn’t find it or it’s a stat that is not freely available anywhere. We’ll still probably make the chart anyway and whether it’s 52 million homes or 44 million, it’s getting to be a lot of homes.

But here’s another statistic from the CEA from the same press release predicting the 52 Million homes, 44% of the homes with at least one HDTV receive no HD programming at all.

It’s bad enough that I don’t get Mark Cuban’s HDNet or HDNet Movies channels via my Comcast HDTV package, but at least I’ll be able to watch him dance in HD if the sources for this story are correct.

Who spends all the money for an HDTV and then doesn’t get any content? Apparently a whole lot of people.

The Trend is not Les Moonves' Friend

Per Bill Gorman:

But neither is it his competitor's friend either.


Lot's of hub bub about the Katie Couric move, but the reality is that the long term trend in broadcast nightly news viewing is down and nothing is going to change that.

Amen.

But will Mark Cuban be able to capitalize on this?

Because Egos are Sooo Fragile: Les Moonves, You’re #1: Really!

Not just because I'm a chronic suck up at all. Moonves really is #1 in the thing networks care MOST about: primetime ratings. We live in a world where you can really make a boneheaded decision and totally undervalue the worth of the Dan Rather brand and still be…#1. Les Moonves lives in exactly that world. A world where America LOVES, LOVES, LOVES CSI.

That America isn't loving on Miss Couric on the CBS Evening News – this I believe isn't Miss Couric's fault at all, but instead just how the whole transition from Rather to Couric was handled (which is to say, very, very badly). Again, I don't think that's a really function of anything to do with Katie Couric.

It doesn't matter. Primetime ratings matter. And here, Moonves or at least CSI in all its variations are killing. While CBS didn't have any of the top 5 programs, either for the season or the May sweeps, CBS still dominated with 13 out of the top 20 shows being CBS products and EIGHTEEN OUT OF THE TOP TWENTY-FIVE shows in the May sweeps. That's dominance. The highest value to the networks come from its ability to score during primetime, so Moonves probably views himself (and correctly so) as the winner.

I wouldn't fault him for that. Except I have no idea what role Moonves had in CSI and its variants or any of the other programming running during primetime. If those decisions were his, I'll give him all the credit for it (and even if they weren't his, I'll give him the credit). What I am sure of is, the Dan Rather/Katie Couric thing was all his, and it was completely botched: not just in execution, but in terms of how he thought about it to begin with. The fact that CBS is #1 during primetime has no bearing on how poorly this was handled, except that I'm sure that Moonves is not under any kind of pressure, say…compared to NBC, which came in last in the primetime sweeps.

Les Moonves is #1 in the thing that really matters, the primetime ratings. But if the goal is to make the most money for your firm possible, and if it isn't, I kind of think it should be, I hold Moonves completely accountable for botching the Rather thing. Because he's #1 where it matters he won't feel any heat for being accountable here. That's human nature, but it's the kind of human nature that usually eventually comes around to bite you in the butt.

Les Moonves vs. Mark Cuban: Who ya Got?

Thinking can sometimes be a very synergistic process for me. There are a multitude of subjects I am interested in thinking about and sometimes in the process of thinking about one thing, I wind up understanding another. It turns out in some weird way almost everything is at least tangentially related in my mind. I understand that often the output of all that is probably some “crazy thinking”.

Things are not always what they seem. I saw record low Nielsen Ratings for the (Stanley Cup) and wondered why my pal Ted Leonsis wasn’t selling the Washington Capitals as fast as he possibly could. On the surface, my approach made a lot of sense. But TV is a place where things aren’t always exactly what they seem, and indeed in the case of Ted Leonsis and the Washington Capitals and the NHL, I was very wrong.

Thankfully I had that all sorted out and didn’t wind up needing to binge on any kind of e-mail exchange with Mark Cuban where I was freaked out looking at the Nielsen Ratings for the NBA Finals and saying, “Oh my God, you’re as crazy as Leonsis!” It’s a good thing too, because I don’t think Mark would have gone nearly as easy on me as Ted did!

Fortunately I do have a gift for self-correction. I can learn.

One thing I am trying to learn is what’s really going on in the television business. I mean what’s really going on. The television industry itself faces the exact same challenges as the major sports franchises. Television bumps up against the same real limits. And there is definitely one real limit: that’s the amount of available free time. You can check out some of this data by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The bad news is, there’s definitely not unlimited free time. The good news is, as of last summer, TV still won the highest concentration of free time (about 2.6 hours per day). And as you know, on any given night there is way more than 2.6 hours of programming available. All of the programming is fighting for the same free time.

I watched the Dan vs. Katie/Cuban vs. Moonves frenzy the other day and it definitely got me thinking that I was missing something. Something was not right about the whole thing in my mind, but I couldn’t figure out why.

Then, in a somewhat unrelated bit of curiosity, I was looking at the Brand Keys “Sports Loyalty Engagement” (more or less a measure of which sports franchises have the highest loyalty from their fans) and saw all the other “brand loyalty engagement” studies Brand Keys does, including this (rank of evening news by loyalty in 2007):

Evening News Shows
ABC
NBC
FOX
CNN
CBS
MSNBC

Then I understood the something I had missed in this whole thing. The short version of that thinking is, “Ouch, Moonves is dope!” The truth of it is, here he was a complete and total dope. He’ll never admit it. You won’t likely hear the Les Moonves, “Mistakes were made…” speech. But one very, very, very big mistake was made.

First, it is true that the program “brands” do have some loyalty and you can measure it. That’s true for both the Today Show and the CBS Evening News. There is data that I am missing and this data would be helpful. But there is data that I am not missing, and that’s the actual results (which are not good). I like to focus on results. Also, I wanted to start thinking about this in these terms: “What would I do if I ran a television network?”

There’s a secondary truth as well: the stars themselves have some “loyalty engagement index”. Which shows have the most loyalty and which stars have the most loyalty very often crossover. The data I am missing is the crossover between people who are loyal to both Katie Couric and Dan Rather, and people who are loyal to both morning AND evening news programming. Based on the actual results, and admittedly this is still pretty speculative there wasn’t all that much crossover.

Moonves made a key mistake, I believe. The evening news market was already in a free fall (and that trend will NOT change), the mistake Moonves probably made was that he thought he could change this trend. Given that mistake, I do understand how he made the second and big mistake. Let me be clear: when you have a brand, and the sky is kind of falling (ratings across all evening news viewers combined are down more than 50% over the last 25 years) but there is still value in the brand to be milked out of it – you milk it as long as you can. Creating a “new brand” in the environment of Network evening news is as complicated as launching a new beer brand. Beverage companies spend years with rollouts of new brands and the main reason (in my opinion) the rollouts of “new beer” are handled as slowly as they are is because they don’t want the success of the new brand to come at the expense of any existing brand.

There was an existing brand at CBS News. The brand to be exact, was “The CBS News with DAN RATHER”. Dan Rather actually was the brand and I think in a shrinking market where you have a fairly good brand – killing that brand off and trying to launch a new one is just…absolutely insane. This has nothing to do with Katie Couric. I do not believe there was anyone CBS could have put on aside from perhaps bringing Walter Cronkite back that would draw MORE viewers than Dan Rather. Because Dan Rather was the brand and getting rid of him pushed out the millions of people who were loyal Dan Rather evening news fans.

Katie Couric had loyal fans too – but that was for something else. So one lesson here is that brand loyalty does not (certainly in Network television) cross over from morning shows on one network, to evening news shows on the other.

As a result of the way Moonves went about this – again probably a result of thinking he could change the overall trend, one very, very critical mistake was made. Moonves thought about CBS News as the brand. It wasn’t. Dan Rather was the brand and in this case Moonves completely underestimated the value of the Rather brand.

I really don’t find it surprising that without ever thinking about any of this I hadn’t figured it out. What’s vastly more surprising to me is Mooves didn’t figure it out either. There are studies on brand loyalty by the stars themselves. I would not be shocked at all to find out that programming decisions for smaller networks, whether it be USA or Mark Cuban’s own HDNet are being made by trying to create programming around stars with high brand loyalty that happen to be out of work.

I also won’t be surprised that when it comes to network television, that no matter how steep the trend line down is, that the egos like Moonves will think they can reverse the trend, fire more stars with high brand value and…how long can it really be before Dan Rather and Katie Couric are hosting together a nightly news show on Cuban’s own HDNet?

I’ve got Mark Cuban.

Advantage: HDNet?

Mark Cuban knows how to leverage the pop culture better than the geniuses at Time Warner. I didn’t even know Dan Rather was doing some investigative journalism for HDNet until Mark’s blog post this morning.

I am not a huge fan of “The News” on television. In fact, I try to avoid it whenever possible (which believe me, is every time) taking my news in from the New York Times, Google, Yahoo, etc, and a large, large dose of ESPN.

Anyway, Mark capitalized on all the press about Dan Rather saying Moonves at CBS was “tarting it up” in an attempt to attract younger audiences. Moonves has apparently said if they don’t attract a younger audience, the nightly news will die. Moonves shot back that Rather was being sexist in his “tart-ing it up” comment and Rather responded that he wasn’t calling Katie a tart. Just commenting on CBS’ approach.

I look at this chart at and see that the nightly news (in the aggregate, this chart represents total viewers across all 3 major broadcast networks) has been in a steady free fall for over 25 years. It’s not turning around. The overall audience for nightly network news shrunk in half during a 25 year period where there was definitely a bit of population growth. The good ship “Nightly News” has sailed and isn’t going to turn around and come back.

We know for sure, advertisers are willing to pay more for the coveted 18-49 demographic. I only have about 5 years left to be coveted and I want to know WHATS IN IT FOR ME? (I mean besised ads trying to whip me into a frenzy that I need this or that product or I’m a total loser). But beyond that, all that’s clear to me is that that chart is going to continue to trend down. CBS will ultimately have less viewers than they do now. So will ABC. So will NBC.
This speaks to some of the same fragmentation issues I wrote about yesterday, and is every bit as inevitable.

The interesting thing to me is that it does seem that the advantage has shifted to the smaller guys like HDNet. If HDNet could attract even a million viewers to one of its broadcasts I believe that will be a profitable piece of content for HDNet. I do not believe there is any chance in it current set-up that CBS can produce a nightly news show and make money on it for one million viewers, for an audience of one million.

The HDNets do seem to have an advantage with the "smaller" market fragments.

DVRs Save Thursday Nights

According to this story from the Hollywood Reporter, ABC had success with Thursday nights for the first time since the Barney Miller days (well over 20 years) by switching Grey's Anatomy to Thursday nights. Because I'm long winded and have not yet refined my writing skills yet let me tell you the most important thing right now: CBS says that HALF of its viewership for the CSI that runs Thurdays vs. Grey's Anantomy is people watching on DVRs. HALF. HALF. That seems...shocking and outrageous...but cool as hell if it's true.

While I did sort of taste the Grey's kool-aide, I did so primarily because it became socially impossible to have a decent conversation with any woman over the age of 33 because there were simply too many Grey's references that I wasn't aware of.

To me, this show has roughly about the same appeal as an Internet chat room or Craig's List. Right in front of you, characters who are way more screwed up and depressing than anything you have going on in your own life. But Grey's notches this up because unlike most flakes in an Internet chat room the people actually have good jobs and are beautiful and ARE STILL MISERABLE AS HELL. This is a show about a bunch of people who have great lives but are chronically miserable as hell.

Anyway, the interesting thing about this story to me was the quote from CBS Research Chief, David Poltrack. Because although CSI on CBS did feel the pain of Grey's moving to Thursdays, it wasn't problematic according to Poltrack.

"In a non-DVR world, this would have been a tough situation for the viewer and for CBS in particular because 'Grey's' comes in there and people have to make a decision whether they're going to watch 'CSI' or 'Grey's,"' Poltrack said. "But with DVRs, people were able to watch both." Half the "CSI" viewership comes in playback mode, according to the CBS data.