The People Look at Commercials: A Study of Audience Behavior

Abstract

T HIS paper is primarily a report of a survey of viewer behavior associated with television commercials. Although the sample is non-representative in many respects, the findings are of interest from several aspects. First, from the business standpoint of advertisers and agencies, the survey offers new measures of audience reaction and attention to commercials of various lengths, positionings, and content. It also offers a useful new methodology, capable of yielding data that can supplement the findings of other surveys of audience size, commercial recall, etc., in the search for the ultimate measure of the effect of advertising on sales and profits. Second, from the standpoint of viewers, regulators, and network policymakers the survey provides additional information on viewer attitudes toward commercials and on certain other elements of programming, for example, public-service announcements, production credits, and news bulletins. Because the survey mainly reports actual behavior during actual broadcasts, the data seldom permit us to say much about viewer responses to markedly different kinds of commercials or programs or radically different ways of guiding network behavior. Wherever statements on these issues appear to be justified by the data they are included, but this is not often. The major issues raised by the commercial structure of television are touched upon only lightly. Our survey approaches the subject through these three questions: (1) What are people doing just before a commercial appears? (2) What overt reaction do they exhibit at its onset? (3) What do they do while it is on the air? While our major emphasis is on network commercials, we will examine other non-program elements (NPE's)-specifically, credits, billboards,' promotions, and public-service announcements. We seek to answer these questions not through the verbal reports of subjects but via the written records of trained and hopefully unobserved observers. This is, in a sense, a spy study in which one member of each family surreptitiously observed and recorded the viewing behav* This study is an outgrowth of a 1963 study commissioned by CBS and devoted to an investigation of viewer attitudes toward television in general (Gary A. Steiner, The People Look at Television [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1963]). Among other things, the earlier study found that more direct and more consistent audience criticism was aimed at commercials than at any other single aspect of television. The present study attempts to add some behavioral substance to the attitudes expressed by the viewers in order to make their interpretation more meaningful. The author wishes to thank Peter M. Scalise, Elizabeth Rey, Susan Yaeger, and Will Moody for their assistance, Carl F. Anderson for preparing the graphs and charts, and my colleagues and friends for their comments and criticisms.