Advertising: Trying To Keep The Viewers When The Ads Come On

As the big agencies get ready for the biggest week of the year for the biggest advertising medium, changes are coming that can only be called, well, big.

The medium is of course broadcast television, which remains a powerful way to peddle products despite the recent inroads made by alternative ways to watch programs, which include the Internet, digital video recorders, cellphones, DVD players and video on demand.

Beginning today, the, er, um, big broadcasters will reveal their prime-time lineups for the new season in a week of lavish, star-filled presentations at Manhattan landmarks like Carnegie Hall and Madison Square Garden.

For years, the presentations during what is known as upfront week — so named because the agencies decide to buy billions of dollars of commercial time before the fall season starts — have remained essentially the same. Season after season, the spiels were mostly confined to rote reiterations of the value of buying spots on broadcast television.

But the growing popularity of the alternatives to watching TV on TV sets is forcing the networks to change decades of habits.

For instance, ABC is scheduled to describe at its upfront presentation tomorrow an extensive promotional initiative called ABC start here in which TV is just one medium among many. The campaign is intended to help guide consumers through the maze of devices on which they can watch ABC entertainment and news shows.

It doesnt matter — TV, online, iTunes, whatever, said Michael Benson, executive vice president for marketing at the ABC Entertainment unit of ABC, part of the Walt Disney Company.

They have control, Mr. Benson said of viewers, and were not going to fight that. We want to make it easy for them to get what they want, where they want, when they want.

At the same time, ABC and the four other big broadcast networks are working on methods to hold the attention of TV viewers throughout the commercial breaks that interrupt the shows they want to see.

That is becoming increasingly important for two reasons. One is that more viewers are watching shows delayed rather than live, using TiVo and other DVRs. Research indicates those viewers are more likely to fast-forward through spots than those who watch live TV.

The other reason the networks need viewers to keep watching ads is that Nielsen Media Research, the ratings arbiter, intends soon to begin measuring viewership of commercials as well as programs.

One way that many networks hope to engage viewers during commercial breaks is by wedging original content into the blocks of advertising time, so that viewers will anticipate seeing something fun if they sit through a few ads.

Fox Broadcasting, for instance, tried out a series of clips for two weeks last month about an animated character named Oleg, a New York cab driver, who popped up in eight-second vignettes during commercial breaks in series like 24. CW has been running content wraps, which mix sponsor products into program snippets.

Some experiments involve the cast of the shows in which the commercials appear, serving as hosts for the breaks. That is a throwback to an era when cast commercials proliferated with the stars of series like I Love Lucy, The Beverly Hillbillies and even The Flintstones.

The changes are fraught with risk because the broadcasters have long been following tradition in the way they schedule shows, promote them and sell commercial time in them. But with risk comes potential reward, analysts say.

We do focus groups with consumers 18 to 34, the most desired demographic, the most tech-savvy, and their media consumption habits are changing, said Michael Kelley, a partner in the entertainment media and communications practice at PricewaterhouseCoopers. With that comes receptivity to new forms of advertising, provided the networks get closer to viewers interests.

To do that, Mr. Kelley said, the broadcasters must change their focus to engagement, or involving viewers in ads, from impressions, the total audience exposed to commercials. He likened the challenge to how Google persuaded computer users that ads could be useful rather than annoying, by promising that only relevant ads would be displayed alongside search results.

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Several network executives responsible for sales acknowledge the challenges ahead.

We need to become a lot more innovative in the way we present commercials, said Ed Swindler, executive vice president and chief operating officer at NBC Universal advertising sales, part of the NBC Universal division of the General Electric Company.

NBC has been testing what Mr. Swindler called various forms of pod innovation, referring to the collection of commercials that compose a break, and even when ratings did not go up, some measures of engagement did.

For example, Mr. Swindler said, in one experiment, the awareness of a brand rose 15 percent compared with a spot in a regular commercial break.

This puts the onus on networks to creatively program the commercial pods, he added, and on agencies to create commercials more fun and interesting to watch.

Mr. Swindler declined to provide additional details of the tests for competitive reasons, but at least one was previously reported: a trivia quiz during a commercial break on the sitcom Scrubs.

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