April 22, 2020 6:45am PT by Rick Porter

Network Newscasts Keep Up Ratings Momentum During Pandemic

ABC News

'World News Tonight' anchor David Muir

Coronavirus

The nightly broadcasts on ABC, CBS and NBC are drawing their biggest audiences in years, eclipsing their cable competition by wide margins.

The three main cable news channels averaged a little above 10 million viewers in the 6 p.m. hour in the week of April 13. Fox News, CNN and MSNBC are all experiencing ratings surges in the hour as they cover (in whole or in part) President Donald Trump's daily press briefings about the novel coronavirus pandemic.

It's an impressive tally, one that's up by some 4 million viewers from a month earlier. It's also small potatoes compared the three network evening newscasts, which averaged almost three times as many viewers — 29.67 million — in the week of April 13. The most-watched show in cable news last week, Fox News' Special Report With Bret Baier (5.77 million daily viewers), fell more than a million people short of the third-place network newscast, CBS Evening News (7.52 million, including a re-airing at 4 a.m. the next day).

The three network newscasts have been reaching bigger audiences than they have in several years in the five weeks since the World Health Organization declared a pandemic and widespread stay-at-home mandates went into effect in mid-March. News coverage across broadcast and cable, and across dayparts, has drawn bigger ratings than usual in that time, but the tallies for the nightly network newscasts are on a different plane.

Since March 16, ABC's World News Tonight With David Muir, NBC Nightly News With Lester Holt and CBS Evening News With Norah O'Donnell have averaged a combined 30.27 million daily viewers. That's a 39 percent jump over the same five-week period in 2019, translating to 8.5 million more viewers spread across the three networks.

As it has for more than a year, World News Tonight has led the way, averaging 12.36 million viewers over that time. Last week, the five nightly broadcasts ranked second through sixth across all of Nielsen-measured TV in viewers, trailing only the 13.5 million who watched CBS' stalwart NCIS in primetime (not including the multi-network One World: Together at Home special). It's up by almost 50 percent from a year ago.

NBC Nightly News has averaged 10.66 million viewers over the past five weeks, up 39 percent year-to-year. CBS Evening News has grown by about 24 percent to 7.25 million viewers. The ABC and NBC figures include re-airings after the initial 6:30 p.m. ET broadcast; Nielsen does not roll up the 4 a.m. CBS re-airing into the network's average.

The week of March 16 brought the highest combined viewership for the three networks (32.16 million), and it has ebbed and flowed some in the weeks since. In each of the past five weeks, however, the three have had a combined audience at least 30 percent larger than the comparable week last year. Network evening news hasn't drawn such consistently big numbers in more than a decade.

 

Commentary

WTF Are We Going to Do Now?

• by Scott Gillum , Op-Ed Contributor, April 24, 2020

No one had to say it, because everyone in my company felt it. After months of research, repositioning the organization, and refining the messaging, it all blew up in less than a week.
With the global pandemic in full swing, I’m sure this scenario is playing out across organizations around the globe. Whether it’s sales goals, marketing budgets and/or anything in between — they’ve all been blown to hell.
So what do we do now? It’s a great question that so many of us are asking. To help answer it, I went back into the archives to see what projects clients were undertaking during the “Great Recession” of 2007. Here’s what I learned.
Repositioning and structural change: I found companies using the downturn to reposition themselves in the market, shifting from product to services, from product-focused to customer-focused, etc. Often, they made a structural change as well as a change in positioning. 

 

So now, be prepared to see new competitors coming into your industry once the economy recovers. Or, it could be your organization taking the chance to enter new markets. 

Fixing the infrastructure: For many, running hard for the last 10 years created very little time to fix basic problems, especially related to the revenue engine. A slowdown is a perfect time to fix the things that can create greater efficiency coming out of a recession. An investment in this area produces a ROI that only gets better over time. 

Look at the quality of the database, opportunities to leverage AI, and better tracking and performance solutions. This requires an investment in time and focus  rarely found in good times. 

Refining the value: It’s not the value proposition, it’s the entire value package. 
You can count on one thing for certain about the future: Customers will have to, or will expect, more for less. Don’t get caught flat-footed. Prepare now to deliver more value for the money or expect to 1) be undercut by competitors, and/or 2) take a hit on your profit. If you can’t figure out how to build in new value, then figure out how to deliver the same value for less. 

In challenging times like these, the first reaction is basic survival. And for many, that may be the case for the foreseeable future. As a small-business owner, I feel you! Many of the plans you’re making now are built around business viability, but soon there will be light at the end of the tunnel. Keep in mind, the items I’m suggesting will take at least 16 to 20 weeks to plan, develop and execute. 

I understand it may take all your time and energy to ride the storm out in the short term, but keep your eyes on the

 

Big Agencies Put Less Stock In 'Sales' As A Metric For Measuring ROI Than Smaller Shops Or Clients

• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, Yesterday

When it comes to the KPIs -- or key performance indicators -- used to evaluate the ROI of advertising, big agencies are far less performance-oriented than small agencies or their clients. That's one of the findings of the second in a series of "Organizational Benchmark" studies published by the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF).

The new study, which measures how research is organized within ad agencies, is being released this week, and follows a similar study the ARF conducted among clients, which was released late last month.

Looking at "sales" as a proxy for performance, small agencies indexed the highest, followed by both big advertisers and small ones, although it was the No. 1 attribute for all respondents. Among the big ad agencies, it was tied as the most-cited KPI along with "efficiency," which big agencies also over-index on.

 

All groups put surprisingly low stock against historic measures of branding such as "brand equity" and "brand lift," which trail sales' big significant percentages.

Noting that advertising effectiveness researchers have long argued that "in general, long-term brand advertising should be 60% of the advertising goal, while 40% should target sales activation," the new ARF report points out: "Agency respondents have suggested, at least so far as the ROI of research is concerned, that they are putting more emphasis on sales than brand lift and brand equity."

 

Nielsen Product Chief Describes Pandemic As Unprecedented Media 'Lab,' Long-Term Impact Unclear

• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, Today

Characterizing the COVID-19 pandemic as a “lab scenario” for the media industry, the head of product strategy at Nielsen said there has never been such a concentrated period of consumer adoption of new and potentially disruptive media technologies like it before, and that it’s unclear how much of it will be sustainable and how much consumers will return to more “normal” patterns of behavior.

While the unprecedented spikes in overall TV usage levels from Americans stuck at home are showing signs of flattening, Nielsen Senior Vice President-Product Strategy Brian Fuhrer told attendees at an Advertising Research Foundation virtual “Town Hall” Thursday that it nonetheless is too early to tell if media consumption is “starting back to normalcy.”

The most abundant example of the unprecedented change, he said, was the number of streaming minutes Americans are spending on their TV sets.

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Citing recent Nielsen data, he said American TV households currently are spending 170 billion minutes streaming content on their television sets, which is up 143% from about 70 billion a year ago.

Fuhrer said time spent streaming on TV was already ascendant prior to the pandemic, but that America’s shutdown accelerated it exponentially.

 

“Before COVID, it was probably the biggest amount of change we’ve seen,” he explained, adding, “With COVID, in a lab scenario, we’re seeing a tremendous among of differences.”

Fuhrer said it’s still unclear “what’s permanent and what’s going to shift back,” but he ticked off a variety of factors signaling change that go beyond the pandemic, including:

• Free trials by subscription streaming services.
• Pent-up demand for sports, and a corresponding uptick in use of eSports platforms like Twitch
• Adoption of new devices and technologies inside U.S. TV households to access streaming, etc.

Fuhrer said Nielsen is always looking for “inflection points” in the adoption of new media technologies, what he described as “enablement of devices,” and he said normally such spikes only happen around the holiday gift-giving season when American households purchase new media technologies.

“This is an inflection point, because people are looking for new ways to get content,” Fuhrer said of consumer adoption of new media technologies in U.S. TV households.

Fuhrer predicted some patterns -- including a stabilization of radio usage, as well as out-of-home media consumption, and sports TV viewing -- would return to normal after the pandemic, but he also implied some of the changes in media behavior would persist well beyond it.