April 19, 2006
5 Reasons to Market Movies Online - 4. TV is Losing Effectiveness
As we saw earlier, consumers are turning to the internet for information and entertainment. However, movie marketers still spend the vast bulk of their budgets on TV-- even though the audience reach of any single TV show is plummeting.
According to Nielsen Media Research, TV watching time for the average American household has gone up dramatically: from 43 hours and 42 minutes per week in 1975 to a staggering 57 hours and 17 minutes per week in 2005.
So the TV watching audience is bigger, but that audience has spread out considerably, and we can see this in the decline in share for most television programs. For example, let's take a look at the fifth most popular show:
#5 TV Show
| Season | Score | Rating | % | Viewers | |
| 1994-1995 | Monday Night Football | 30 | 17.8 | 9.9 | 24,420,000 |
| 1999-2000 | Friends | 23 | 14 | 8.2 | 20,950,000 |
| 2004-2005 | CSI: Miami | 20 | 12.4 | 6.8 | 18,881,000 |
The farther down the list you go (e.g., the tenth most popular show and on down the list) the more the share, rating, percent of audience and number of viewers shrinks.
Increasingly, this means that TV advertising is a bad buy. This chart from comScore shows how the rising cost of a TV spot (the red bars) has a sinking ratings effectiveness (the plunging blue line), which means that marketers are paying more dollars for less reach:
