ABSTRACT

As live TV has lost viewers to streaming services and digital videos, TV producers have strived to bring viewers back to TV screens by integrating social features in programing. Meanwhile, social TV has become a prevalent TV-viewing pattern. Although previous findings indicate that social TV can help increase engagement with TV programs, how it benefits advertisers is still uncertain. This study sheds light on this idea by investigating what live TV viewers talk about during commercial breaks. A content analysis was conducted using 4,792 live comments posted on a major social TV platform during the commercial breaks in five episodes of a popular South Korean TV drama. Results indicate that (a) the majority of the live comments pertained to the drama episodes (79.7%) rather than commercials (8.9%) and (b) comments related to commercials were more likely to be negative (50.1%) than positive (20.6%). Overall, the findings suggest that social TV viewers are generally program-oriented and, thus, either neglect or unfavorably perceive program-irrelevant tasks (e.g. attending to and processing commercials). The findings emphasize the need for an advertising-centric theoretical approach to social TV and provide practical implications for advertisers based on analyzing social TV behavior.

摘要

随着直播电视的观众流失到流媒体服务和数字视频，电视制作商努力通过在节目中集成社交功能来让观众重新回到电视屏幕上。与此同时，社交电视已成为一种流行的电视观看模式。尽管之前的研究结果表明社交电视可以帮助增加对电视节目的参与度，但它如何使广告商受益仍不确定。这项研究通过调查电视直播观众在广告插播期间谈论的内容，阐明了这一想法。一项内容分析是在一部流行的韩国电视剧的五集广告插播期间使用主要社交电视平台上发布的 4,792 条实时评论进行的。结果表明 (a) 大多数现场评论与电视剧集 (79.7%) 而非广告 (8. 9%) 和 (b) 与商业相关的评论更可能是负面的（50.1%）而不是正面的（20.6%）。总体而言，调查结果表明社交电视观众通常以节目为导向，因此要么忽视或不利地感知与节目无关的任务（例如观看和处理广告）。研究结果强调需要一种以广告为中心的社交电视理论方法，并在分析社交电视行为的基础上为广告商提供实际意义。