Abstract

It is well documented that TV viewers avoid advertisements by switching channels during commercial breaks (“zapping”). Ads with lower audience retention ability lead to more consumer zapping. Given that several ads are sequentially broadcast during a commercial break, an ad with a low retention rate will negatively affect the viewership of subsequent ads by decreasing their opportunities to be exposed to viewers. In this case, the ad imposes a negative externality on subsequent ads in the same commercial break. This externality is typically not priced in the TV advertising market; however, it may substantially affect the TV network’s profit. Based on a large and rich data set on TV viewing and advertising, we build a comprehensive model of consumer zapping and conduct various simulation studies to quantify the impact of the zapping-induced externality on the network’s revenue. Results show that our focal network may increase gross revenue up to 19.38% by reordering ads during a commercial break so that the negative impact of this externality is minimized.

摘要

有据可查的是，电视观众通过在广告时段切换频道（“切换”）来避免广告。观众保留能力较低的广告会导致更多的消费者流失。考虑到在商业中断期间连续播放多个广告，保留率低的广告会减少后续广告展示给观众的机会，从而对后续广告的收视率产生负面影响。在这种情况下，该广告对同一商业广告中的后续广告施加了负外部性。这种外部性通常不会在电视广告市场中定价；但是，它可能会严重影响电视网络的利润。基于大量丰富的电视收视和广告数据集，我们建立了一个消费者快速切换的综合模型，并进行了各种模拟研究，以量化快速切换引起的外部性对网络收入的影响。结果表明，我们的焦点网络可以通过在广告时段重新排序广告来将总收入提高高达 19.38%，从而最大限度地减少这种外部性的负面影响。