MTV Finally Catches Up With MTV Generation’s Attention Span

Viacom, benevolent overlord of MTV Networks, has begun to track its audience’s interest in its programming at a second-to-second level, using the (cough) video channel as its guinea pig. Except that instead of checking to see if interest in the The Hills spikes whenever Lauren is onscreen or at what moment a given viewer puts their boot through their TV during an episode of My Super Sweet 16, Viacom is using the data to note when people are paying attention to its commercials, having realized that its viewership has long been associated with the kind of A.D.D.-addled attention spans that make it hard for ads to sink in:

“There is more than one way to present commercials to an audience,” said Colleen Fahey Rush, MTV Networks’ exec VP- research. “We’re really interested to see if commercial viewing is different in, say, prime time vs. late night, or if … certain types of commercials at the beginning of a break create a higher-rated break.” Among the elements MTV will consider are whether viewers behave differently at various times of the day, including late night and prime time, Ms. Fahey Rush said.

Viacom has good reason to explore audience behavior. Many of its channels, which include MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, Spike and Logo, draw younger viewers, who are notorious for splitting their attention between various media tasks — TV watching and instant messaging, for example. MTV Networks is also under scrutiny by media buyers, who believe that commercial ratings on its channels are bound to show audience erosion. In a conference call last week, Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman said the company was considering a range of new techniques to increase viewer retention for ads, including examining the order in which commercials appear within commercial pods.

No one seems quite sure exactly what this means for the future of MTV’s advertising and programming alike, aside from the idea that “the new scrutiny on ad breaks will add pressure on networks and may force them to start running ads in a particular order that keeps viewers rooted to their screens rather than changing channels or fast-forwarding.”

What I took away from this article, other than the slightly unnerving realization that networks can now track viewers’ habits down to microscopic intervals, is that MTV’s ever-more-vacuous content is viewed by its parent corporation more as a flawed delivery system for adverisements, and the suits are less interested in fixing the crappy shows than in righting what it feels are the ineffectual commercial breaks. I know, I know–how shocked should we all be that a TV network is more concerned with its ad revenue flow than, I dunno, the quality of its shows? (Next time you really want to feel unclean, watch a Next marathon and then sterilize yourself.) But it still creeps me out somewhat whenever I dip into the skeevy word of advertising and see just how clinically teenage desire is manipulated, with people using poker-faced phrases like “commercial pods” and “viewer retention.”

Viacom To Start Measuring Audience Viewing Second-By-Second [Advertising Age]