Page 73 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

The streamlined audience disrupted: impact of the new technologies 61
commercials will remain unwatched! The concern is still aggravated by the VCR’s fast-
forward button. This button enables viewers to ‘zip’ through the tape at several times the
normal rate, in some cases even with the screen going to black in the process. What if
viewers practise this on the commercials when they play back their tapes? Then viewers
would watch the programmes while skipping the commercials—a most undesirable state
of affairs for the advertisers.
Here again, we see a cultural battle being acted out: while ‘zipping’ and ‘zapping’
enlarge the freedom of viewers to watch television as they feel like, they form a serious
problem for the industry, a problem that unsettles the consensus between networks and
advertisers about the ‘right’ measure of the audience. To counter the problem, research
was summoned to bring about the relevant facts. But there is a lot of controversy about
the frequency of zipping and zapping, as survey results tend to contradict each other.
While some findings speak about a ‘zipping rate’ of 60 per cent, others lead to the
conclusion that for all the zipping that is practiced, still 90 per cent of the commercials
are seen on playback, because people do not seem to be zipping consistently (ibid.). Still
less evident is the eventual impact of playback and zipping for commercial exposure.
Thus, a network representative foregrounded the finding of one survey that the average
tape is played back 1–6 times, which he cunningly interpreted as an advantage to the
advertiser: ‘We’re providing a hard copy of a commercial, so there’s the potential to
watch a commercial more, if it’s worth viewing.’ And so he ventured to put the burden on
the shoulders of the advertisers: ‘We’ve never guaranteed the viewing of a commercial
without the VCR. It’s the agency’s responsibility to make it appealing. [Zipping data]
will educate the agencies on which commercials are being viewed and which aren’t’ (in
ibid.: 70)
Clever logic, but not particularly appealing to the advertisers. In general, the latter are
keen to emphasize that even without zipping, time shifting will inevitably lead to a loss of
audience for commercials—according to one estimate, only 58 per cent of all recordings
made for time shifting are ever replayed (Potter et al. 1988)—and that including recorded
programmes in the ratings is unfair because it tends to benefit the networks at the expense
of the advertisers. Similar concerns are expressed as to zapping. One study estimated that
almost 20 per cent of homes is populated by ‘heavy zappers’ (switching channels more
than once every two minutes), and such figures tend to reinforce advertisers’ claim that
they are paying for millions more viewers than the networks are actually delivering them
(Kneale 1988). Advertisers became obsessed with the question ‘how to grab viewers
before they grab remote controls’ (Marton 1989; see also Sepstrup 1986). On the other
hand, an occasional voice could also be heard saying that ‘maybe the valley of the
shadow isn’t so dark after all’ (Greene 1988): in this case, a market researcher reasoned
that the reach of commercials may be less impaired by active viewer strategies such as
zapping and zipping than is feared, because ‘a programme viewer who switches channels
(or fast forwards or even erases commercials at recording or on VCR replay) has to really
watch the set to see/know/perceive what she or he is doing and ends up with more
commercial exposure value than we have been prone to grant’ (ibid., 15). All in all,
advertisers are clearly increasingly worried about the fact that viewers can actively avoid
watching the commercials that are embedded in the programmes. Against this
background, advertisers have begun to call for audience measurement based upon reach
of commercials rather than reach of programmes—a development which is met with less