The Viewer In Profile

Fragmenting Audiences, April 1996

Pity advertisers in the age of all things digital. They must deal with an ever-fragmenting audience - or as they see it, market - brought about by the proliferation of new televisual services. There's pay television's increasing range of alternative channels competing with broadcasters for that most precious of commodities - we viewers. And ads aren't even allowed on pay until 1997.

Then there's Australia's original add-free "pay channel" - home video - with its segment of viewers bypassing the best efforts of network programmers to attract their attention. Now the Internet with its colourful and noisy televisual component - the World Wide Web - threatens to further erode broadcast television audiences. Already internet "surfers" in the lucrative demographic of 18 to 25 year olds - who spend up big on new entertainments - are "watching" the Web when they get home - possibly affecting figures for some programs.

But the television industry isn't taking this competition lying down. Like other service industries, such as publishing, banking, travel and telephony, going through the same market fragmentation - or rather, added competition from new players - tools are being developed to more accurately target stubbornly independent, er...disloyal, audiences. Television audience measurement itself has been updated with the changeover from diaries to people meters in 1991 by Neilsen's, the ratings agency.

The slightly more accurate figures derived from meters - which unfortunately still require active input by those 400 homes mad enough to have one - changed some accepted ideas about viewing habits showing more people watched the ABC and latenight television than had been thought. In the States the increased ratings meters give cable has the broadcast networks in a frenzy. When the "passive" people meter comes - which automatically relays who watched what back to base - expect our ideas of audiences to change again.

Also on the drawing boards are plans to continuously monitor we poor laboratory animals...er, customers, using our cable television set top box, our computers as you dial up different services, and our fly-buy, stored value and credit cards. Whenever we buy, we'll instantly be under the spotlight of the marketeers who plan to combine all this data into a potentially valuable "virtual profile" of each individual customer.

But the headlong plunge into better customer service offered by hi-tech advertisers who know your personal tastes could have a downside. Our privacy might take a back seat - and could be thrown right out of the fast-moving vehicle altogether.