Audience Presence During Breaks in Television Programmes

Experiments on the use of electricity data as an unobtrusive measure of household behaviour during breaks in television programmes have provided some new insights.Whilst confirming much of accepted “presence” research, there is a clear indication from these studies that following more popular programmes, a larger fraction of the viewers leave the television temporarily. This runs counter to previous studies which have suggested a constant presence fraction. If these results do hold generally, then they have strong implications for the theory of optimal advertising schedules. The studies were undertaken on British data. (Marketing: advertising, television audience behaviour; Energy: electricity demand)