Creating the Viewer: Market Research and the Evolving Media Ecosystem

By Justin Wyatt

A study of the largely hidden world of primary media market research and the different methods used to understand how the viewer is pictured in the industry.

The first book on the intersection between market research and media, Creating the Viewer takes a critical look at media companies’ studies of television viewers, the assumptions behind these studies, and the images of the viewer that are constructed through them. Justin Wyatt examines various types of market research, including talent testing, pilot testing, series maintenance, brand studies, and new show “ideation,” providing examples from a range of programming including news, sitcoms, reality shows, and dramas. He looks at brand studies for networks such as E!, and examines how the brands of individuals such as showrunner Ryan Murphy can be tested. Both an analytical and practical work, the book includes sample questionnaires and paths for study moderators and research analysts to follow. Drawn from over fifteen years of experience in research departments at various media companies, Creating the Viewer looks toward the future of media viewership, discussing how the concept of the viewer has changed in the age of streaming, how services such as Netflix view market research, and how viewers themselves can shift the industry through their media choices, behaviors, and activities.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Release date: Apr 23, 2024
• ISBN: 9781477329085

Book preview

Creating the Viewer

Market Research and the Evolving Media Ecosystem

JUSTIN WYATT

University of Texas Press

Austin

Copyright © 2024 by the University of Texas Press

All rights reserved

First edition, 2024

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Wyatt, Justin, 1963– author.

Title: Creating the viewer : market research and the evolving media ecosystem / Justin Wyatt.

Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023029869 (print) | LCCN 2023029870 (ebook) ISBN 978-1-4773-1651-1 (hardcover) ISBN 978-1-4773-2906-1 (paperback) ISBN 978-1-4773-2907-8 (pdf) ISBN 978-1-4773-2908-5 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Television viewers—Research. | Television production companies—Marketing. | Television programs—Marketing. | Television programs—Marketing—Case studies. | Television broadcasting—Marketing. | Television viewers—Research—Methodology.

Classification: LCC HE8700.65 .W57 2024 (print) | LCC HE8700.65 (ebook) | DDC 302.23/45—dc23/eng/20230810

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023029869

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023029870

doi:10.7560/316511

To Irene Manahan, with love and respect, and in memory of Priscilla Manahan and Tessa Manahan

Contents

Preface

PART I: Introduction

ONE: Considering Viewership

TWO: The Terrain of Media Market Research: Partners, Projects & Collaboration

PART II: The Battery of Media Market Research Studies

THREE: Pilot Testing & Series Maintenance

Appendix to Chapter 3

FOUR: Brand Alignment & Derailment

Appendix to Chapter 4

FIVE: Talent Testing & Media Research: Gauging Awareness & Connection

Appendix to Chapter 5

SIX: Ideation & Content Co-creation

Appendix to Chapter 6

PART III: Rethinking the Viewer

SEVEN: The (Manipulated) Performance of Market Research

EIGHT: A Corrective for Media Market Research & You

Appendix to Chapter 8

Acknowledgments

Glossary

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Preface

This book examines the role of the television viewer in our media landscape, highlighting ways that the viewer has been conceptualized both in academic work and in industry practice. Given my own perspective as an academic and a market researcher, I should be clear about my position and, consequently, how my work in the media industries impacts this book. I have been very lucky to lead a professional double life, with over 15 years as a professor of media studies and about 15 years in the media industries conducting primary viewer research. In the latter category, I have worked for media clients, for media suppliers (i.e., third-party research providers), and as a research consultant. In these roles, I developed many research platforms for programs, networks, and other clients. These platforms include qualitative research (especially focus groups and ethnographies) and quantitative research (particularly online surveys and tracking surveys). I made my transition in my mid-thirties from working as a professor to being a professional media researcher. With the idea of bringing the knowledge and learnings of the profession and the media industries back to the classroom, I knew that I was on a hiatus from my real calling as a teacher. As a result, even while working directly on market research projects, I often felt separate, almost an observer of the media industries. While this book borrows from my professional experiences, I should stress that it is not intended to be either a booster or an indictment of media market research. When I speak of my experience in the industry throughout this book, please keep in mind that I am speaking solely from that perspective.

In terms of an academic orientation, this book fits with media industry studies. Daniel Herbert, Amanda D. Lotz, and Aswin Punath-ambekar explore how scholarship can be defined more clearly within the larger umbrella of media industry studies. It is most closely aligned with studies of industrial practice, which Herbert and colleagues describe as specific, identifiable activities in which industries and institutions engage (96). In this case, the focus is on the broadcast and cable television industries, although discussion also extends to the streaming marketplace for media content. While this book reviews several types of primary research projects, the aim is to understand the assumptions that these projects make, individually and together, about the television viewer. In other words, the goal is to show how the research studies construct the viewer, laying bare the assumptions that are often unmentioned or undiscussed within the industry.

Having worked within the media industry (as a market researcher) and within academia, I am interested in how we can reform the concept of the viewer using both domains. As a starting point, I address how the battery of market research studies forms an image of the viewer. In fact, one of the most interesting questions surrounding market research and audience is the image of the viewer created by typical market research studies conducted within the industry. How do the assumptions and findings of these studies construct the hypothetical viewer? I probe this question, seeking to understand how the viewer is constructed through market research and the implications of this for program content, advertising, and new show development. The typical market research study within the industry embodies underlying beliefs about the viewer, their engagement with entertainment, and their propensity to share their opinions. All serve to guide the industry in their quest to engage audiences more fully. Rather than act as an apologist for market research practice, I want to review key models of market research methods while keeping in mind how the models construct a space for the typical viewer.

I explore market research, mainly in the television industry, focusing on how the viewer is constructed through market research studies and agendas. In each chapter I consider a different market research study and/or method. There are, however, common threads that connect the chapters and key lines of inquiry overall: the research protocols used to understand the specific element or aspect, the model of the viewer created through the research, and an evaluation of how the method may or may not need to be revised. Although I cannot cite proprietary studies, I am able to characterize the typical projects, methods, and expected outcomes from media research studies. Readers do not require a background in market research to understand this book. I have included sample studies and greater project detail in appendices. These questionnaires and other research documents can be useful augments for those who want a more in-depth examination of each specific market research study or practice. The glossary gives a more complete definition of core concepts.

PART I

Introduction

ONE

Considering Viewership

In a first-day exercise for their Media Criticism class, a team of students was struggling with a question: Are you a television viewer? Garrett mentioned that he watched TV sometimes at his parents’ house but never on campus or with friends. Sarah was devoted to the Real Housewives franchise (especially The Real Housewives of New Jersey and The Real Housewives of Orange County) and watched these with her sorority sisters. Otherwise, she might check out clips on social media and YouTube on her phone. Jessica had her parents’ Netflix and HBO codes so she could watch on campus, but she rarely looked forward to watching anything other than some award shows and red-carpet events. Interestingly, each concluded, separately, that they were not a television viewer; they associated TV viewing with their parents’ generation. Watching television was, for this team, an occasional activity rather than a routine. In discussion, following a different prompt—Who is the typical television viewer?—the group went silent. Clearly, the typical viewer was someone other than themselves.

That simple question—Who is the typical television viewer?—has inspired a rich history of scholarly literature, suggesting that layers of meaning and interpretation illustrate that the question is substantial and complex. Two important strains of scholarship inform the ways that the television viewer was configured within academia: mass communications research and cultural studies. The former grew from empirical projects involving the impact of television on the viewer and their life. Effects research tended to focus on the impact of viewing content, such as violence, on the perspective of the viewer. In their review of effects research, David Croteau and William Hoynes trace how scholarship moved from a hypodermic model of media impact (i.e., the media injecting a message directly into the public bloodstream) to a more nuanced minimal effects model in which the media message is buffeted by social and individual characteristics (208). Studies associated with this approach tended to be based in quantitatively grounded sociology and social psychology (Nightingale 6). On a more positive trajectory, uses and gratification research presented a viewer empowered by the media, that is to say, finding value within the content and making informed entertainment choices.¹

Several influential studies from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham addressed the role that television played in social and cultural life in Britain centered on individual programs, such as the television shows Nationwide and Crossroads.² Utilizing multiple methods, including survey research, focus groups, and ethnography, the cultural studies approach was influential for understanding the depth and variety of reactions from viewers and for situating the viewer, the text, and the industry within a larger social and cultural context. In this manner, the work in cultural studies was informed by a political economic perspective, offering a critique of the exploitation and inequities that exist within the capitalist social structures. These different lines of inquiry produced useful models of committed audiences, but these models were also starkly divergent from one another. Reviewing five foundational audience studies within the cultural studies area, Virginia Nightingale identifies several difficulties in assessing the viewer and their reactions. In particular, Nightingale comments that the studies set themselves the task of explaining the programme through what people said about it rather than of explaining people through the ways they respond to the programme (59).³

Within this critical and cultural scholarship, the difficulty of understanding the viewer becomes a pervading concern.⁴ Nicholas Browne’s The Political Economy of the Television Supertext, from 1984, illuminated a key model for considering television as an economic and social force. Browne’s work draws directly from an influential essay published in 1977 by Dallas Smythe. Smythe argues that television is producing a commodity audience for advertising purposes. Audiences are important in total as well as in targeted demographic segments sought by advertisers (Mosco 149). Similarly, working from the perspective of political economy, Browne complicates the project of understanding the viewer considerably. The viewer and the television text are seen as mere participants in a larger framework. As Browne describes it: The television text is a ‘supertext’ consisting of the program and all the introductory and interstitial materials—chiefly announcements and ads—in its specific position in the schedule (176). The distinction is a crucial one for moving analysis away from considering the individual television program as the text.

In Browne’s viewpoint, the supertext is the valid focus for study, including the program, ads, interstitials, and program placement in the schedule. This approach is also useful when considering the audience in depth. Interestingly, Browne suggests a critique of existing political economic approaches through the audience’s differential positions and readings according to different levels or instances of social position or practice—for example, according to gender, class, ethnicity (175). Browne’s argument therefore is based on seeing the study of television as a dynamic process involving the viewer, the television text, the schedule, and the industry. In this way, he can posit the complexity of conceptualizing the viewer. The viewer becomes a means of understanding the context of television viewing, leading to a more nuanced knowledge of how television viewing operates in the life of the audience member. Television studies becomes the process of understanding how we consume television rather than a reading of the television text from different perspectives.

Browne’s call to action has echoed over the decades, with scholars and industry practitioners arguing for a broader grasp of viewing in context, even to the extent of revising key metrics of viewership. Seven years after Browne’s essay, Ien Ang’s Desperately Seeking the Audience presented an important adjustment to our understanding of the television audience. Ang shifted attention to the industry’s conception of the audience. Rather than actual viewers, the industry sees the television audience as different discrete metrics made possible through aggregating viewer data from audience measurement services (Ang 4). The process of creating these metrics impacts the ways that the industry conceives of the audience. Ang refers to a streamlined audience in which the wide variety of differences among viewers are minimized given the aggregation of individual viewers. As Ang describes the streamlined audience: It is constructed by ratings discourse through a smoothening out of problematic subjectivity and translating it into ordered and regular instances of viewing behaviour (63). This translation yields a greater stability to the audience viewing patterns. While identities are inherently unstable and erratic, their representation in aggregate proposes a moderated perspective of the viewer. Ang concludes that we need to be aware of the resulting difference between the television audience and the real audience members (66).

Within academic literature, many qualitative and quantitative research studies have addressed additional criteria to comprehend the television viewer. Cristel Antonia Russell and Christopher Puto, for example, argue for a revision of audience measurement methods based on gauging how the television viewing experience extends to the individuals’ personal and social lives (393). Similarly, Andrew Green proposes that analysts, rather than analyzing impact of commercial load, need to spend a much greater effort at comprehending the program and advertising environment to characterize the act of television viewing (102). After reviewing scholarship conceiving of the media audience, Sonia Livingstone argues that the singular media audience is an appropriation by the media industry. Instead, Livingstone implies that we need to look at the multiple media audiences along with the many ways that viewers engage with the media text beyond simply viewing (2010 566).

The Landscape of Contemporary Viewership

Certainly, the category of the viewer is elusive. We live in a time of incredible transformation in the television and media industries. Even the act of viewing has altered radically with the advent of the digital age. Opportunities for TV delivery beyond broadcast and cable have been shaping media consumption by creating a generation who watch on-demand, largely commercial-free entertainment. This shift in viewing occurs while the cable industry is experiencing a wave of cord-cutting and cord-shaving (i.e., trimming cable subscriptions): 27 percent of cable households anticipated cord-cutting in 2021, continuing a long-standing trend, with the number of cord-cutters and cord-nevers (those never having a cable subscription) tripling from 2014 to 2021.⁵

In the current environment, understanding media viewing is fraught with endlessly morphing means of distribution, ways of engaging media, and the co-creation of media content. The digital era is impacted by many factors creating opportunities for viewership and audience. This entails examining not only the products and business practices of media providers but also the ways that social networks, user-generated content, and media measurement work together to define audiences. If previous critical works could envision an empowered viewer, models of viewership in the digital age increase the opportunities open for viewership, consumption, and engagement. Paul Levinson characterizes this shift as taking the viewer from being a voyeur to a participant (65). Inspired by the media theorist Marshall McLuhan, Levinson sees the digital universe as offering a heightening of human choice so that, for example, online users choose which prior medium to engage with online to customize their entertainment and media choices (39).

The ability to empower viewers in their media consumption is one of the most pervasive themes in defining the new media environment. Writing in 2008, Henry Jenkins argues that a key part of the viewer experience is the way that stories are created and consumed far beyond the traditional media texts. Jenkins cites The Blair Witch Project (1999) as an early example of transmedia storytelling: the website telling of the Burkittsville witch and the missing film crew was present more than a year before the film’s release (103–104). As Jenkins explains the process: The entrenched institutions are taking their models from grassroots fan communities and reinventing themselves for an era of media convergence and collective intelligence (22). As a result, transmedia storytelling places the onus on the viewer/user and dissolves the traditional boundaries of the media text. Viewers assume the role of hunters and gatherers in a participatory culture allowing audiences ways to impact, shape, and create their own texts and creative forms sometimes aligning with media texts and sometimes extending or contradicting them. This kind of participation occurs at three different levels: production, selection, and distribution (Jenkins 275). The viewer can therefore be placed as an active participant in the creation of meaning from media texts and paratexts. Understanding that the shifts in technology and consumption have been occurring with increasing rapidity, Jenkins’s argument for the active viewer re-creating the consumption experience across media can be seen as just one potential way of viewing in the digital universe.

Jenkins’s scenario on the possibilities for convergence culture is echoed through many other conceptualizations of the digital viewer. Axel Bruns defines the viewing activity as produsing, in which an individual is implicated in producing as much as consuming through their own online activities in terms of media consumption (84). Michael Z. Newman and Elana Levine in their aptly titled book Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status foreground the agency possible for viewership in the digital era; as they describe it, media consumption is an act of liberation for the active viewer (132). Philip M. Napoli sees viewing as offering audience autonomy with the power to impact the media content consumed (2011 79). Presenting a specific example of how the process of digital viewing has shifted, Louisa Ellen Stein focuses on millennial fan culture and how the relationship between producer and fan has been altered. Stein assesses the ways through which the fan engages with the media text, arguing for an aesthetics of high performativity in which the practice of mediation is based around fulfilling the emotional needs of the viewer (157–158). Matt Hills sees fandom as even more expansive, with both fandom and Netflix needing to be considered as necessarily hybridised and multi-discursive (496).

However, it is important to note that these models offer ways to conceive of the viewer in our digital era. The viewing picture presented here is not prescriptive; there is a range of viewing behaviors beyond users who engage across multiple media in consuming a single media product. Even assuming that the viewer does engage with media in this manner, the process and function of cross-platform viewing and media engagement can shift viewer to viewer. Jason Mittell, for instance, suggests three types of active viewers based on their viewing behaviors: fresh viewers, spoiler fans, and rewatchers (176). Eileen Meehan sets categories based on the depth of viewing connection: casual viewers, focused viewers, and engaged viewers (2007 166–167). The diversity of viewing behaviors must be considered across all groups of viewers, including those who have no affinity for creating and engaging cross-platform with media. In this respect, the optimism associated with engagement must be tempered by fragmentation.

With a larger number of possible venues for watching media content, the audience has become scattered. This is particularly the case when looking at metrics for traditional broadcast and cable television viewing. These transformations did not immediately impact the cable industry, but over time the impact has been dramatic. Opportunities for streaming and other delivery services have been shaping media consumption by creating a generation of viewers to watch on-demand, largely commercial-free entertainment. Napoli uses the phrase the long tail of media consumption to sum up the consequences of these shifts: viewers are still engaged with media, but their attention and engagement are spread along a bigger range of potential outlets (2011 59).

Napoli as well as James Webster chart the impact of this audience fragmentation on the traditional business models in the television industry. Drawing on specific studies from Turner Broadcasting and multiple studies on engagement with local and national news, Webster distinguishes between preference-driven loyalty (audience loyalties driven by user preferences) and structure-driven loyalty (social structures and program structures such as channels, program schedules, and filtering/recommending systems).⁶ The recurring themes of engagement and fragmentation have framed much of the critical discourse on the television viewer this century. Such scholarship has illustrated, at a minimum, how traditional conceptualizations of the viewer must be reworked to account for the options for media consumption in the digital era.

Audience Measurement and the Media Industries

Trying to understand, appreciate, and even predict the behavior of viewers is crucial to the smooth functioning of the media industries, in which viewership and audience are linked to two research methods: Nielsen audience measurement and customized primary viewer research. These services guide executives in crafting programming, building marketing campaigns, and ultimately picturing the viewer. The Nielsen protocols, measurement, and ratings are widely available, as ratings traditionally have been crucial for advertising revenue: higher ratings indicate a greater number of viewers for which advertisers can be charged a higher fee for placing their ads in popular programs.

Amanda D. Lotz recounts the development of the Nielsen measurement technologies and the concurrent issues connected to changes over a four-decade period in The Television Will Be Revolutionized (207–232). Lotz’s analysis illustrates that, while Nielsen has updated its measurement techniques over time, the media industry has made several claims of undercounting.⁷ As the television writer and producer Rob Long explains, the disagreement between any network and Nielsen over an audience size is often resolved by a positive ratings bump by Nielsen. As Long describes it, tongue partly in cheek: After some adjustments here and there to its methods and some statistical tweaks, the recalculated audience for cable and broadcast television will be found to be 5 percent higher than previously measured. Not 6 percent, because you have to leave something on the table for later (55). As Lotz notes, Nielsen has been accused of complacency in responding to technological changes in the industry. Time-shifted viewing, possible thanks to DVRs, eventually resulted in a new set of ratings data streams (ratings calculated as live, live plus same day viewing, and viewing within three days), or C3 ratings. This system gave advertisers credit for commercials watched in delayed mode. It is worth remembering, however, that Nielsen disqualified DVR homes from their sample for eight years before finally acknowledging and counting them (Lotz 218).

Understandably challenged by the audience fragmentation created by cable and then by streaming options, Nielsen, with a virtual monopoly on television audience measurement, has faced the dual issue of new television delivery means and options, such as Netflix and Hulu, not covered by their audience viewing sample. Nielsen’s Total Content Ratings product, launched in 2016, moved beyond linear TV ratings to include video-on-demand (VOD), mobile devices, and digital measurement. Complaints about incomplete measurement coverage included NBCUniversal stating that Hulu, of which they were part owner, was not included in this new Nielsen tool.⁸ Although Nielsen has offered data connected to streaming usage, the industry has been critical about the pace of these ratings innovations. As the industry analysts Jill Goldsmith and Dade Hayes commented on the measurement issue in 2021: Nielsen has been under scrutiny for many years for being too encumbered by its traditional methodology to fully reflect the streaming era. Marketers have complained of not having visibility into streaming platforms taking share from linear TV. Networks at the same time have insisted that Nielsen has undercounted their viewership.⁹

Criticisms from networks and media suppliers increased during the period of the COVID-19 pandemic. Nielsen blamed ratings decreases to the lack of live sports and to delayed series premieres. With Nielsen field representatives not visiting homes during the pandemic and a smaller sample (dropping from 39,600 households in February 2020 to 29,500 a year later), data from Black households (down 28 percent) and Hispanic households (down 18 percent) was greatly impacted (Neff 14). Accreditation by the Media Ratings Council (MRC) was withheld for Nielsen in 2021 due to undercounting audiences (especially minorities and younger viewers), suspending home visits due to the pandemic, and the ability to integrate broadband-only households into their local market samples.¹⁰ The MRC is a nonprofit organization formed in the wake of the 1950s quiz-show scandals to monitor the operation of the television business.

Nielsen has been plagued by other issues, including a 16-month undercounting of out-of-home audience measurement. Sean Cunningham of the Video Advertising Bureau referred to this error as unfathomable, both for Nielsen and the buyers and sellers that use Nielsen data as trading currency.¹¹ A disparity between social media response and Nielsen ratings for When We Rise (2017), a groundbreaking mini-series depicting events in LGBTQ+ civil rights since 1971, led to Nielsen adding a same-sex household data point (Koblin B1). This was seen as another indication that Nielsen was slow to account for viewing by different subgroups within their sample. Joining the ongoing issues with accounting for streaming viewing, industry executives became more vocal about their Nielsen issues. Kelly Abcarian, NBCUniversal executive vice president for measurement and impact, proclaimed in 2021: It’s time for us to declare measurement independence, and build solutions that will serve all consumers, advertisers, publishers, and platforms for the next century.¹² Abcarian called for measurement companies to offer alternative measures of viewing across linear and digital platforms.¹³

The connection between Nielsen ratings and viewer preferences is routinely offered as one function of the measurement service: programs with higher ratings garner more advertising revenue and attention from the network. Placing aside the other measurement issues, Eileen Meehan suggests that this image of a demand-driven media marketplace is somewhat inaccurate. The Nielsen ratings system is centered on audience metrics, with networks and suppliers favoring programs with the greatest appeal. As Meehan explains, however, this populist rationale is superseded by corporations maximizing the value of synergies across properties and delivery systems in the era of deregulation (2005 121). As greater consolidation has occurred within the media industries, the straightforward connection between audience, rating, and supplier becomes more complicated. As a result, program choice may not truly reflect audience demand; as Meehan describes it, television is not our fault.

Although not addressed by Meehan, primary research also embodies assumptions about the viewer, their preferences, and their behavior that can also misrepresent the actual viewer. As with Nielsen ratings, primary research relies on reflecting content with the greatest appeal to viewers. While market research appears to show viewers’ choices transparently, it can fail to paint a complete and accurate picture of the contemporary viewing landscape.

Partnerships: Industry, Academia, and Primary Research

As Philip M. Napoli recounts, primary market research in the television industry, parallel to the film industry, had to confront the early intuitive models of the audience: the show and network producers based their decision-making in regard to what worked (and what did not) on instinct and gut reactions rather than depending on external data and information gathering (2011 53). To a certain extent, as John Caldwell claims, executives still are selective in using market research as a guide: Executives frequently invoke hard numbers from research departments when useful but ignore them when the data contradict their personal hunches or intuition (Caldwell in Mann 153).

Early industry research on programs conflated quality and popularity, a distinction that separated academic work from industry audience research. A hybrid academic/industry approach to television studies has been realized since the inception of television as a medium. Leo Bogart’s work as an applied sociologist and mass media expert is especially significant here.¹⁴ Addressing many strategic and structural issues in the mass media, Bogart can be seen as an early public intellectual engaging media consumption and the role of media in society. Several issues Bogart engaged with over the decades remain relevant, including the need to integrate qualitative and quantitative data to give a better approximation of the media user (1956 354) and the importance of understanding the television viewer beyond simple metrics (1966 54).

The connection between academic and industry research is generally more limited, however. Certainly, collaborations between the two worlds are evident over decades. The legacy of British Cultural Studies, for instance, can be seen in the work of David Gauntlett and Annette Hill. The scholars worked on a five-year audience tracking study to understand the place of television in everyday life (13). Addressing such issues as the planning of viewing, interactions around television, and the fit between television and everyday life, Gauntlett and Hill offer a useful longitudinal analysis of interest to both industry and academia. Hill astutely notes that relationship management is important to these shared projects: At each step in the process our relationships with the creatives, within the team, and with audiences were a constant presence (2019 215).

In the American context, the Media Industries Project, led by Jennifer Holt, Michael Curtin, and Kevin Sanson, in the Carsey-Wolf Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara, initiated a pioneering series of studies, publications, and conferences around several initiatives of interest to the industry, academia, and the public. These were grouped largely under two rubrics: the Creative Labor Initiative, examining labor trends in global media industries, and the Connected Viewing Initiative. The latter project linked the scholars with Warner Bros. Home Entertainment to understand cross-platform viewing practices and the impact of new technologies on entertainment and media choices. The result was a partnership with takeaways and findings of interest to multiple constituencies.¹⁵

The Media Industries Project is a rare example of collaboration between industry and academia in North America. As Jennifer Holt points out, though, partnering between industry and academia can be tricky given the different goals of each group. Funding from industry can also be an issue. As Holt succinctly describes: Further, being funded by the research subject potentially sacrifices the independence, criticality, and freedom from market pressures that are vital for scholarly inquiry to thrive (186). Most of the market research conducted within the media industries for television is, by nature, proprietary, since the crafting of product, marketing, and messaging based on feedback from potential viewers can provide a strategic advantage for any company in a very crowded marketplace. To understand how market research operates in the television industry, a useful distinction should be made between viewer and audience.

Why the Viewer?

The impetus for this project came, while I was working in the media industries, from realizing that a clear definition of the viewer was elusive. This was especially the case for those in a television network (broadcast or cable). Different executives and departments thought of the viewer in their own way and for their own purposes. Each person at the network decision-making table imagines a different possibility. For the network president, the viewer is simply the consumer who can be counted on to be loyal in their viewership, try out new shows, and watch more of the network over time. For the marketing chief, the viewer is the ideal sales demographic, comprising the perfect mix of characteristics appealing to the widest number of potential sponsors. While the match between the actual viewer and the sales demographic may not be exact, the marketer cares largely about reaching viewers who just fit the desired target viewer framework. For those in charge of ratings, the viewer comes from the Nielsen composite of who was watching the network most of all. The viewer matters only as a data point for ratings, impressions, and digital metrics. For others in programming, scheduling, and digital, personifying the viewer might be the goal: the viewer as a specific friend, focus group participant, social media composite, or online commenter who made a vivid and lasting impression. Regardless, the most basic question yields a multitude of responses, with the answer often unstated or unspecified for others at the table.

Building a network around these varying concepts of the viewer is a daunting task. The meaning of the viewer is flexible, with different quarters utilizing concepts that fit their own needs and structures. The goal of understanding the viewer is addressed often by an array of media industry insiders, from programming and marketing executives to schedulers and ad agencies. This question is, of course, at the basis of the entire media industry. While it may seem like a straightforward empirical query, events since the 1990s have rendered it increasingly relevant and difficult to unravel.

Think of all the factors impacting a conception of the viewer from the industry’s perspective: The competitive field has morphed substantially with the streaming services; the means of watching have moved far beyond linear television; and, as noted earlier, audience metrics and Nielsen measurements have struggled to keep up with technological and institutional changes. Suddenly, the industry is scrambling to understand exactly who the potential audience for their product(s) can be. As the viewer is ultimately the basis for all commerce and business decision-making in the media industries, being able to pinpoint the motivations and behaviors of the viewer is a much-needed focus for moving forward in a rapidly changing media environment (Wyatt 2022 534).

The definition of the viewer