As Oscar Wilde said: “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.”

Rentrak has been partnering with social media tracking companies over the past several years and publishing a weekly “TV engagement” or “stickiness” report that covers ad-supported primetime programs. I recently wrote about “stickiness,” our internal measure of engagement (see my earlier post, “What’s Engaging about TV?”). I now would like to turn to the level of social media chatter about TV shows—a metric that can also be seen as an engagement measure. Both “stickiness” and a social media index are covered in our free weekly report. You can contact me at bruce.goerlich@rentrak.com to get your own weekly copy.

In 2013, we partnered for most of the year with Trendrr, and then later with General Sentiment, to create our weekly reports on the most “buzzed” about ad-supported primetime broadcast network and cable TV programs. The two companies have different ways of scoring social media chatter about TV shows, so to make a fair comparison for the whole year, I averaged each service’s score and indexed their reported programs to their own average. So what you will see in the following charts are program counts for both services for the entirety of 2013, as well as the average indices by program type for both services. In this blog, I will focus just on broadcast prime network shows. Primetime cable shows will follow in the next blog. It is very important to note that all of these broadcast shows were the most talked about broadcast shows during the week in which they aired. An index above 100 just means that, within the most talked about broadcast prime shows, the show was even more talked about. An index below 100 means that, within the most talked about broadcast prime shows, this show was less talked about.

So let’s look first at the volume of chatter by program genre for broadcast network shows in 2013. I’ve done my own personal classification here (in part to protect the innocent), but also to reflect the nuances of social media buzz about TV programs.

The highest number of talked about Broadcast Prime shows in 2013 were in the “Competition” genre, which includes singing and dancing competitions, as well as beauty and modeling contests. The “Drama” category came next, which includes a whole slew of sub-genres like “Detective/Mystery,” “Fantasy,” “Medical” and “Nighttime Soap Operas.” “Reality” was a distant third, followed by “Comedy,” “Sports” and “Awards.”

However, the volume of social media buzz looks very different by genre, as the chart below shows.

“Awards” and “Sports” are far and away the most buzzworthy categories in Broadcast Prime. People like to talk about who won the Academy Awards, who won the People’s Choice awards and so on. And sports have been talked about since the days of boat racing in ancient Egypt along the Nile. Social media has just enhanced our ability to talk about things we like to talk about. Again, I want to emphasize that the shows in the other genres were all highly talked about, just not as talked about as awards and sports shows.

So let’s break down two genres a bit more: “Drama” and “Competition.” As mentioned above, there are several sub-Genres within “Drama.” The chart below illustrates the number of mentions of these in our 2013 reports.

There were a lot of teen-oriented dramas talked about in 2013. These are shows like “The Carrie Diaries”, “Glee” and the “Vampire Chronicles.” “Detective/Mystery” was next with shows like “NCIS,” “Law and Order: SVU” and “Castle.” “Medical” includes shows like “Bones,” “Gray’s Anatomy” and “Rookie Blue.” “Fantasy” has shows like “Sleepy Hollow,” “Once Upon a Time” and “Under the Dome.” “Nighttime Soaps” include “Revenge,” “Nashville” and “Scandal.” “Action” has shows like “Marvel’s Agents of Shield” and “Revolution.”

Again, the picture changes when we look at the average index for these sub-genres. “Broadcast Nighttime Soaps” have the highest average indices in the “Drama” genre. The plot twists and cliffhangers in these shows are made for social media buzz. And “Teen” shows come next. In my youth, it was my teenage sister talking on her “princess phone” about “The Monkees.” Now it is tweets and posts from Millennials.

We can just briefly recap the “Competition” genre. Over 90 percent of the shows were the singing/dancing competitions like “American Idol,” “The Voice” and “So You Think You Can Dance.” These shows had an average index of 91.

So in summary, if an advertiser is looking for broadcast network prime shows that are the “crème de la crème” in generating buzz, they should look to “Awards” and “Sports” first. “Competition,” “Drama,” “Nighttime Soaps” and “Teen-Oriented” programs also get a lot of talk.

It is interesting to note that this reflects the “conventional wisdom” of the broadcast era gone by. It was the “office water cooler” where people talked about special events on TV and the “big game.” Teens talked with each other a lot, on the phone, or in parking lot of the drive-through about who on TV was cute and who was bad.

The technology has changed and broadened our ability to talk with each other, but the basic human interest in interesting, exciting and relevant stories remains.

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In case you don’t know, I am Bruce Goerlich, Chief Research Officer at Rentrak, the global standard in movie measurement and your TV Everywhere measurement and research company. I have been in the research end of the marketing business for more than 30 years primarily on the ad agency side, with my last stint prior to Rentrak in the role of President, Strategic Resources Zenith Optimedia North America. Somewhere along the way I morphed from young Turk to old fogey. Now that I have grey hair and am horizontally-challenged, I can speak with some authority on advertising and research issues – which I will do from time-to-time on this blog.

Well, I won’t have done too badly this Lent. I will have posted two blogs.

As promised, I am continuing to write about TV “engagement.” In the last blog, I focused on broadcast TV programs. In this piece, I look at ad-supported cable network programs. As I said before, the definition of “engagement” deals with time spent viewing, or “stickiness.” Rentrak looks at the average percentage of a program watched. This form of “engagement” is good, because studies have shown that if two people watch a half hour program that has an ad in the first 15 minutes, if one person just watches the first 15 minutes, and the other watches the full half hour, the half hour viewer is much more likely to recall the ad. Programs with audiences that “stick to them” give a positive benefit to their advertisers.

I looked at data from Rentrak’s weekly reports on “engagement” for 2013. You should also know that Multichannel News is now publishing our reports in advance in their print edition. (Visit Multichannel.com to get more information.) And you can send me an email at bruce.goerlich@rentrak.com if you want to get on the Rentrak mailing list.

Like in my broadcast post, I first took a look at the distribution of shows by genre.

As with broadcast, Drama and Reality genres dominate the most engaged programs. However, cable’s share of top engaged Dramas is 43%, compared to broadcast’s 67%. What makes up the difference in cable? Ad-supported cable reality shows are at 34% compared to 16% on broadcast. (Thank you, “Basketball Wives,” “Braxton Family Values,” “Duck Dynasty,” “Project Runway,” etc.).

Another big difference with ad-supported cable consists of the importance of the Movie and Mini-Series categories. These genres still show up on cable, and viewers like and are engaged with them. Many of these are originals, as well as old favorites.

One way that broadcast and cable programs are exactly alike is that there is no relationship between the rating and “engagement”/”stickiness.” The chart below takes all the ad-supported cable shows in our 2013 reports and plots them on the vertical axis for “stickiness,” and on the horizontal for ratings rank. No relationship exists. A low rated program can be very engaging.

And, as with Broadcast, this additional leverage from looking at a measure of “engagement” is a good thing. Both sides of the desk can use the leverage when it serves their interest.

Next up, what you didn’t know about the State of Video on Demand.

In case you don’t know, I am Bruce Goerlich, Chief Research Officer at Rentrak, the global standard in movie measurement and your TV Everywhere measurement and research company. I have been in the research end of the marketing business for more than 30 years primarily on the ad agency side, with my last stint prior to Rentrak in the role of President, Strategic Resources Zenith Optimedia North America. Somewhere along the way I morphed from young Turk to old fogey. Now that I have grey hair and am horizontally-challenged, I can speak with some authority on advertising and research issues – which I will do from time-to-time on this blog.

It’s been a busy couple of months, and I haven’t had a chance to write. So, as part of my Lenten discipline, I promise more timely blogs. I’m going to devote the next couple to looking at “engagement” in national TV programs.

“Engagement” is one of those words like “freedom.” Everybody is for it, everybody thinks it’s good, but there isn’t a single definition that everybody agrees on. At Rentrak we have two measures for “engagement.” The first one, which this piece is based on, deals with time spent viewing, or “stickiness.” That is, what is the average percentage of a program that is watched? This form of “engagement” is good, because studies have shown that if two people watch a half hour program that has an ad in the first 15 minutes, if one person just watches the first 15 minutes, and the other watches the full half hour, the half hour viewer is much more likely to recall the ad. (Frank Harrison at Zenith-Optimedia did some very good work in this area.) Therefore, programs with audiences that “stick to them” give a positive benefit to their advertisers.

I looked at Rentrak’s weekly reports on “engagement” for 2013 for both broadcast and cable programs. (Contact me if you want to get on the mailing list.) In this post, I am going to concentrate on broadcast. In the next blog, I’ll move on to cable, and then on to our second definition of “engagement” which involves social media.

A couple of interesting things pop out when we look at the “stickiest” shows for 2013, as the chart below shows.

First off, dramas are the kings of “stickiness.”* From cop shows to novellas, the audience stays throughout them. Over two thirds of the most engaging shows last year were dramas, where people like to stay around and see what happens. Storytelling goes back to our ancestral roots when we huddled around the fire in caves while the Shaman told tales of the battles between good and evil. And today, dramas provide a real benefit to advertisers.

Reality shows are second (please forgive me network clients), but they really are just dramas done on the cheap. Contests, where viewers want to find out who wins, are third, and the same phenomenon follows for sports. Although awards shows are not often in the top rankings, which is in large part because there aren’t that many of them in broadcast. We do know, however, that the big ones are there: “The Academy Awards,” “The Golden Globes,” “The Grammy Awards,” etc.

Another interesting fact about “stickiness” is the high proportion of Hispanic network programs that show up. Overall, 32 percent of the broadcast programs that showed up were Hispanic, but that percentage differed by genre as the graph below demonstrates.

The categories where Hispanic programs did especially well were News, Review (e.g. movie and TV show reviews), Talk Shows, Variety and Awards shows. It should also be noted that in the largest “stickiness” category of dramas, 34% were Hispanic programs; the novellas hold their audience.

One final note, there is no direct relationship between “stickiness” and program rating. Rentrak’s weekly top “stickiness” report looks at the top 20 “stickiest” broadcast shows. Across the year, only 46 percent of the top 20 “stickiest” shows were also in the top 20 highest rated shows of that week. In short, a high rating does not guarantee a high level of “stickiness,” and a high level of “stickiness” doesn’t guarantee a high rating.

And I think that is a good thing. Both networks and advertisers need more than one metric to value a program. Sheer audience level is good, but so is a measure of “engagement.” Both sides can use these as leverage points in negotiations. And finding leverage is what media is all about.

Soon to follow will be a look at “stickiness” and cable programs.

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In case you don’t know, I am Bruce Goerlich, Chief Research Officer at Rentrak, the global standard in movie measurement and your TV Everywhere measurement and research company. I have been in the research end of the marketing business for more than 30 years primarily on the ad agency side, with my last stint prior to Rentrak in the role of President, Strategic Resources Zenith Optimedia North America. Somewhere along the way I morphed from young Turk to old fogey. Now that I have grey hair and am horizontally-challenged, I can speak with some authority on advertising and research issues – which I will do from time-to-time on this blog.

*The technical level of “stickiness” is determined by level of variance between average percentage viewed of the telecast to that of all telecasts of the same duration during Monday-Saturday primetime (8-11 p.m.) and Sunday primetime (7-11 p.m.).