New Fall Shows In 2013: The Correlation Between What You Watch And How You Travel

What new shows are you most excited about this fall? Turns out the answer to that simple question says a lot more than you may realize about what brands you prefer in everything from the hotels you frequent to the airline you earn miles with.

For the past eight years, strategic marketing and analytics company NewMediaMetrics, or NMM, has matched the Emotional Attachment, or EA, of consumers between what brands they use and what new fall shows they will tune in to. The company claims it can do so with about 80 percent accuracy.

“Simply stated, we find people who are highly attached to a brand and link those people to the media they’re highly attached to. This finds people who are three-times as likely to act on the advertising,” NMM CEO and co-founder Gary Reisman explained. “In this manner, we are calculating which media are saturated with the highest potential brand prospects.”

NMM looked at 54 new broadcast and cable shows and matched them to 400 consumer brands for its 2013 study. Reisman said the research provides an important tool for companies to better understand which television programs their key consumers will most likely watch.

“The media landscape is getting very complex. But more importantly, the consumer is in charge -- they are now ‘pulling’ the TV shows and media they desire via their TVs, tablets and phones,” Reisman explained. “If they are not highly attached to a media, the likelihood of them viewing and engaging is much less likely. As an industry, we tend to focus way too much on just the eyeballs and impressions, but consumer ‘pull’ and engagement are the new keys to success.”

Reisman noted that eight years of data had proved that people are 2.5-times more likely to pay attention to an ad for a brand they are attached to, while people who are highly attached to a brand contribute, on average, 47 percent more revenue to that brand over a 12-month period. If brands can link their products with the shows their consumers are most likely to watch, Reisman said the return on investment could be as much as three-times higher.

Take JetBlue and United Airlines. NMM predicts that high-value brand lovers of JetBlue are very likely to view "Sleepy Hollow" (Fox), "24: Live Another Day" (Fox) and "The Last Ship" (TNT), while high-value United Airlines brand lovers will likely be more attached to "Hostages" (CBS), "Crazy Ones" (CBS) and "Deal With It" (TBS).

“People who are highly attached to United are inherently different than people who are highly attached to JetBlue, so it stands to reason that the media they are highly attached to would be different as well,” Reisman said. “After all, isn’t that what media planners and buyers are always trying to do -- find media saturated with the highest possible opportunity for return.”

NMM conducted an online poll with roughly 3,000 nationally representative participants to come up with its 2013 results. Researchers asked consumers to respond to questions that collect their right-brain EA responses. For new shows, consumers read two to three sentence descriptors, or log lines, and then provided their EA on an 11-point scale.

Reisman offered International Business Times an exclusive look at how some of the nation’s top travel brands match up against the new Fall 2013 TV lineup. Check out the results below:

Airlines

American Airlines’ Fall 2013 TV Show Correlation

No.1 Cold Justice (TNT)

No.2 The Blacklist (NBC)

No.3 The Bridge (FX)

No.4 24: Live Another Day (FOX -- Spring 2014)

No.5 Graceland (USA)

Delta Air Lines’ Fall 2013 TV Show Correlation

No.1 Hostages (CBS)

No.2 Junior Master Chef (FOX)

No.3 Sleepy Hollow (FOX)

No.4 Cold Justice (TNT)