AUDIENCE ACCUMULATION BY TELEVISION DAYPART ALLOCATION BASED ON HOUSEHOLD-LEVEL VIEWING DATA

A fundamental challenge to media planners in using television advertis ing is to choose a daypart (time of day) combination that will achieve efficient delivery of an audience. The author addresses audience accu mulation by daypart allocation with a household-level exposure model u sing viewing records from single-source data. By retaining the behavio ral assumption of a popular beta binomial distribution model, exposure by each household within each daypart during each week is assumed to follow a binomial process with a distinct exposure probability that is inferred from the household's past exposure history. The model captur es exposure heterogeneity nonparametrically by household-specific expo sure probabilities rather than fitting a parametric beta function and automatically accounts for audience duplication across dayparts. This approach is made possible by the availability of large-scale household -level exposure records obtained from audimeters and the increasing co mputation power of personal computers. An example of spot allocation t o dayparts shows hour media planners can use the model to obtain insig hts into audience accumulation.