Total Audience?
So. Love him or hate him, one thing is undeniable about #DonaldJTrump: he obsesses over measuring things. Hand size, public opinion, inaugural crowds and, perhaps most of all, TV ratings. He loves measuring these things. Maybe even too much for a President to pontificate about in public.
This blog post is in no way a piece of political commentary. But as we here, in the confines of Limbik HQ, also obsess over numbers there was one item which came up over the past week or so which really captured my attention (that was another pun, for those of you Limbik users).
Sean Spicer, the President’s press secretary made a pretty bold comment that Trump’s was, “the most-watched inaugural” ever. Move over Obama. Step aside W, Bubba and the Gipper, there’s a new POTUS in town.
A little background, to get everyone up to speed:
President Trump’s inaugural TV ratings hit 30.6 million;
President Obama’s inaugural TV ratings hit 37.8 million; and
President Reagan’s inaugural TV ratings hit 41.8 million.
So ostensibly, Spicer was wrong.
But when asked to clarify Spicer made a point of saying that if you took the TV ratings, supplied by Nielsen (as all the aforementioned stats reference), and add in total online audience, Trump’s would blow every other preceding President’s numbers out of the water.
When you take into account the fact that more video content is uploaded every 30 days than all 3 major U.S. TV networks combined have created in the last 30 years and that 85% of the U.S. Internet audience watches videos online, all of a sudden spicer doesn’t sound so crazy, on this particular point.
We quote Rob Norman, chief digital officer at Group M, a lot here at Limbik. In particular, he said with regard to online video analytics: “What is needed is the ability to get more granular data on video viewers. We need to count them, know who they are, and the degree to which they are paying attention.”
So again, if you added the TV viewers of Trump’s inauguration to everyone who watched on every website and app which live streamed the event, in addition to every single site which played it’s video, it’s quite likely that Spicer was right.
Or was he?
And that’s the issue here. On the surface it sounds like Spicer was correct. There are more people consuming video content online in 2017 than there was four or eight years ago. We know that, but I keep coming back to Rob Norman. How do we really know? How many people actually watched online, and of those people who watched, how many actually paid attention…?
If more organizations - be they brands, agencies, or even political organizations (and Governments for that matter) - spent more time and money investing in what Rob Norman has demanded, we’d likely to be able to say for sure whether Sean Spicer was speaking the truth or just speaking spin.
