Trends in DVR Ownership and Advertisement Recall - Episode 20
Meredith Abreu Ressi, VP of research

With August just around the corner, one can’t help but realize that the lazy days of summer will soon be coming to an end. And while it will be sad to bid farewell to beach weekends and flip flops, there are a few things to look forward to about the fall season. After all, as much as I enjoy the new episodes of Mad Men and reruns of Law and Order, I am starting to itch for some of my favorite network TV shows to return. But once that first episode of Gossip Girl airs, I know that with the fall TV season comes a territorial battle for one of the most precious resources in my household – no, not gasoline or electricity – but space on our digital video recorder.

If you don’t have one, the digital video recorder -- also own as a DVR, or Tivo if you have that brand – is a life changing device. Before I had a DVR, I barely watched television. But now I can record my favorite shows week after week with just one click of a button – and skip commercials when watching them – which changes the whole concept of television from a 700-channel monstrosity that’s never quite what you’re looking for into an on-demand world of content at your fingertips.

Not surprisingly, we’ve seen in our research that the DVR has enjoyed increasing popularity over the past few years, especially as many cable companies have begun offering DVR service that is integrated with the cable box. In fact, the number of households with a DVR has doubled in just the past two years. During that time, the demographics of the DVR owners have also shifted.

Over the past two years, this technology has become increasingly mainstream: While the typical DVR owner used to be younger and more likely to be male, both the age difference and the gender gap between DVR owners and those who don’t own a DVR has narrowed. In fact, women in their forties and fifties are the age / gender cohort most likely to own a DVR today.

Interestingly, DVR owners watch almost a full hour less television each week compared to the non-owner, but they use the Internet for almost two hours more each week as compared to the average online consumer who does not own a DVR.  So the consumers who own a DVR are a technologically advanced group of avid media consumers – an important segment to keep an eye on.

Besides allowing consumers the convenience of recording programs to watch outside of their scheduled time slots, the DVR also allows users to fast-forward through commercials. As DVR technology becomes more commonplace, this has marketers and the television networks who depend on advertising dollars understandably concerned and asking themselves how widespread DVR ownership will impact the efficacy of television advertising.

As we see it currently, this is not the case. Despite this widespread hypothesis that DVR ownership would yield lower recall and response to advertisements, in looking at today’s DVR owners, we see that they actually are more likely to have recall of pharmaceutical or prescription drug ads.  For instance, seventy-one percent of DVR owners recall seeing an advertisement for a pharmaceutical or prescription drug in the past twelve months, as compared to 64% of all consumers. However, as DVR ownership becomes more commonplace and consumers become more familiar with the capabilities of the DVR functionality, we may start to see these numbers decline. But for now, marketers can rest easy -- DVR owners appear to be highly media-savvy consumers who are still tuning in to ads.



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