Do viewers really talk about ads during commercial breaks? Findings from a South Korean social TV platform

Abstract

As live TV has lost viewers to streaming services and digital videos, TV producers have strived to bring viewers back to TV screens by integrating social features in programing. Meanwhile, social TV has become a prevalent TV-viewing pattern. Although previous findings indicate that social TV can help increase engagement with TV programs, how it benefits advertisers is still uncertain. This study sheds light on this idea by investigating what live TV viewers talk about during commercial breaks. A content analysis was conducted using 4,792 live comments posted on a major social TV platform during the commercial breaks in five episodes of a popular South Korean TV drama. Results indicate that (a) the majority of the live comments pertained to the drama episodes (79.7%) rather than commercials (8.9%) and (b) comments related to commercials were more likely to be negative (50.1%) than positive (20.6%). Overall, the findings suggest that social TV viewers are generally program-oriented and, thus, either neglect or unfavorably perceive program-irrelevant tasks (e.g. attending to and processing commercials). The findings emphasize the need for an advertising-centric theoretical approach to social TV and provide practical implications for advertisers based on analyzing social TV behavior.