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.

KEYWORDS:

• Social TV
• advertising
• commercial
• motivation
• content analysis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Following the definition of Ji (2019), we defined live TV as the first-run of a TV program (e.g., broadcast of a real-time sports event or the first airing of the episodes of a drama series).

2 In this study, two terms, social TV and second-screening, were used interchangeably.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kyongseok Kim

Kyongseok Kim (Ph.D., University of Georgia) is an associate professor in the Department of Mass Communication at Towson University. His research interests include audience motivation and information processing, strategic communication using new media, and health and environmental communication.

Hyang-Sook Kim

Hyang-Sook Kim (Ph.D., Pennsylvania State University) is an associate professor in the Department of Mass Communication at Towson University. Dr. Kim’s research centers on the development of effective strategies for health promotion and public health education, drawing on the theoretical frameworks of cognitive, social, and media psychology.

Mun-Young Chung

Mun-Young Chung (Ph.D., Penn State University) is an assistant professor in the Department of Media and Journalism at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania. His research interests center on the psychological effects of media entertainment on self and emotions.

Yeuseung Kim

Yeuseung Kim (Ph.D., University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill) is an associate professor in the Department of Advertising and Public Relations at Chung-Ang University, Korea. Her research interests include what makes consumers share information online; the effect of personalization and privacy concerns; and the effect of communicating corporate social responsibility.