For marketers, TVs a priceless set of eyes

While Ellen Milz and her family were watching the Olympics last summer, their TV was watching them.

Milz, 48, who lives with her husband and three children in Chicago, had agreed to be a panelist for a company called TVision Insights, which monitored her viewing habits — and whether her eyes flicked down to her phone during the commercials, whether she was smiling or frowning — through a device on top of her TV.

“The marketing company said, ‘We’re going to ask you to put this device in your home, connect it to your TV and they’re going to watch you for the Olympics to see how you like it, what sports, your expression, who’s around,’” she said. “And I said, ‘Whatever, I have nothing to hide.’”

Milz acknowledged she had initially found the idea odd, but those qualms quickly faded.

“It’s out of sight, out of mind,” she said, comparing it to the Nest security cameras in her home. She said she initially received $60 for participating and an additional $230 after four to six months.

TVision — which has worked with the Weather Channel, NBC and the Disney ABC Television Group — is one of several companies that have entered living rooms in recent years, emerging with new, granular ways for marketers to understand how people are watching television and, in particular, commercials. The appeal of this information has soared as Americans rapidly change their viewing habits, streaming an increasing number of shows weeks or months after they first air, on devices as varied as smartphones, laptops and Roku boxes, not to mention TVs.

Through the installation of a Microsoft Kinect device, normally used for Xbox video games, on top of participants’ TVs, TVision tracks the movement of people’s eyes in relation to the television. The device’s sensors can record minute shifts for all the people in the room. The company then matches those viewing patterns to specific shows and commercials using technology that listens to what is being broadcast on the TV.

“The big thing for TV advertisers and the networks is: Are you actually looking at the screen or not?” said Dan Schiffman, chief revenue officer of TVision. “What you looked at is interesting, but the fact that you looked away is arguably the most interesting.”

Schiffman founded TVision, a 30-person startup, with a classmate from the Sloan School of Management at MIT.

Companies spend around $69 billion per year on TV ads in the United States and are keen to find out how to best distribute that money in a fractured media landscape. Nielsen and its panel of 42,500 households have long determined how money is spent on TV advertising in the United States. The higher a show’s ratings, the more networks can charge for advertising.

But some industry executives have criticized Nielsen’s methods as outdated. Nielsen selects homes at random to represent the nation’s viewing audience, and measures who is watching what shows, mostly through meters connected to the sets, as well as diaries in select markets and digital tracking of certain ad-supported programs on tablets and phones.

The company recently delayed the rollout of a new system that will count viewing across platforms and devices. The capability to do just that is a core selling point for upstarts like TVision, which promote their ability to measure how people are binge-watching shows on, say, Netflix and Amazon.

“Nielsen will remain the currency for the time being because it is agreed upon as the thing everyone uses,” said Alan Wurtzel, an adviser at NBC Universal and its former head of research. “But as the world becomes more complex, as it is, many more additional supplemental or complementary measures will come into play.”

Information gathered by companies like TVision can help advertisers steer marketing toward shows with the most engaged audiences, not just the largest ones. And for networks, it could make a show with a committed and loyal audience as valuable as one that attracts a larger but more casual set of viewers.

TVision has recruited 2,000 households, or roughly 7,500 people, in the Boston, Chicago and Dallas-Fort Worth areas. The company said the information was transmitted without storing images or video and collected anonymously. Schiffman said the data would show, for example, “Person No. 124 in Household 6 was paying attention this second and not paying attention the next to a certain program or advertisement.”