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in this particular study we're interested in the relationship between television viewership and online sales
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and asking the simple question of whether their substitutes or complements the way that we studied this is we
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gathered a pretty large comprehensive data set on viewers in germany where we got tv viewership data at the
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national level hourly tv viewership data and then we also got sales data from a large online
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company a company similar to ebay so it was a large auction site we performed the study over four years
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or we got data for four years and in addition to the tv viewership and the online sales that we were most
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interested in we also collected a lot of other data that we used as controls so we collected weather data because
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weather has been shown in the past to impact online sales we also from a large bank in germany collected
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average bank account to get a sense for the potential for the for the country at
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any given on any given day and then in addition for ebay in germany we got online sales as well
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adver as well as their advertising spend to get a sense for um the competition for this particular
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company so we use those as controls to basically control for anything else that could possibly explain the online
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sales and we found that tv viewership in this case is in fact a substitute for online sales
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of the particular online retailer so we found that there's this negative relationship between tv viewership and
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online sales and one might think that's not surprising however there were two competing
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hypotheses going into the study on the one hand you might think well you have an attention budget
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so you can't watch television and use the internet at the same time and therefore
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one should be a substitute for the other however before we performed this study we
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actually ran a large survey where we asked a large number of people in germany about their online behavior specifically
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whether they use the internet while they're watching tv so a competing hypothesis would be well
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since there are more people online and at home while watching television online sales might actually go up so we
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were able to show at least in this context that tv viewership has a negative relationship
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with online sales and therefore they're substitutes well the first one of course is that
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tv viewership at least on days where there are huge numbers of viewers watching shows should be factored into models of
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predicting online sales so when companies predict online sales they factor in weather like i mentioned
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among other things and viewership should be accounted for and then for auction sites in particular
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which was sort of the context of this study sellers on auction sites may want to pay
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attention to the closing date and time of their auctions and not have them coincide with times
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when popular television shows are on so i think there are a lot of potential implications the first one being that
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if in fact this is an attention story where people can only pay attention to a limited number of
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activities at any given time then this would have implications for tv shows that are prompting
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viewers to participate in the in tv show activity while the tv shows are going on for example
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asking viewers to participate in polls to tweet to post on facebook all of these activities potentially have
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the unintended consequence of impacting online sales and the interesting thing about that
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is the online sellers or companies in general are the customers of tv shows they buy
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advertising and ultimately don't want their sales impacted so i think this is
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just an eye opener perhaps for tv shows to think about the relationship between viewership and
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sales there are a lot of stories in the news that are relevant to my research um the tv industry and tv measurement
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industry is really overnight becoming revolutionized in the amount of data that we or that tv
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shows and networks can collect as well as tv measurement companies and so pretty much anyone involved in
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television tv producers tv networks tv advertisers are interested in the relationship between
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um what's happening on television and what's happening online so specifically
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people tend to focus on engagement so how are people responding online as it relates to social media
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but also there are new ways to measure audiences in terms of their demographics and what they're doing so
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if they're buying but in all of this the nice thing is that we have all of this
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data now that we can link in new and interesting ways that can help us better understand the
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impact of tv and view on viewership and sales and social media in ways that we couldn't even imagine
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before so as i just mentioned there's a lot of hype about um sort of second screening and what
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people are doing while they're watching television and i think there's this
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general belief that it's actually a good thing for television shows and for um and for online sellers and for
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sellers in general um so here for the first time it's kind of saying well maybe we should take a
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step back and think about what the impact of television is on online sales so maybe
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second screening isn't positive for sellers just yet it's really the data so we have data on
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viewership at the hourly level as well as all of the sales data from this online company and so the data
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enables us to answer these questions in the first place and at least we think it's for the first
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time we have a planned project for bringing this study to the u.s context so extending it both because we're going
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to use u.s viewership data and then also because we're going to look across different online retailers
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so in the first paper we focused on a particular online retailer and auction site
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and in the second study we're going to focus more on which types of online firms are impacted the most so in
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preliminary analysis what we found was in the u.s context on days like the super bowl and mba finales where people
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are watching television in large numbers while on average sales go down sales for
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pizza go up so it's possible that while on average high levels of television
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viewership impact sales in a negative way that for some categories of products sales might actually go up so the plan
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is to see if there are variants across categories as it relates to television viewership
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and online sales you