How do we get hooked on TV?

Have you ever wondered what makes a TV show SO addicting? How do certain networks know how to target an audience, and hold onto them for soo long. Shows like HBO's Entourage and True Blood hit the target of college students and graduates. Students have been known to make a night out of "HBO Sunday's" specifically to watch these two shows. Then you have TV stations like MTV who have their annual "MTV Spring Break" every year. High school students become extremely attracted to this week of drinking and partying because they believe that their future college years may be just like that.

TV Stations don't just take a guess at who would enjoy their shows, they start with a hypothesis, like any other start to qualitative research. HBO takes a common approach by using Nielsen, an independent survey company that gives ratings to all popular TV shows. Nielsen finds out the viewers opinions on past and upcoming episodes for HBO. They also tell HBO what TV shows are in the running's on their station, who their competitors are and who their target audience seems to be.

MTV takes a slightly different approach. MTV joined with the Associated Press to gain a better understanding of the youth audience. They had a study conducted by Knowledge Networks Inc., another research company. Their study consisted of over 1,000 youths, aged 13-24, answering a survey. The survey was titled "Youth Happiness Poll" and asked questions about what everyday situations in life make you happy or unhappy. The respondents would have never known that they were taking a survey for MTV unless it said "MTV" across the top of the survey.

I find this survey a lot more interesting than HBO's tactics. It is really amazes me that MTV is more concerned about what makes their target audience happy so that they could implement those variables into different shows. This method of research may work better for the company not only because it is showing their interest in their viewers, but also because it helps build their reputation.