Hype Works - Thursday 26 March 2009

If Thursday's ratings prove anything - it's that hype works. The Melbourne audience was assualted for two solid months by almost every media outlet in the city with wild speculation and anticipation over the first in-season match for current AFL bad-boy Ben Cousins and his "showdown" with former team-mate Chris Judd.

In the end the game itself was a little lopsided but with over 700,000 melbourne viewers tuning in - for television it was a rousing success.

For Ten as well it provided the perfect opportunity to showcase the new OneHD an all sport all the time digital channel and the first significant effort at multichannelling since ABC2 all those years ago.

Elsewhere Nine was taking the biggest damage with Getaway dropping by over 200,000 viewers week on week and Adults Only 20 to 01 losing 92,000 viewers.

Although comparing their 9.30 slot with last week is a little useless (the AFL Footy Show was replaced by CSI Miami, it should be noted that in Sydney and Brisbane the Footy Show came third in its slot behind Private Practice and Life on Mars.

I’ll see you when you get there – Thursday 26 February 2009

As a guy who goes through the ratings on a daily basis nothing is more infuriating than sorting through the mess when networks decided to program city by city and now that Football season is starting up the game of shows being pre-empted in some markets or bumped in others begins. Usually this sort of nonsense is confined to weekends where nobody cares because only movies are scheduled anyway – but on a few occassions the practice spills over to weeknights, and last night was one of those nights.

It produced a good result for Ten with the combo of crime show and football allowing them to dominate the post 8.30 timeslots. But in the last few weeks they’ve tended to dominate them anyway – which is the ral rub for Ten – I’m sure if they could chose to pre-empt a weeknight it would be Monday or Wednesday – not Thursday which is generally successful. Southern viewers of Life on Mars will get a double episode next week so they can catch up but there’s no word on when Ten will air the pre-empted SVU episode skipping it for the time being in the southern states, this is the annoying factor with state based programming.

The absence of Life on Mars in some markets handed almost 100,000 extra viewers to CSI Miami – ordinarily that sort of shift would be something to worry about, but in a few weeks CSI Miami makes way for The Footy Show which will make the choice easier for viewers in this slot.

Meanwhile over at Seven their Thursday night tentpole Grey’s Anatomy seems to be on the decline – relegated to third place on a low viewing night. To Seven’s credit they are trying to bring a new audience to Thursdays but it doesn’t look like anyone’s biting.

It’s worse news for Private Practice which lost 72,000 viewers week on week, no doubt those were the few remaining men watching before they checked out altogether, Seven will probably tolerate this show in this slot for a while longer – but I’m starting to wonder how they would go if they swapped this with the far superior Scrubs which follows it.