Dialsmith

Every major broadcast network has used dial testing to gather audience feedback on their television pilots. That’s a pretty positive endorsement of the value that dial testing brings to entertainment research.

Here are some of the things that veteran media research expert Aaron Paquette had to say about dial testing:

Dial testing adds a quant boost to your qual.

“Dial testing can capture that visceral reaction in the moment, allowing researchers to understand what’s working and what’s not on a second-by-second basis, as well as the ‘flow’ throughout an entire piece. We use this deeper level of feedback to make editing decisions, remove entire scenes, reorder elements and quicken pace.  We also use this to ask thoughtful follow-up questions that can address moments of confusion, boredom or offensiveness.”

Dial testing allows you to tap in to visceral reactions and perceptions.

“For entertainment testing, the dials add value any time clients are trying to understand moment-by-moment reactions to a piece of content. In traditional survey research or focus groups, it’s fairly easy to learn how a consumer feels about a piece of content in its totality.  However, it’s very difficult to understand how the specific moments are playing. For starters, respondents forget individual moments after being exposed to a longer piece of content. And secondly, their feelings about those individual moments are colored by what comes next. But dial testing can capture that visceral reaction in the moment, allowing researchers to understand what’s working and what’s not on a second-by-second basis, as well as the “flow” throughout an entire piece.

Dial testing answers questions that traditional methods cannot.

“We were testing a pilot episode of a new television comedy, looking to identify scenes that were working and scenes that weren’t.  Through the survey results, we saw that the show tested better in total among men than women—a surprising result as women tended to favor this client’s shows.  However, on the dial, we saw something interesting.  There was a climactic scene during the pilot that men just loved.  It came about two-thirds of the way through the show, and it caused men’s dials to peak, creating a “halo effect” around the final third of the show.  Women, on the other hand, didn’t show as much interest in the scene.  Their dials flattened, and were then lukewarm for the rest of the program. So this indicated that this one scene was very polarizing by gender, and seemed to color each gender’s response to the rest of the show, and in fact, their entire evaluation of the program afterwards.  That’s a lot of power for one scene, and the dial traces illustrated it very clearly.

Dial testing is a great tool to optimize storytelling.

“Dial testing is a great tool for identifying storytelling issues. I tend to look at the dial trace on a ‘micro’ level to see how the individual beats are playing, and then on the ‘macro’ level to see how viewers are responding over time, and whether their interest is gradually building, stagnating or declining. Sometimes you can tell when a storytelling beat isn’t playing because of an immediate dip in interest. Other times, it’s like a tire gradually losing air, and you can trace back to where it picked up that ‘nail’ and interest began ‘leaking out.’”

Want to take a deeper dive into how to use dial testing for entertainment research?

Download the free Moment-to-Moment Research Playbook or contact us to answer your specific questions.