Political Ads Target TV, But Not Everyone Is Tuning In : NPR
“The No. 1 finding in the survey, which really shocked me, is that 31 percent of voters we talked to said they had not watched live TV in the past week,” Newhouse says.
Live in this case doesn’t mean a live event, like a baseball game — it means watching a TV program when a channel or network airs it. So if about a third of TV viewers only watched recorded programming in the previous week, there’s no reason to assume they sat through the commercials. That’s what the fast-forward button is for.
“You do a little deeper dive in the data, and there’s not a gender difference, there’s not a partisan difference — Republicans vs. Democrats — not really an educational difference,” Newhouse says. “Where there’s a real difference is a generation difference. The generation gap is stark and wide.”