The summer doldrums are disappearing from TV-land even faster than humans are being abducted by aliens on Steven Spielberg’s Taken.

The eerie sci-fi series debuted on CBC during what used to be tossed off as dog days worthy of little more than reruns. Yet Taken is scaring up respectable ratings and enticing an enviable roster of advertisers. The premiere boasted a national average minute audience (AMA) of 581,000 (adults 18 to 49), accounting for a 13% share, and one recent two-hour episode ran commercials for no fewer than 34 different marketers, among them such titans as KFC, Volkswagen, Coca-Cola, Shell, Bell and Kellogg’s.

CBC’s Taken – and CTV’s Canadian Idol, which recently garnered an impressive 1,234,000 AMA and 35% share (adults 18-49) – are only two of many examples that connote the end of a ho-hum era when blase programmers assumed that too few viewers were lurching out of the water to watch TV from June to September.

Even when cable networks and, later, specialty and digital channels began wooing viewers with fresh options, the biggies figured they could easily afford modest ratings dips until September, when their flocks presumably would trot back home.

Little did they dream that, one day, wandering viewers would get hooked on shows they ignored during the winter months – say, Designer Guys on HGTV or The Office on BBC Canada – and never return to key conventional time slots.

‘It’s not just that reruns drive people away from conventional channels,’ says Sherry O’Neil, managing director of Toronto-headquartered OMD Canada. ‘It’s that they’re being drawn to the specialty and digital channels that do a good job of positioning themselves, finding themes and attracting audiences by offering strong alternatives.’

Then came the summer of 2000, when CBS’s phenomenal Survivor series opened the floodgates to a deluge of cheap-to-produce and easy-to-refresh reality shows that just kept on coming.

‘Suddenly, it dawned on the networks, Canadian and American alike, that there was an opportunity to capture coveted advertising dollars year-round, not just during the traditional September-to-June broadcast season,’ explains Adam Ivers, SVP of programming for Toronto-based Global Television.

Along with that epiphany came acknowledgement that the traditional pattern of Dad getting a month off work and taking the whole family on vacation was history. These days, thanks to the increased prevalence of two-income and non-traditional families, shift work and shorter-allotted holiday time, viewers no longer just evaporate until Labour Day.

The result is a rising summer audience across the board, says Jim Patterson, president/CEO of the Toronto-based Television Bureau of Canada.

In fact, Nielsen Media Research numbers show that the percentage of Households Using Television (HUT) during the summer months (June through August) has increased from 10.5% in 1998 to 11.9% in 2002. Not only that, but over the same period, the broadcasters lost a significant percentage of their summer viewers to the specialties. To wit, in the summer of 1998, the conventionals had a 35.3% share, while the English-language Canadian specialties had an 18.4% share. In 2003, the conventional share dropped to 28.2% and the specialty share grew to 25.3%.

The end result of all this, says Patterson, is ‘an evolution to all-season television, [partly driven by] wow audience numbers for reality series such as Canadian Idol… which means a bigger payoff on programming investments.’

Today’s summer ratings dips don’t seem nearly as benign or inevitable as they used to at the conventional networks. Currently, their lost viewers average about 11% whenever reruns make up 20% to 40% of the primetime schedule, and zoom to 20% when the repeat rate is higher. These numbers are from a recent report by Magna Global USA, which concluded that ‘TV usage in the summer is now only 10% to 15% lower than during the nine-month season.’

Squandering so many summer viewers without a fight is now a no-no at a growing number of networks. South of the border, despite ABC’s decision to stick with reruns, other conventional broadcasters are premiering nearly two dozen original shows this summer, both reality and scripted.

The Fox network has taken the lead, says Helen Shelton, VP of broadcast operations at Toronto media shop MBS, who notes that ‘Fox is premiering a lot of their fall shows this summer. It’s partly because they’re carrying the World Series, which goes to the end of October, and partly because they got killed in the fall sweeps last year, so starting early is their solution.’

Some of the new Fox shows being simulcast in Canada this summer include Paradise Hotel, American Juniors and The O.C.

CBC is among the broadcasters that realize that summertime can be a goldmine instead of a wasteland, says Slawko Klymkiw, executive director of network programming. ‘We’ve decided that summer is actually a very, very good time for us and we’ve been proactively growing our programming accordingly,’ he says. ‘It makes a huge amount of sense because we’re building share, we’re building value through more interest, and a lot of smart advertisers are seeing the real benefits of buying in the summer.’

Among the boons of original summer programming, adds Klymkiw, is that there’s less competition from the broadcasters who do still rely heavily on reruns, and thus a better chance to draw attention than during the fall clutter. As well, with programming that extends into the traditional season, there’s the opportunity to get a jump-start on building momentum.

That’s valuable from a buyer’s point of view, says MBS’ Shelton, ‘because if you can see how a show is performing early on, it gives you an idea of how it’s going to do when the rubber hits the road during your fall and pre-Christmas buying.’

CTV is also capitalizing on these summertime advantages, says programming president Susanne Boyce. ‘That’s why we’re doing things like premiering Canadian Idol as a summer series, running the reality shows For Love or Money, Cupid and Amazing Race 4 now, and taking an existing show, e-Talk DAILY, from daytime to primetime. We also saved episodes of Sue Thomas: F.B.Eye for the summer, partly to build momentum for when its second season begins in the fall.’

Although Boyce says that CTV still does well with reruns of certain kinds of shows, such as Law & Order, ‘summer provides this whole other wonderful opportunity. And it just confirms that, no matter what time of year, if you program good material, people will watch.’

Global concurs with these views, says Ivers, ‘but we’re also balancing our original shows with repeats, which gives viewers a chance to catch things they missed the first time around.’

But Ellen Baine, VP of programming at CHUM Television, says her network has chosen not to introduce new shows this summer ‘because we prefer to hold on to the franchises that are doing well for the fall,’ including The Bachelor, The Bachelorette and Joe Millionaire.

‘However, on the Citytv side, in both Toronto and Vancouver,’ she adds, ‘we always run original big-name movies pretty well every night in the summer, and they sometimes get bigger audiences then because viewers aren’t tuning into reruns.’

This is especially true when movies are timed and promoted to borrow equity from theatrical releases. Recent examples include scheduling the original Charlie’s Angels and Terminator 2 for when their respective sequels hit the cinemas.

The bottom line about summer, says David Cairns, a partner at Toronto’s Asylum thinkgroup media consultancy, is that although programmers ‘may have to use different strategies, they can still find audiences. And lots of advertisers are looking for programming that attracts a lighter or a more discerning viewer, who might very well be watching the specialty channels.’

With more new programming debuting year-round, might traditional fall upfront buys eventually go the way of the dinosaur?

Shelton says it’s still too early to tell, ‘but the lines are definitely blurring because broadcasters and advertisers realize that both the viewers and the ratings really are there in the summertime.’

A version of this story appeared in

the July 28, 2003 issue of Strategy Media magazine.