Morning TV Survey Results – The ConsumHERist

Posted on | January 8, 2009 |

by Delia Passi

We recently surveyed the thousands of women in our MedeliaMonitor database on their TV morning show habits and opinions. 271 women responded, providing an interesting insight into what drives women to watch those perky morning hosts.

72% told us that they do watch morning shows, regardless of whether they are in the work force or not.
74% of moms watch morning shows.
36% say that The Today Show is their favorite, with Good Morning America a close second at 32.8%. This contradicts the ratings differential reported at TVbythenumbers.com which has much greater spread. Is GMA doing better with women?
Despite the declared importance of local news (54.2% said it is the most important content), and local weather (49.8%), local news morning shows are favored by only 17.9%, putting them collectively in third place ahead of The Early Show on CBS. Again, this somewhat contradicts TVbythenumbers.com which had TES a good deal higher vis-à-vis Today and GMA.
National news was trumped by local news in importance despite the general lack of local coverage on the big 3 network shows.
After news and weather, our respondents liked health, special interest and food segments in that order when it came to content. Further down the list were celebrity, shopping, parenting, finance and international content.
There was little difference of opinion on whether mixed gender hosts were better than just women as hosts, but most felt that a personal connection with the hosts was important.
When asked if a horoscope feature was of interest, 32% said absolutely not, and 68% weren’t so adamant. I think my mother helped skew this response.

Questions that we didn’t ask but perhaps should have asked include:

Would pretty work as well as perky?
What makes the best weather reporting personality?
What is Ann Curry trying to prove? What’s next after brain swelling on Mt. Kilimanjaro? Mars?