I have been really curious about how the very expensive infomercial would play. We know now that the CONTENT was amazing and struck the perfect emotional tone.
And now we know that people actually saw it! Via Ben Smith:
The Obama-mercial was fairly highly rated across the three broadcast networks (CBS, Fox and NBC) in the early metered market numbers. Between the three networks it scored an impressive combined 17.8/29 (household rating/share).
I am not extremely well-versed in TV ratings lingo--I assume this means about 17.8 million households saw it?
We also don't know yet how the cable nets (MSNBC, Univision, BET, TVOne) contributed to viewership, so it was probably more like 25 million households.
Either way, this was money extremely well spent. I have gotten nothing but positive feedback from everyone I have asked about it. It really went over very strongly with the weak Obama supporters that I know.
Thanks to Siberian for the lingo explanation:
As of August 27, 2007, there are an estimated 112.8 million television households in the United States. A single national ratings point represents one percent of the total number, or 1,128,000 households for the 2006-07 season. Share is the percentage of television sets in use tuned to the program.
For example, Nielsen may report a show as receiving a 9.2/15 during its broadcast, meaning that on average 9.2 percent of households were tuned in at any given moment (i.e. how many televisions in the country were in use at that time). Additionally, 15 percent of all televisions in use at the time were tuned into this program (i.e. how many of those televisions were watching this particular show). Nielsen re-estimates the number of households each August for the upcoming television season.