Men and Women Watch TV Differently. Here’s how to make money from that.

Most of us don't actually zone out in front of the TV. In fact, we give off all kinds of clues to what we really think about the shows we are watching.

Japanese startup, T-Vision Insights has come up with a way both to measure and to monetize those reactions.

Today we sit down with founder and CEO Yasushi Gunya and we talk about T-Vision's business and the future of advertising in video.

T-Vision Insights already has 100's of customers and is monitoring thousands of households both in Japan and the US and we dive into some of the differences in how different kinds of people watch and react to TV.

I guarantee some of the results will surprise you.

It's a great conversation, and I think you'll enjoy it.


Show Notes

How AI can determine viewer engagement
Proof that women watched the super bowl more closely than men
How men and women watch TV differently

Which TV shows and commercials  are most engaging
The danger of advertising on the Walking Dead
How privacy concerns are addressed
Why it's hard to sell genuinely new innovations
The most engaging parts of commercials
Why starting a startup is not really risky in Japan





Links from the Founder

Everything you ever wanted to know about T-Vision Insights
T-Vision Insight's ranking of the most engaging commercials in Japan
Friend Yasushi on Facebook


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Transcript
Welcome to Disrupting Japan, straight talk from Japan’s most successful entrepreneurs.

I’m Tim Romero and thanks for joining me.

This episode is a fun one. You know, I’ve always considered watching TV to be a passive activity. I mean, aside from sleeping, it seems like the most passive thing you could spend your time doing. You zone out while entertainment is poured into your brain, but it turns out, that’s not quite the case. TV watchers are a subtly active bunch and as we watch, we give off all kinds of signals to indicate our opinion of what we are being shown.

Well, Yasushi Gunya, founder and CEO of T-Vision Insights has developed an unobtrusive way to measure viewers’ reactions to TV shows and to TV commercials. It’s already deployed in thousands of homes in Japan and in the United States, and the results are remarkable. T-Vision is already showing global 100 brands how consumers react to their commercials and to the TV shows that they air in, and they provide a data-driven approach to show what content is the most engaging and what kind of response it evokes, but what I think is even more interesting is that T-Vision’s data shows that we all engage with TV differently.

Adults engage differently than children, Americans watch differently than Japanese, and men watch very differently than women do. In fact, there’s a big difference between how men and women watch sports on TV, and I guarantee you, it’s not the difference you think it is.

But Yasushi tells that story much better than I can. So, let’s get right to the interview.

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 [Interview]

Tim: Cheers!

Yasushi: Cheers!

Tim: So, we are sitting here in the We Work office in this incredibly hot Tokyo afternoon with Yasushi Gunya of T-Vision Insights, so thanks for sitting down with us.

Yasushi: Thank you, Tim, and let’s cheer since we have beer here.

Tim: That tastes good on a hot day. So, T-Vision Insights measures the viewer’s reactions to TV shows and the commercials, but why don’t you explain basically how it works and what it is?

Yasushi: Okay, our core technology is AI-backed algorithm and we just inserted to a sensor and set the sensor on the top of TV. As a result, we can understand how people in front of the TV will react to the contents of TV, and actually, we have already said this kind of stuff to 3,000 households in US and Japan.

Tim: Okay, and we say ‘how they react,’ so is this a device sort of like Microsoft Kinect,