Five years later, TVI once again became the audience leader in Portugal. SIC, the group that led this count since February 2019, was dethroned this month by the Queluz de Baixo station, with data showing an audience of around 16% in the February average and an advantage of 0.6 percentage points over TVI compared to its main competitor.
Cristina Ferreira was present at the turnaround made by SIC in 2019, when the Impresa group station broke an audience hegemony that had lasted for 12 years. Now at TVI, she admits to PÚBLICO that this overtaking was already something that Queluz de Baixo was looking forward to, a feeling reinforced by the hard-fought accounts of recent months.
“We had this desire [de ser líderes] and we worked every day to make that happen. We have already had months of great proximity with SIC over these four years, minimum distances that sometimes represented an average of five or ten thousand viewers”, recalls the executive administrator of Media Capital and director of entertainment and fiction at TVI.
Miguel Manso/PUBLICO
TVI’s approach to SIC has been taking place for several months now, but the Impresa group station had managed to maintain its advantage in the month’s average until now. In January, for example, SIC and TVI closed the month just two tenths apart (15.5% against 15.3%), with the Queluz de Baixo station losing ground in the ranking. prime timea trend eased in February that allowed this turnaround.
“In January we had already had more victories [diárias] in relation to SIC. We realized that February, being also our birthday month, could be the month in which we could achieve [a liderança]. I confess that, throughout this week, the days never passed,” she says, laughing.
If we look at the audience data – we still need to calculate the data from the 29th of February –, TVI led the majority of days in February, achieving, on the 20th of the previous month, an advantage of 4% in share compared to SIC, one of the biggest differences between the two stations in the entire month of February. On the side of the Impresa group station there was fairplay: in SIC’s monthly audience report, TVI is congratulated for its victory in the audience “war”.
“This is exactly the same position that TVI has, the more fight we have on the other side, the more encouraged we feel to win. But our main objective is always the spectator. We don’t focus on what others do, but on what we think is a good product to capture the public. It’s obvious that we are always vigilant about what the competition does – it’s part of our job”, he reiterates.
Even though all programs are fundamental to February’s success, the weight of entertainment was preponderant in breaking SIC’s cycle. The area is under the responsibility of Cristina Ferreira, who recognizes that the success – or otherwise – of a given program can be critical to the final results.
“In terms of entertainment, we have already managed to be leaders for many months – if we remove information from the equation. But TVI is a whole, we have to ‘marry’ entertainment with information and it is from this whole that we arrived at these February numbers. Information accounts for four hours a day and entertainment is the other 20”, he analyzes.
Despite it being a time of celebration, Cristina Ferreira does not disarm. For the executive administrator, the month brought a “cycle break” for SIC, with the person responsible believing that the true consolidation of leadership in the hearings will be achieved in the coming months.
