The newest Emmy nomination list is out, and following last year’s breakthrough success, Netflix is winning even bigger this year, with a total of 31 nominations compared to last year’s 14. Besides various expected nods for its acclaimed series House of Cards and Orange is the New Black, it also scored a surprise nomination for Ricky Gervais for Lead Actor in its new original comedy series Derek. Overall, premium cable company HBO still dominating the field with most number of nominations. But Netflix’s consecutive success in winning critical acclaims nicely echoes their recent “TV is getting better” native ad, signaling the continuous rise of the OTT content providers in the market.
Tag: tv
Millenials Spend More Time Watching TV Content On Other Devices
A study from Deloitte has found that teens and younger twentysomethings spend more time watching TV shows and movies on other devices than their TV. Not surprisingly, desktop was leading the charge as the greatest TV competitor while approximately 8% of all viewing occurred on a gaming device. These stats point to why Chromecast and Roku streaming sticks are gaining traction as they couple the interactivity of mobile with the larger display of TV.
Brands Who Release Super Bowl Ads Early Win Big
The Super Bowl is still fresh in the minds of advertisers as they slowly determine the returns on their advertising dollars. The reach of an ad doesn’t stop at the end of the game, though, and online views have become increasingly important to the overall success of a campaign. Analytics firm Visible Measures looked at online “True Reach” statistics for every Super Bowl campaign since 2010 and found that advertisers who released their ads online before the game saw far greater reach than those who didn’t. Budweiser’s “Puppy Love” commercial from this year’s bowl had already received 26.7 million views before the game, and its final reach is expected to be much higher.
Amazon To Shoot Originals In 4K
Amazon is planning to shoot its original content in 4K, the ultra-HD format that will be the industry standard in the living room…eventually. For now, 4K is practically a proof-of-concept with the lack of 4K TVs on the market and even less content available. It’s a ‘chicken or the egg’ scenario as TV manufacturers require content and content creators require an audience. Nevertheless, Amazon is positioning themselves at the forefront of innovation and will unquestionably give 4K some much needed momentum.
95% Of TV Conversations Happen On Twitter
Twitter announced that 95 percent of online public conversations about TV take place on Twitter, and 60 percent of UK Twitter users are active on Twitter whilst watching TV. Moreover, 40 percent of all Twitter traffic around peak time is about TV. Not surprisingly, Twitter has launched a TV retargeting product called Twitter Amplify, integrated broadcasts into tweets and provided robust analytics service to corner the TV industry.
Roku Adds Live Disney and ESPN Content
As Americans begin to abandon cable TV providers in favor of streaming services, and those streaming services being to gain a foothold in the living room environment, content providers are aiming to distribute to the widest variety of services possible. Set-top box manufacturer Roku added new live broadcast programming to its selection in the form of WatchESPN and WatchDisney channels. These networks are available widely to tens of millions of digital cable subscribers, and represent an effort on the part of content providers to accommodate varying user tastes to ensure they aren’t left behind by rapid developments in how people choose to consume media.
Flurry & IPG Lab Media Trial: TV Viewing Vs Tablet
IPG Lab and Flurry conducted behavioral focus groups with tablet video watchers. Left alone in our living room, hidden video cameras show that participants watch tablet video very differently than TV, even taking the tablet with them on trips to the kitchen instead of waiting for an ad break, as our TV watchers did. Hear our participants give their opinions on tablet video first-hand, and see it through their eyes via a video camera embedded in their eye-glasses.
WWE: A Case Study On Second Screen Effectiveness
If there is anything to be learned about WWE’s wildly successful second screen initiative, it’s placing a premium on audience participation. From airing video responses from viewers to audience polling that affects storylines, the WWE is committed to making their viewers active participants. Their second screen programs bring viewers far closer than Twitter can, and yet most of the second screen efforts fail on that front. An auto check-in or character list is not a close enough tie-in to sustain attention across screens.
Can TV Be The Mobile Cookie?
Most industry folks would agree that the Holy Grail of marketing is to create a) highly targeted advertising b) at scale. This is, however, no easy feat…
As we point out in the recently released Second Screen Fallacy report, the simultaneous usage of a mobile device while watching TV (a behavior true of most mobile users at this point) is the best means we have of personalizing the TV experience. But while mobile offers the best means of personalizing, TV continues to be the most effective medium for reaching audiences at scale.
Recognizing that “second screen” is a nebulous and often misleading term, in this case we are using it to represent a two-screen advertising strategy, regardless of which you would consider the “first” and “second” screens.
A recent Forbes article does a great job of describing what we might call a “marriage of convenience” between Twitter and TV networks and their hybrid offspring: Twitter Amplify, which enables complementary content to be served up to users on the second screen. But we have started to observe a different dynamic occurring between the two screens; TV content is now starting to be used to contextually target a user on mobile platforms.
Not only do marketers want to know who the users are, but also what mood they are in, and what interests they’ve recently indulged in (cooking, sports or X Factor?) so we can target them with right message at the right time, according to their specific mindset. Ultimately, TV provides rich behavioral insight for mobile targeting, and this dual screen dynamic is opening the doors to richer and more personalized mobile targeting, powered by hefty TV audience data.
In my previous life as a digital media planner, the daily banter with ad ops would include: “how many cookies do we have in the cookie jar,” because some of our campaigns were so targeted it would sometimes take weeks to gather enough cookies for a fully-fledged retargeting campaign. But TV is a ready-and-waiting, data-rich cookie pool which can now be activated, thanks to the “second screen” industry.
And so far, it is showing promise. AdTonik, a “second screen” startup, found that using TV as a “cookie” off which to retarget mobile ads has resulted in a reported 3-10x increase in mobile engagement (compared to straight-up mobile buying).
Meanwhile, at the Lab, we are starting to establish best practices in this nascent space. In partnership with Collective, we have conducted research (to be released soon) focusing on Collective’s cross-screen targeting capability, TVA. Our research demonstrates that re-messaging people sequentially (meaning within 10 to 40 minutes of TV exposure) across screens yields the highest ad breakthrough. We also found that using the same creative across the two screens is more effective than switching (at least until breakthrough has been achieved).
Another potential twist on this theme, from our resident broadcast visionary, Brian Hughes, is to reverse engineer the flow of data, using mobile as the “cookie” to make TV advertising more targeted and effective.
“Simulmedia, for example, already allows you to buy targeted local TV ads based on content people are watching,” he noted; “why can’t we use the richer data available via mobile to create more targeted TV ads?”
Why Are TV Channels Still Numbered, Anyway?
In the on-demand, programmatically-bought future, fitting content into numbered slots will seem antiquated and superfluous. Our great-grandchildren will hardly believed we ever did things this way.
When I was a kid, we had a small black & white TV with a dial. We had our choice of channels 2 -13, plus another knob for the vast UHF wasteland. No offense, Weird Al.
Television was presented to us as an ordered list, because that was how it was broadcast. Since each TV station needed to broadcast on a different frequency, they were assigned orderly little slots. Since geographically adjacent markets needed to alternate which slots they used, and TV-makers didn’t want to manufacture new knobs for each market, the slots were assigned numbers and the numbers were put on the knobs in sequence. Channel 4 broadcast at a slightly higher frequency than Channel 3, but a lower frequency than Channel 5.
Then along came cable TV. Cable inherited this legacy even though it was not bound by broadcast frequencies. Consumers needed to know that if they subscribed to cable, they would still get “Channel 2” and “Channel 7”; plus they get new cable networks, which get their own arbitrary numbers. Why train people on a whole new system, right? Cable is just like “regular” TV, except with lots more of it. Also, it’s easier to show a number on the front of the cable box than the name of the channel. So the numbering model was still useful. Also cable companies could use “low” numbers as negotiating leverage with networks.
This model doesn’t hold for newer forms of content. The Huffington Post isn’t “Website number 802.” Of course it isn’t, trying to number websites would be superfluous and silly. You don’t have to navigate up and down through a list of websites, you just type in what you want based on its descriptive name and go there. Your only hurdle perhaps is remembering which vowels to leave out of the domain name.
A slow revolution of sorts is beginning to take hold that will finally challenge the numbered-TV model. You may have heard this referred to as “cord-cutting” or as the adoption of “over-the-top” entertainment options. This trend doesn’t just mean people cancelling cable and watching Netflix instead. It challenges the 70-year old definition of what a “network” is and the 7-year old definition of what an “app” is (vis a vis entertainment).
Right now, we have cable networks with linear programming, and we have apps with supplementary content about those cable networks. The logical conclusion of the current trends is that the two merge; the linear TV broadcast of live events plus on-demand shows all live within an app that is ad supported (e.g. Hulu), subscription based (e.g. something like HBO Go or Netflix), or some sort of hybrid. Imagine a world where you subscribe to “cable”, but instead of 500 numbered channels, you get access to 500 apps. Each app then has the “TV network” as you used to know it embedded within, plus supplementary functionality. So your ESPN app includes live coverage plus a widget showing scores, and your History Channel app shows an interactive map with the best routes for ice road trucking along with the show of the same name.
You don’t necessarily lose the ability to bundle content the way cable does currently. For instance, a parent company with many cable networks could bundle them together into one subscription app, effectively becoming a mini-cable company unto itself. A user could then rebuild an approximation of current-day cable service by subscribing to some of these bundles. The idea of assigning numbers to these apps at that point would seem completely ridiculous. As content providers shift to this model, so begins the decline of the channel number. The last vestige will be over-the-air broadcasts; but even then any remotely modern digital tuner can list channels by name rather than number with a simple firmware upgrade.
And what would that then mean for advertising? Well it’s a whole new world entirely. The 30 & 60 second spot formats will erode in favor of a new set of standards for video and interactive ads. These new standard units will be distributed across a vast sea of platforms, apps and experiences in real time based on programmatic algorithms. In parallel there will be enormous opportunities for specialized sponsorships, apps, games and experiences that can rise above the clutter and integrate themselves with audiences’ lives. If you need help imagining what this future will be like, just take a look at where digital display advertising has been headed.
We’re already reading about Apple skipping the cable companies and going directly to content providers for their long-awaited TV offering. Netflix original programming is another example of what this future may look like (albeit without ads). The more Netflix produces original programming, the more they begin to resemble what we currently think of as a TV network. Except they never had a channel number, and never needed one, and never will.
