Real Fans Watch
Hope Solo. I wonder if she's related to Han.
PJ Tatler
Turns out we weren’t the only ones who became instant Hope Solo fans. Twitter reported earlier this week that the Women’s World Cup final on Sunday set a new record, with a peak volume of 7,196 tweets sent per second. It’s unclear how many of those were actually about the match (and not about related things, like the volume of beer in the fridge), but those numbers make it clear that something interesting is happening at the intersection of live television and social media.
It wasn’t too long ago when networks and advertisers alike were worried sick about time shifting, and how the DVR would destroy the value of the 30-second spot. What a difference a few years makes. Today, producers are hustling to overlay #hashtags on top of their shows, along with calls to action to get their fans tweeting on their behalf. Wiredset, a company focused on real-time marketing through social, last month published their guide to Social TV Best Practices, with helpful guides about using Twitter to do thing like “emphasize a major plot twist.” We can only imagine the fun in writers’ rooms across Los Angeles, figuring out just how to best integrate retweetable plot points and one-liners into their scripts…and then watching their social media dashboards in real time to see how it plays on the small(er) screens, out across the network.
The sharing’s not just happening on Twitter and Facebook; apps from GetGlue and Clicker make it easy for people to “check in” to the shows they’re watching and connect with other fans…popcorn not included. It used to be the case that bloggers and forum denizens would warn their readers about plot spoilers in their reviews and recaps. But if you’re a sports fan, a sitcom fan or a reality TV fan and are anywhere near your smartphone, avoiding spoilers is nearly impossible. Today, real fans watch. In real time. With their fingers on their keyboards.
As social media makes “appointment television” a real thing again, there’s an opportunity for brands to plan transmedia campaigns that connect all the screens in the house. It’s not just enough to deliver the 30 second spot. Smart creative will connect the emotional punch that’s possible on the wall-mounted big screen, to the engagement that’s possible on the mid-sized screen in the lap, to the social sharing that’s happening on the small screen in the hand.
While this is, as always, an interesting read, I think we're off base on the fundamental premise of the piece, which is that people are generally watching live television and there is no wind in the sails of the folks who have been declaring the tv commercial to be threatened by DVR's. Certainly, sports is a category that tends towards live viewing, since the excitement dies if you know the outcome before watching. That said, for the seemingly endless Tour de France, my wife has been recording the whole five hours every race day and watching after work, assiduously avoiding sports sections.
And she has been skipping commercials all the way through. In fact, SAY has conducted two major pieces of research in the last year that analyze the changing ways people are watching video programming and the implications for marketers. Our findings are consistent with the hand wringers worried about the 30-second spot. In the first, Off The Grid, we saw that 1/3 of the adult internet audience, or 56 million people, are watching either no live television or watching the majority time shifted. And the second most popular reason for moving away from watching live is the ability to skip commercials. More recently, we did a piece of research partnering with digital media consultancies that work in politics and two political pollsters. The full results of that research will be released in mid-September, but we find that a very similar 1/3 of the audience of likely voters did not watch live television in the week prior to the poll and a somewhat larger number describe a platform other than television as their primary source of video programming. Of the 35% of likely voters that have DVRs (a number that is still growing nationally), 87% of them say that they skip commercials at least 3/4 of the time.
Television programming is certainly social and programmers should be connecting with audiences in every way they can. 60% of the audience still does not have a DVR, live television is still a significant force. However, it is a declining force and the rise in social platform activity during live programming is not good news for advertisers who buy those tv spots. If you are busy tweeting about plot twists during the commercials, you are likely not paying attention to the commercials. We have seen numerous findings that show that people are increasingly using multiple devices while watching tv, suggesting that as programming experiences become more dimensional the attention focused on the screen continues to fragment. Not good news for big buyers of tv spots.
Twitter is indeed a great indicator of the cultural relevance of tv programming, among other things. It has almost become a public utility. There is, of course, another public utility that gets a good workout during commercial breaks of big live tv events like the Super Bowl and the Academy Awards. That is the municipal water system. I would argue that the use of either during commercials indicates an audience not engaged with advertising.
Posted by Matt | Saturday, July 23, 2011