Second Screen Changes How Viewers, Advertisers Interact, Create Shared Experiences, Executives Say
Second-screen engagement is becoming an important part of the marketing for TV programs, said Bravo Executive Vice President Lisa Hsia on a Cable Show panel on the growing trend of social TV. SocialGuide CEO Sean Casey said 80 percent of Twitter traffic about TV comes from mobile devices, and while only 1-2 percent of people watch live sports, it accounts for 50 percent of the conversation about TV on Twitter. Executives from Bravo, Starz, Facebook, SocialGuide and Zeebox also said second screens can entice more viewers to watch and have a shared experience.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Export Compliance Daily combines U.S. export control news, foreign border import regulation and policy developments into a single daily information service that reliably informs its trade professional readers about important current issues affecting their operations.
The second screen enables viewers to get involved with their TV programs in four ways, said Zeebox CEO Ernesto Schmidt. People interact with social media to discover which shows they want to watch, to get more information on their shows, to engage with non-linear forms of TV and to buy products, said Schmidt. Starz Executive Vice President John Penney said it would be most appealing to advertisers that “money can be made through transactions and ratings; Advertisers make money because people are engaged with programs and they want to watch.” Facebook found 47 percent of people find their new shows from their friends on Facebook, said Jane Schachtel, Facebook global technology lead.
Bravo was the first network to create a second-screen experience through Facebook and Twitter and mobile apps, said Hsia. “We rerun episodes with curated comments to create interactive versions of the shows, and they have higher ratings than the original. Reality TV and live talk shows lend themselves more to the second screen,” said Hsia. Bravo is working on providing full episodes through its mobile apps and making it a second-screen experience. Starz’s needs are different because it doesn’t have advertising or product placement, said Penney: “We base our model on retention and to do [that] people need to engage with the brand.”
SocialGuide will collaborate with Nielsen to create the Nielsen Twitter TV Rankings, launching in September, creating the first measurement of total audience for social TV activity. “We hope that it will become a social currency for advertisers and the networks,” Casey told us. The rankings will create a standardized measuring approach from a social perspective, said Casey. “We want networks to have a measure of knowing how valuable from a social perspective their ratings are and ultimately charge advertisers more money for shows that have higher social engagement because it’s higher programming which leads to higher ad recalling potentially,” Casey told us.
The TV landscape will drastically change over the next 10 years to meet consumer needs, experts said. “It’s going to be driven by how they interact with shows and we have ability to take advantage of these people and their personal experiences,” said Schachtel. The experts said the challenge for multi-system operators will be to integrate social media into the experience to maintain customers. “Social media in general is affecting a lot of areas of society and the entertainment experience is going to be one of them,” said Casey.