Tag Archives: tv

Another Day

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February 10, 2012

On Sunday 5th February, What’s Hot was one of the 111.3m viewers who tuned in to watch this year’s Super Bowl final. For the third consecutive year, it attracted the largest audience of a TV programme in US history. At a price tag of $3.5m for a 30 second spot, it is the definition of primetime viewing. With the rise and rise of dual-screening, this year advertisers pulled out all the stops to make sure that, regardless of the platform, they had the viewers’ attention.

Ever since Apple’s iconic ‘1984’ ad, which introduced the Macintosh personal computer for the first time, the Super Bowl ads have become an integral part of the whole extravaganza. Hulu, an American online TV streaming platform, jumped on board this year and partnered with Advertising Age and Toyota to bring viewers the ‘ultimate viewing experience’.  The Hulu Adzone Player allowed viewers to watch the ads in real time as they aired on TV, to vote for their favourite ads and share the clips across social media. Thanks to Hulu, the ads instantly took on another level of engagement.

Coca Cola also embraced engagement by creating entertaining content that ran online throughout the evening, and nicely complemented their spot airtime ads. During the game, two of the brand’s legendary polar bears were decked out in team colours – one in a New York Giants’ blue scarf and one in a New England Patriots’ red scarf. Viewers who logged on to the Coca Cola site could watch the bears react in real time to the match (e.g. celebrating when someone scored) and could follow the bears commenting on Twitter and ask them questions.

Users were prompted to engage with brands featured during the ad breaks – 68% of the ads shown had references to websites and social media sites. As viewers of sporting events tend to be passive, the challenge is how do you convince them to interact with an ad? Simple answer: free stuff. Between Shazam and QR codes, goodies up for grabs ranged from two Camrys from Toyota, $50 off a new phone in Best Buy, and exclusive content from Madonna for the half-time show.

And the results? This year’s Super Bowl attracted 12.2m social media comments during and immediately after it – a 578% increase on last year, making it the biggest social media event recorded in the US. Tweets spiked at 10,000 per second. People weren’t just watching – they were interacting.

Looking forward to Superbowl 2013, it would seem that the lesson to learn from this is to keep your eyes on your screens – all of them.

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Modern Life is Rubbish

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January 16, 2012

 

Last week saw the world’s tech lovers drawn to Las Vegas in their annual pilgrimage to the Computer Electronics Show (CES). Whilst What’s Hot would love to be checking out impressive new innovations from clever people, this year we have to settle for observing the reams of excited online content generated by the show.

Against a backdrop of worldwide austerity, there is in fact more amazing gadgetry on show than ever.

Samsung has been busy impressing even die-hard Apple fans, leading the technological revolution with its smart, connected TV products. Samsung’s OLED sets (that’s organic light-emitting diodes to you and I) with ultra-crisp picture and wafer-thin appearance have set tongues wagging, and both Samsung and LG are sounding the death knell for the humble remote, with voice and gesture controls taking over.

Inevitably, tablets are everywhere, but the new buzz is around ‘ultra-books’.  Critics say this is a dismal attempt by laptop manufacturers to win back some currency from the tablet players, or just MacBook Air copycats.  However, with machines such as the HP Envy 14 Spectre boasting some impressive technology, an interesting war might be on the horizon.

Moving swiftly from the sublime to the ridiculous, here’s something else that caught our eye. At What’s Hot we love to give new gadgets a chance, but we’re not sold on the LC Smart Manager fridge.  Priced at £2,000 it has an LCD touchscreen, camera and internet connection which means it can download recipes and link to online shopping services such as Ocado.

This scary piece of kitchen equipment comes with a range of capabilities, such as scanning your barcodes and receipts, monitoring its contents – even suggesting recipes based on the ingredients you have left. It can also switch on the oven to the correct temperature for said recipe via a wireless connection. Move over Delia.

Google is present, of course, pushing its TV offering and highlighting partnerships with large flatscreen manufacturers such as Vizio and Sony. 

Lastly, a nod to Ford in the US, and the announcement that it is bringing iHeartRadio to its vehicle line-up, allowing drivers to access the popular US radio service using voice commands.  Ford will be the first auto company to offer cars access to iHeartRadio, an app which features more than 800 of America’s top broadcast and digital-only stations, and allows users to create their own custom radio stations using particular artists and songs.

The Ford SYNC AppLink gives drivers hands-free control, access to local traffic reports via the phone’s GPS and a connection to Facebook timeline to allow music sharing with friends. Keep your hands on the wheel, sir!

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When You’re Looking Like That

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October 21, 2011

 The internet and social media have allowed people to define the terms on which they interact with the media they consume. For example, The X Factor may be seeing a drop in viewer numbers but this doesn’t stop fans from tweeting about the contestants or the judges. The latest figures show that 59 per cent of 16-23 year olds use social networking sites to discuss their preferred television programmes with their online friends. What does this have to do with us? Well recently 52 per cent of people have admitted to shopping online whilst watching television. What’s Hot decided that it was about time we had a look at how consumers are interacting with TV and digital simultaneously.

 The act of watching television whilst using another screen, whether that be laptops, tablets or smartphones, is known in the industry as ‘dual-screening’. Dual-screening isn’t particularly new, but only an astonishingly small handful of companies have used it to their advantage. Of course it is by no means unusual to see a television programme ‘#hashtagging’ to encourage Twitter interaction from their followers. However very few have embraced dual-screening for its marketing potential, perhaps the logistics of co-ordinating marketing on two devices limiting what they feel they can do.

 One company to attempt to incorporate dual-screening is Honda. After its highly successful ‘Grrr’ campaign, Honda decided to create something that could interact with its television advertisement. Their creation was a mobile app which could be ‘swiped’ at the television whilst the advertisement was being played. The application would recognise the soundtrack and automatically download a character from the advertisement, with a total of six available. This encouraged the consumer to actually interact with the advert, anticipating the next time it will be screened in order to download their next character.

Dual-screening may not be such good news for the television industry. Even for the most tech-savvy user it is practically impossible to be concentrating on the television content whilst discussing it on social platforms. Furthermore if consumers choose to use their second screen to research the brand or programme, whilst having it on their television, they are automatically transferring their concentration into the hands of the digital world. The television advertisement will have little chance to influence the user after they turn their eyes to a search engine or social network.

We are yet to see the direction dual-screening will take in regards to advertising potential. What is certain is that advertisers can no longer take for granted the effectiveness of any single media type.

 Consumers are communicating their likes and dislikes over many different levels, and advertisers need to keep an eye on it.

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TV Market

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October 6, 2010

The doomsayers predicting the end of the current rally in TV revenue seem to have got it wrong again. TV revenue remains stubbornly up double digits this autumn and even looks for a rise into the new year. Good news for ITV and the rest of the station groups who rely on ad revenue and strangely this is good news for advertisers. Prices have increased year on year but are still below pre-recession levels and the TV programme producers have more cash and importantly more confidence to invest in new programmes.

But let’s not get too excited, easter and beyond in 2011 are still too far off to call and nobody is talking levels of growth continuing indefinitely.

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Porn Again

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September 2, 2010

Richard Desmond is a smart media operator and his achievements at Express Newspapers are the subject of business text books, so we are truly baffled by his decision to buy Five from RTL for a reported £103m.

He might be the king of media turnarounds but turning around this ailing TV station will be no mean feat.

Last year Five lost in excess of £35m  on an operating income of a little over £200m, in our opinion even with a bit of recovery in the TV market, no amount of cost cutting is going to make up this difference without impacting the very fabric of the station.

And herein lies the rub, Five is a small TV station entirely reliant on advertising revenue for survival. To grow that revenue it needs bigger and better audiences, but in an increasingly digital world the cost of growing those audiences is getting more expensive and arguably more risky, so unless the team at Northern and Shell have a new formula for making great TV shows, you’ll understand our skepticism.

There has been much talk about investing in the programme budget, maybe taking over the Big Brother franchise from C4 and introducing a new level of cross promotion on Desmond’s TV and Print products, but we don’t buy this and it flies in the face of the way that TV advertising is bought and sold. ITV, C4 and Sky have spent years building their audience base and trading strategy. They’ve also invested heavily in developing a whole story around the relative strengths, weaknesses and sub audience segmentations across their portfolio channels.  Five has always struggled to define their place in this world – building a franchise based on football, films and f**ing (for those old enough to remember) is hardly a proposition that endures.

So unless Desmond has a cunning plan to persuade the big agency groups to back him we don’t believe he can achieve the sort of success he did 10 years ago with the Express. Nonetheless we have to admire his chutzpah and wish him and his team every success, competition in the TV market is to be encouraged and please keep the gadget show going – we love it!

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