Top10 ways marketers are using the second screen | Marketing magazine.
The ‘second screen’ is quickly becoming a golden marketing opportunity, as consumers increasingly multi-task while watching TV with their smartphone or tablet. Using it to complement the TV experience is becoming increasingly common as live events or telecasts engage their audiences in ‘social TV’ and advertisers attempt to capitalise on a ‘media multiplier’ effect in real time by referring viewers from TVC to the device in their hands.
This profileration of screens is creating intriguing new possibilities for TV broadcasters and marketers alike, JWTIntelligence writes in this top 10 taken from the agency’s trend briefing. JWT’s report was compiled from research conducted throughout the first half of the year, and supplemented by interviews with experts from Shazam, TVexchanger.com, MIT and Participant Television.
1. Leveraging the small screen during big live events
Big annual events like the Super Bowl and the Grammys have been garnering more viewers and buzz as social media and second screens create a digital watercooler. Brands are catching the attention of viewers whose attention is split between screens in various ways.
Coca-Cola created commercials featuring its animated polar bears for this year’s Super Bowl, then extended the idea into a second screen ‘Polar Bowl’: Two bear viewers (one rooting for the Giants, another for the Patriots) reacted to the game, the halftime show and the commercials in near-real time. The bears also commented via @CocaCola on Twitter. While the brand had planned for 300,000 concurrent live stream viewers, more than double that number had the stream open by the third quarter, with viewership growing as more people mentioned the Polar Bowl on Facebook and Twitter.
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2. Incentivising ad engagement
Mobile apps open up opportunities to reward TV viewers for watching commercials or second-screen branded messaging – incentives range from freebies and coupons to relevant content like recipes – and even lead them right into an opportunity to purchase.
Unilever’s Dove Men+Care used Viggle, the app that rewards users for watching TV shows, during the NBA’s ‘March Madness’. When viewers checked in to broadcasts of the college basketball games, they were directed to a Dove Men+Care landing page that offered extra Viggle points for watching Dove’s ‘Journey to Comfort’ videos, featuring three basketball legends. The landing page included live tournament stats and an Amazon ecommerce link.
3. Gamifying TV ads
Another way to incentivise viewers to not only keep watching ads but more actively engage with them is by adding second-screen gaming elements that are either fun for their own sake or tied into contests and sweepstakes.
In 2011, Coca-Cola created Chok, an app for the Hong Kong market that turned users’ phones into a mechanism for collecting virtual bottle caps. When signaled by the music in a Coca-Cola TV commercial, the app opened and synced to the ad, then prompted consumers to shake the phone (‘chok’ is Cantonese for this action). Using the device’s accelerometer, the app measured the vigor of the motion and doled out bottle caps accordingly. These could be used to enter an instant drawing for prizes big and small, including digital goods like mobile games. Within 15 hours of launch, Chok became the number one free app.
4. Bridging a campaign’s TV and digital elements
Instead of simply asking interested or intrigued viewers to visit a microsite or Facebook page after seeing a TV commercial, marketers can use second-screen apps like Shazam to quickly link consumers with a campaign’s online elements and provide simple ways to share their enthusiasm via social media.
A 2011 Australian campaign for this Unilever ice cream brand was themed around the Enigma bear mascot helping consumers to “reveal their soft side”; the microsite let Australians send a personalized message via the bear to ‘someone special’. Shazaming the TV spot led viewers directly to a mobile version of that site.
5. Syncing ecommerce with TV content
Simultaneous watching and shopping, with instant gratification for consumers and measurable results for brands, is an old idea that never quite came to fruition beyond home shopping networks. New technology looks to be changing that. While the second screen isn’t vital here, mobile apps offer an easy route to purchase. This could be through a TV spot that syncs to e-commerce options on mobile devices or by using the second screen to surface info on how to buy in-show products.
Watch With eBay, the US app lets users ‘shop your favorite shows’. You input your zip code and cable provider to set it up, then enter the channel number in order to see live auctions linked to what’s on-screen. In theory, the app brings up products related to the TV content: a basketball jersey during March Madness, a Jessica Simpson brand T-shirt during the showFashion Star. In practice, however, it turns up just as many unrelated items (Ringer, for example, summoned a bounty of ringer T-shirts; Fox’s Bones turned up unaffiliated Bones brand skateboard wheels). eBay ultimately aims to match up its listings with specific items viewers are seeing (or lookalikes) by accessing a product database that various shows would provide. A secondary feature, ‘Shop Like a Star’, allows app users to choose from among an actor’s favorite eBay categories, with purchases benefiting the celeb’s favorite charity.
6. Sponsoring second-screen extras
By either partnering with existing tools like Shazam or piggy-backing off custom TV show apps, brands can sponsor novel second-screen experiences for fans.
The US version of The X Factor, which airs on Fox, added a synchronised Xtra Factor mobile app last September that’s ‘presented by’ Verizon. Fans can rate performances, interact with other viewers and access bonus content such as song lyrics. Consumers with a Verizon Android handset can vote for their favorite contestants as often as they want, see backstage goings-on via Verizon Live View and watch episode highlights.
7. Giving sports fans a game of their own
Sports programming is often cited as ‘low-hanging fruit’ when it comes to social TV and the second screen: Fans are especially interested in supplemental information and a group-viewing experience.
This Star Player app from Heineken, launched in 2011, provides a second-screen gaming experience for the soccer fan without distracting from what matters most: the match. The Star Player allows viewers of UEFA Champions League games to interact with the action in real time (and, with the latest update, in eight languages), syncing with the game clock when the match begins. Users then earn points by predicting game events such as goals and corner kick outcomes and by answering questions during periodic pop-up quizzes.
Players compete against friends, in a mini-league, and can also check their rank against all the app users. ‘Dwell time’ with the app has averaged 56 minutes.
8. Spurring social chatter with hashtags
Adding hashtags to ads, increasingly common practice over the past year, is one of the most basic ways to extend an ad beyond 30 seconds and one channel. An Accenture study conducted in March found that 18% of the US consumers surveyed had noticed a hashtag in an ad and that 7% had then searched for the hashtag on Twitter.
Audi was the only marketer to include a hashtag in a 2011 Super Bowl ad. For this year’s
Super Bowl, which featured an array of hashtags during the commercials, the automaker ran a spot promoting its daylight-simulating LED headlights. A group of young vampires partying outdoors at night is incinerated by an Audi’s bright lights; #SoLongVampires was the hashtag. Viewers who entered the hashtag in Google rather than Twitter saw an ad for Audi’s ‘Vampire Party’ on Facebook.
9. Enabling real-time interactivity
Letting viewers directly influence live big-screen content, beyond simple voting tools, is an intriguing concept that we’ll see broadcasters starting to experiment with (there’s great potential for game shows), along with marketers.
In late April, a trailer for the Ridley Scott film Prometheus featured the hashtag #areyouseeingthis. Nothing all that new about hashtags in ads. But these Sunday night viewers had added incentive to tweet: During the next commercial break, a 40-second spot showcased some of the tweets the first ad had elicited. At one point that evening, the hashtag was the number two trending topic in the UK.
Image credit: Twentieth Century Fox
10. Creating transmedia opportunities
Transmedia – the practice of arcing story worlds over various platforms, with each thread tailored to the platform it lives on – is becoming a bigger buzzword with the proliferation of second screens. These can serve as a key entry point for consumers seeking deep engagement, with different channels communicating different things. Watch for marketers to experiment with opportunities here. For instance, Shazam’s Evan Krauss says we’ll soon see ‘Shazamable’ movie ads that provide an ‘interactive panorama experience’ on the second screen, enabling viewers to feel they are walking through a scene in the film.
Red Bull sponsored a backcountry freestyle snowboarding competition that was ‘Shazamable’ when it aired on NBC in March. Shazam users could access point-of-view footage for several competitors, enabling them to see both the wide view on the big screen and the snowboarder’s own dizzying perspective on a second screen. Shazam also linked app users with related social media streams.
Measuring the efficacy of social media marketing still isn’t an exact science, regardless of what the gurus and ninjas tell you.
Last year, the TVs at CES were a wearying collection of the same-y junk, and everyone was pushing the same thing: 3D. I don’t personally have a problem with 3D, and in fact almost every TV we saw this year was also 3D-capable. But this time around, it wasn’t their primary feature. Perhaps as a result of the various display manufacturers’ lineups looking more or less the same for a while (not to mention the indifferent response of the market to home 3D), TV makers decided to actually add different features this year. Not all were useful, mind you, but Samsung, Sony, Sharp, and so on decided to take their own paths – whether in style of interaction, breadth of content, or sheer size (that would be Sharp). It’s good to see a TV here and actually be curious about it again.
While Sony stumbles here and there, especially with PR, they do make some really cool stuff. This year’s trip to their booth reminded us just how much stuff this company makes, and how much of it is actually pretty great. Sure, 1080p 3D binoculars aren’t the most practical thing in the world, but I like to know someone’s making them, and making them well. The Sony-Ericsson phones were also quite nice; the new Xperia Ion and S both impressed. One caveat there: they’ve been hyping their S and P tablets for so long that the devices are in danger of being old before any consumers really get a chance to use them. They have good products, but need to just trust the brand and the quality and ship the damn things.
There was a recurring theme of empowering consumers, by which many companies mean they’ll stop shoving their inferior in-house services down our throats, and let us do what they want with the device we paid for. This means that more and more devices are letting in services like Pandora, Skype, Amazon streaming, everything. If you provide a way to connect consumers with content, device makers want you to be available on their thing. As devices get smarter, it’s getting harder to defend how dumb the big brands have forced them to be over the last few years. There’s no excuse for a device powerful enough to run Netflix (to say nothing of 3D games) not to do so. TV makers are accepting this. That’s a win.
While Intel has been dominating the desktop world, ARM has crept up and stolen pretty much the entire mobile and embedded market. There doesn’t seem to be any abatement in that trend, and in fact Intel’s hold on Windows machines is starting to show cracks as well. This year at CES, all the smart TVs, tablets, phones, tweener devices, and half the other stuff worth looking at were sporting an ARM processor in one form or another. NVIDIA showed a great, cheap Android 4.0 tablet, Qualcomm had a ton of TVs and powerful media devices, Marvell showed their great OLPC XO-3 tablet and powers a bunch of other things — the list goes on. ARM was probably the most ubiquitous company at the show. Intel did show off their new smartphone, though, so a new battle may be forthcoming.
I must admit I wasn’t expecting much from RIM, and I guess in the end they didn’t have that much to offer: a hands-on with the PlayBook 2.0 update. But I’m really glad we stopped by, and I think RIM showed that they are still a force to be reckoned with in some respects. The PlayBook, whipping boy of the tech blogs, is made far more complete by the addition of the email, contacts, and calendar features. If they had released this, and perhaps at a slightly lower price than they were selling it for at launch, I think the tech world would have been genuinely enthusiastic. In our interview with them, I wasn’t just buttering them up when I said I would certainly recommend the PlayBook over an iOS or Android device for the purposes of day-to-day productivity, enterprise, and so on. The PlayBook, I said, was a breach birth, its non-critical consumer-facing functions emerging foremost, and its essential business and productivity functions delayed dangerously. Now that they’ve been delivered (so to speak), I can safely say the PlayBook is a far better tablet than it was, and that Google and Apple should take a look at some of their clever and powerful gesture and UI work.
People have been saying that the shadow of Apple would fall darkly on CES, that everyone would be spooked about the imminent presence of the new iPad and the rumored iTV, that it would be a show of Apple clones. The truth is that no one really seemed to be thinking much about Apple one way or the other. We saw phones taking design in interesting directions, tablets with diverse uses, business models that move beyond iTunes, and smart TVs that the companies seemed pretty excited about, not defeatist or pathetic. The only place Apple showed up was in the accessories area, and the new items we saw, more often than not, were careful to accommodate Android and other devices as well. CES just isn’t Apple’s show, which isn’t much of a surprise to some, but others want to believe that Apple has a presence even where it isn’t. CES showed this year that, news coverage patterns notwithstanding, the tech world doesn’t revolve around Apple; it revolves around a weird and splendid panoply of overly specific gadgets, raw components, and foreign niche markets.
Despite all the wins listed, it still wasn’t a very good show for consumers. Many device classes have been caught mid-transition: tablets and phones, only a few of which are running that all-important Ice Cream Sandwich; TVs, which are beginning the transition to smart TVs but aren’t safe enough yet to put in the hands of non-enthusiasts; car interfaces, which have not learned lessons from smartphones and tablets and are still fairly unintuitive — etc, etc. The trends are good, but you can’t buy trends. Whether it will be next year or the year after that the devices achieve the status of buyable I can’t say, but I do know that I wouldn’t recommend many things I saw this year, even if I found them promising.
The much-hyped ultrabooks were mostly snoozers: the same devices people have been making for years, but thinner. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, exactly, but it sure isn’t very exciting — it’s more like what TV makers do. And brands like Toshiba and Lenovo can’t afford to be considered as providing a commodity after this class of products has been hyped to the moon. The devices I saw weren’t bad, just not very impressive from the standpoint of a consumer standing in a Best Buy or browsing the web trying to decide what to get. I didn’t get a chance to check out Dell’s new machine, though, which Matt Burns tells me is a very nice piece of kit. And these are only the first ultrabooks, so we must give them a chance to refine themselves. It just wasn’t much of a debut.
There’s been an explosion of diversity in the set-top box space, with devices like the Boxee Box and Roku, and of course Tivo and the like. But the new smart TVs being put out by practically every TV maker take dead aim at these convenient, user-friendly products. It was a bottom-up revolution over the last two years as these nimble and inexpensive boxes took the sloppily-produced “smart” TVs of the day to school with faster updates, more content, and easy entry. Those salad days may be ending; Samsung, LG, and others are putting real money and real R&D into making set-top boxes obsolete. I’d hate to be Roku right now — well, that’s not true, they’re doing great. But over the next year they will really have to step up their game and prevent their service from being duplicated on-device.
I’ve talked a lot and answered a lot of questions from people, family, and media about whether CES is in trouble. And my answer has always been: no. CES is doing fine. They had 153,000 attendees this year and 3100 exhibitors. It’s a huge, important, and interesting show, and will be for a long time to come. But when something like the departure of a partner (in this case Microsoft) causes everyone in the world to doubt its relevance, it’s not a question of practicality, it’s a question of confidence. Is the opinion at large of CES so low that such a relatively small event (Microsoft’s participation was largely symbolic, rarely substantial) would mean the difference between “show goes on” and “show shuts down”? The CEA should take this popular response seriously: it’s not a warning that their show is about to hit the wall, but rather a warning that they have failed to make understood what the show is about. They should take the opportunity to fill the Microsoft gap with something big, and do something to make the show, ostensibly trade but in reality very public, more comprehensible to people at large.
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