Synchronizing Ads On The Second Screen: A Study

Hill Holliday and SecondScreen Networks set up a study to find out how they might sunchronize the head shifting that goes along with the ‘swarm of devices’ style of TV use that goes on these days, given the emergence of the second screen:

Ilya Vedrashko, Smartphones Distract People Away from TV, Mobile Ads Help Bring Them Back

When people are in front of the TV, they don’t just watch TV.

The pioneering Middletown Media Study conducted in the pre-iPhone and pre-iPad era of 2005 showed that, at the time, 28.5% of 240.9 daily TV viewing minutes were accompanied by exposure to at least one other medium. (Talking on the phone and texting were the most frequent sources of interruption). In addition, about half of all TV minutes were accompanied by non-media life activities, such as caring for others, eating and cleaning.

The competition for TV viewer’s attention has hardly subsided. Since the study, smartphone penetration in the US soared from 3.8% in 2006 to 44% by the end of 2011. Today, for many tablet and smartphone owners (45% and 41%, respectively) using their mobile device while watching TV is a daily activity.

For any advertiser, these numbers lead to a natural question: What happens to my TV ads?

Having failed to locate a ready answer, we decided to find out for ourselves. We partnered with SecondScreen Networks, a company that sells mobile ads synchronized to what’s playing on the TV, to set up an experiment. Our formal objective was to understand the effect of advertising on a secondary screen during concurrent content consumption of television and mobile content.

They rigged up an experiment with three scenarios: 1/ no phone in hand, 2/ a phone in hand showing unsynchronized ‘ads’, and 3/ phone in hand that syncs an ad with a trailer running on the TV.

They discovered that the first scenario had higher recall and preference rates:  on average 17% higher recall and 12% higher preference than the two-screen groups.

But — and this is the suggestive aspect of the experiment — the synced second screen scenario brought the preference rates up over the unsynced second screen scenario: back up 15%. Recall was lower but people are less unsettled by the second screen.

As Vedrashko tells it:

If independently confirmed, these findings could mean a couple of things. One is that TV advertisers will be looking for ways to compensate for the drop in TV ad effectiveness caused by TV-mobile multitasking either by dialing up frequency or by putting up two-screen roadblocks with the help of companies such as SecondScreen Networks.

Secondly, ads that invite viewers to engage with a smartphone right away – shazam it! scan this QR code! – might be ruining it for the next ad in the pod. The playing field of a commercial break is already uneven: an emotionally impactful ad will carry viewer’s thought way beyond the allotted 30 seconds. By getting people to fumble with their smartphones, an ad essentially makes viewers tune the TV out for the duration of the exercise.

Looks like synchronization of second screen ads is going to be worthy of more research.

OgilvyOne London: “As an ad agency, we’ll always be trying to lean forward” | Lean Back 2.0

OgilvyOne London: “As an ad agency, we’ll always be trying to lean forward” - Emma Gardner via Lean Back 2.0

Has OgilvyOne London seen any evidence of people “leaning back” when consuming ads or creative content on their iPad?

[OlgivyOne London Chief Executive Annette] KING: It’s interesting because we were having a debate between lean forward and lean back before we got on the call with you. There’s a time and a place for both. The Economist app is a good example of a ‘lean back and consume’ type of situation. As an ad agency, though, we’ll always be trying to lean forward. We’re always trying to get people to take part in the app and engage with the ad. By definition, it’s an immersive kind of approach.

We’re really interested in the dual screen experience right now. By dual screen, I mean sitting in front of the TV with a tablet. You might be watching one thing on the TV, but doing something else on your tablet. And we want to start connecting those two things. If Jamie Oliver is making a special truffle recipe on television, you can use your tablet to find out where truffles grow in the world, or how to make Jamie’s recipe. You can get people involved through the second screen.

I wonder about ‘always trying to lean forward’: isn’t there a place for ambient advertising? Ambient awareness of other people (through Twitter or other social tools) is a back of the mind sort of attention scheme: you know what people are up to based on their updates moving by while you are doing other things.

I conjecture that ambient advertising could be very effective on the second screen. Imagine that as I am watching a cooking show, and I’ve enabled a second screen gear applet on my tablet. As the chef’s use various kitchen tools, the gear applet streams pictures and descriptions of the gear: this knife, this sauce pan, this stove. You might think that this is a lean-forward set up — that I am dedicating foreground attention to the gear streaming by — and I might do that the first few times I use the app. However, as I habituate to the app, I will begin to treat it as a lean-back stream of information, so my perception of the products being featured is more additive or cumulative. It’s just as much about brand building as a call to action.

Yes, there will still be times when I want to buy that particular knife, right now. But in general I think it will lead to a collection of brand associations built over time, so that when I get to the point when I want to buy a new knife, a few brands are in my head, and I choose between them at the store, or online.

If there is one thing that advertisers can do, though, to make lean-forward intimacy with products more likely on the second screen, it would be to make it easy to share product information and images with other people: wire it deeply into the social dimension of TV.

(For more on Social TV and The Second Screen, download the free Work Talk special report on that subject, here.)

Special Report: Social TV and The Second Screen

I am happy to release a special report I’ve recently written, Social TV and The Second Screen, developed cooperatively by Work Talk Research and The Futures Agency. Gerd Leonhard from The Futures Agency wrote the foreward, saying

The overlap of social media and TV represents a huge opportunity for those that truly understand and internalize, embrace and partake in these changes, and that welcome this dawning networked, interdependent and many-to-many society.

The report addresses the transition from the old world of TV into a new era, changed from top to bottom by the social web and the emergence of today’s always-with-us mobile devices: the second screen.

From Old To New TV

The term TV carries many meanings.

TV is broadcast in various frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum, and a wide variety of devices have been constructed to operate around the transmission and decoding of signals in those frequencies, and so the term TV can in fact refer to that spectrum. It is the device in the corner of your living room that captures those signals, and decodes them for you, or, nowadays, is more likely to get a signal transmitted through a cable network, and from coax screwed into the back.

In general, when people talk about TV they are referring to the medium of communication that the physics of TV broadcasting makes possible. And, although our civilization might have come up with dozens of forms that medium of communication might take, principally it is a form of entertainment, showing news, sporting events, sit coms, and reality TV shows, in a swirling, kaleidoscopic hodgepodge. And on free TV — broadcast or paid — TV involves a relatively large proportion of ad minutes per hour.

We are at an inflection point, where TV becomes another corner of human civilization that has fallen into the black hole called the web. As a result, in the next few years — at least in the advanced economies of the world — the way we experience TV will be changed profoundly, and the meaning of the word will change in corresponding ways.

For more information and to download, click here.

This is beachfront real estate. Buy In Now.

Lisa Hsia, EVP of digital media at NBCUniversal’s Bravo channel, is cited by Amy Chozick and Nick Wingfield in In Search Of Apps for Television:

I’ve told my bosses, ‘This is beachfront real estate. Buy in now.’

This quote is great, but the piece it’s in fails to touch on social TV and the rise of the second screen: people talking via mobile devices about what they are watching.

Here’s an excerpt from a report I am going to be releasing very soon, Social TV and The Second Screen:

The Rise Of Social TV

TV users are increasingly likely to be using multiple devices at the same time. For example, watching a conventional TV screen while texting a friend on mobile phone, or discussing the show or game with friends on Facebook. The transition to a multi-device user experience — allowing timesliced viewing of TV content and socializing — is the single most revolutionary aspect of social TV. And, as it turns out, more time is spent looking at the other screens than watching the TV, which changes everything.

We are witnessing a rapid, technological and societal transformation of the medium of television. The combination of several recent skyrocketing innovations — particularly always-on connectivity and the use of increasingly capable mobile phones and tablets — have led to a profound shift in the way that people experience television. This transition is closely tied to the rise of the social web, and the behaviors and expectations that web-savvy television users bring to their rapidly changing relationship with television.

As just one example of the ways that these advanced communication tools are shifting our understanding of the experience of television, note that I use the term television ‘users’ instead of the more conventional ‘viewers’. As these super smart mobile devices and social tools come into the context of TV ‘viewing’ the experience becomes social, and the images flickering on the TV screen become a backdrop to the users social interactions, and no longer the dominating center of attention.

This shift lines up with the transition of TV from a rivalrous to an increasingly non-rivalous medium. Most media — when initially invented — are rivalrous, meaning that they conflict with others, and as a result people would experience one at a time. When radio first came out, people would listen to it in a group, silently, as if in church. After a decade or so, youngsters had shifted to running the radio in the background while doing other things. The same relaxation has happened with TV viewing.
TV had become fairly non-rivalrous at least a decade ago, and the emergence of the social web and the use of extremely capable mobile devices — such as smart phones and tablets, typified by the iPhone and iPad, respectively, has led to the phenomenon of the second screen. TV users are increasingly likely to be using multiple devices at the same time. For example, watching a conventional TV screen while texting a friend on mobile phone, or discussing the show or game with friends on Facebook. The transition to a multi-device user experience — allowing timesliced viewing of TV content and socializing — is the single most revolutionary aspect of social TV. And, as it turns out, more time is spent looking at the other screens than watching the TV, which changes everything.

This shift from TV content as the center of the television world, to a supporting role in a social TV era lines up with Kevin Kelly’s observation, that

The central economic imperative of the new economy is to amplify relationships.

And what is happening in the transition to social TV can be viewed as a shift to a new economy, and how that is manifested in the new form factor of social TV.

I will have more information on the report soon.

Blip.tv Co-Founder Mike Hudack Is Now A Product Manager At Facebook - Alyson Shontell via SFGate

Alyson Shontell via SFGate

Thanks to a tip and some LinkedIn stalking, we’ve learned Hudack has joined Facebook.

According to LinkedIn, he’s a product manager there and his Twitter feed is full of fb.me links. It’s not clear what he’s working on, but there’s a good chance fellow NY tech founders and Facebook acqui-hires Sam Lessin or Justin Schaffer recruited him.

I bet that Mike’s doing something with Facebook and video, perhaps Facebook becoming a global social TV network.

The Second Screen Gets Most Of The Attention

In a study published last year, S. Adam Brasel and James Gips studied the behavior of TV use when a computer was also present:

Media Multitasking Behavior: Concurrent Television and Computer Usage - Brasel and Gips, published in Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking

Changes in the media landscape have made simultaneous usage of the computer and television increasingly commonplace, but little research has explored how individuals navigate this media multitasking environment. Prior work suggests that self-insight may be limited in media consumption and multitasking environments, reinforcing a rising need for direct observational research. A laboratory experiment recorded both younger and older individuals as they used a computer and television concurrently, multitasking across television and Internet content. Results show that individuals are attending primarily to the computer during media multi-tasking. Although gazes last longer on the computer when compared to the television, the overall distribution of gazes is strongly skewed toward very short gazes only a few seconds in duration. People switched between media at an extreme rate, averaging more than 4 switches per min and 120 switches over the 27.5-minute study exposure. Participants had little insight into their switching activity and recalled their switching behavior at an average of only 12 percent of their actual switching rate revealed in the objective data. Younger individuals switched more often than older individuals, but other individual differences such as stated multitasking preference and polychronicity had little effect on switching patterns or gaze duration. This overall pattern of results highlights the importance of exploring new media environments, such as the current drive toward media multitasking, and reinforces that self-monitoring, post hoc surveying, and lay theory may offer only limited insight into how individuals interact with media.

Scientists are good at burying the lede, and therefore left the biggest finding out of the abstract: 78.6% of the participants spent more than half of the time looking at the computer.

Personally, I find it unsurprising and not too interesting that people underestimate the number of times they switched from TV to PC or back: we naturally shift our view when doing most everything — walking down the street, driving a car, talking with friends — it’s almost autonomic. But the authors are obsessed with that angle, and make no effort to consider the implications of the most interesting finding.

Obviously, the rise of the second screen has enormous implications for TV, and the knee jerk response to findings like Brasel and Gips will be to try to get the eyes to stay on the TV. But the bigger opportunity lies in the second screen, where there is more interactivity and a world of social networks to share the experience with.

Anna Heim, Zeebox, “the new way to watch TV”

If you’re in the UK, there’s a new iPad app you may want to try immediately. Zeebox, as it is called, will expand to other countries and platforms next year, according to its co-founder Anthony Rose. The former Head of iPlayer at the BBC and ex-CTO of YouView, Rose is certainly one of the architects of the future of TV. Its latest project, Zeebox, is very ambitious, aiming to become “the new way to watch television”. To understand how it works, here’s a demo of the app [above].

If you still needed a proof that Zeebox’s team is not the only one to believe in the app’s potential, iTunes made it its App of the Week in its UK Store. It also has appeal for the TV industry: according to PaidContent, Zeebox’s CEO Ernesto Schmitt is convinced that broadcasters and advertisers will show interest in the app as a way to drive engagement, while producers will be keen on getting minute-by-minute data on how their shows perform.

Looks like Zeebox is the social TV app I’ve been talking about for years.

While much television and video content will be time-shifted, the best video content distributors (remember this is a post-channel world) will build communities of viewers around live programming. Much of the future of television, and especially its revenue models, will revolve around community

what_tv_will_be.html (via mediafuturist)

social tv

The Days Of TV Are Numbered

Nielsen wants to redefine ‘TV household’ to include those watching TV-ish video on their computers, because TV ownership is down for the first time in 20 years. Yes, part of this trend is due to the transition from analog to digital TV sets and signals, which has left some poor people high and dry: they might not be able to afford digital TV, especially in a down economy.

But the future is lurking in the stats too: young, cord-cutting urbanites who are not buying in:

Brian Stelter, Television Ownership Drops in U.S., Nielsen Reports

For the first time in 20 years, the number of homes in the United States with television sets has dropped.

The Nielsen Company, which takes TV set ownership into account when it produces ratings, will tell television networks and advertisers on Tuesday that 96.7 percent of American households now own sets, down from 98.9 percent previously.

There are two reasons for the decline, according to Nielsen. One is poverty: some low-income households no longer own TV sets, most likely because they cannot afford new digital sets and antennas.

The other is technological wizardry: young people who have grown up with laptops in their hands instead of remote controls are opting not to buy TV sets when they graduate from college or enter the work force, at least not at first. Instead, they are subsisting on a diet of television shows and movies from the Internet.

That second reason is prompting Nielsen to think about a redefinition of the term “television household” to include Internet video viewers.

[…]

Then there are the tech-savvy Americans who once lived in a household with a television, but no longer do. These are either cord-cutters — a term that refers to people who stop paying for cable television — or people who never signed on for cable. Ms. McDonough suggested that these were younger Americans who were moving into new residences and deciding not to buy a TV for themselves, especially if they “don’t have the financial means to get one immediately.”

Nielsen has not yet assessed what proportion of the decline can be attributed to this behavior. But the decline in the percentage of homes with sets is sure to kick off another round of speculation about cord-cutting.

Sensitive to its clients’ concerns, Nielsen explains the trend this way in the report: “While Nielsen data demonstrates that consumers are viewing more video content across all platforms — rather than replacing one medium with another — a small subset of younger, urban consumers seem to be going without paid TV subscriptions for the time being. The long-term effects of this are still unclear, as it is undetermined if this is also an economic issue that will see these individuals entering the TV marketplace once they have the means, or the beginning of a larger shift to online viewing.”

I think Nielsen is misreading the tea leaves here. But they have every incentive to hope that this is an anomaly, that hipsters will switch to conventional TV viewing in a few years, instead of what will happen: they will invent a new way to experience ‘TV’, whatever that comes to mean.

I can guarantee one thing: whatever ‘TV’ comes to mean in the near future, it will be profoundly social, which traditional TV is not. And that doesn’t end with every show having a Facebook page, or celebrities twittering.

Becoming social means that TV will become another sort of liquid media, unbound from network’s and cable companies control, floating in the social stream, just like blog posts, images and music are now. This content will be fractured — we will share snippets of shows and mashups. And the aesthetic of TV will shift to match, as producers wise up to the facts, and see the possibilities.