Social Media Seen Challenging Old TV Audience-Measuring Models

LAS VEGAS -- The second-screen experience is creating a new measurement tool for TV viewing, panelists said Monday at the Parks Associates Connections conference held in conjunction with the CTIA conference. “In the past,” said D.P. Venkatesh, CEO of content discovery company mPortal, audience measuring companies would “tell you what people in America watch.” Now, he said, a new model is emerging based on broadband activity which “lets you know exactly what people are doing.”

Those kinds of measurements could alter the advertising-based revenue and ratings model for broadcast TV, Venkatesh said. Advertising will continue to play a part in the second-screen era, but analytics and personalization and the associated data will become “very, very important,” he said.

Venkatesh cited the coveted 18-30-year-old demographic and its consumption model, which is “very different” from previous generations. “You have a second-screen experience that matters, but the way you're watching television has changed,” he said. Given that much of the revenue model of TV today is driven by advertising and upfronts, “that is where the big change comes,” he said. The question is, “Where does the money go,” he said, and what effect will that have on the business model. “Not everyone has the money to fund their own shows,” he said.

Social media on second-screen devices is a new force in the TV ratings picture, panelists said. Venkatesh cited programs that were canceled for low ratings during primetime viewing hours but got a second life as a result of community support via social networks. Sean Besser, executive vice president of GetGlue, both a destination and a platform for social media around TV, noted the CW’s program Nikita, a cult show that’s been renewed over the past couple of years in large part because of communities that formed around the show. “Networks are really seeing the value” in communities, the different voices they bring and the “reach and power that has,” Besser said.

According to Besser, seven out of eight times when people turn on the TV, “they have no clue” what they're going to watch. GetGlue gives them a way to see what friends are watching, check into TV shows, post what they're watching on other social media networks including Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr, and allows them to chat about shows they're watching to “recreate the water cooler” experience. Besser said 17 percent of GetGlue users have watched a TV show because of a friend’s suggestion on the site. GetGlue issues stickers for shows, runs sweepstakes and creates an environment for “clusters of communities” to form around TV shows, he said. When the Summer Olympics pre-empted Days of Our Lives last summer, cast members hosted chats on GetGlue about the summer games. When the show returned, Besser said, “they had the highest ratings of the year."

Communities allow viewers to engage socially in different ways, panelists said. A viewer who’s embarrassed to admit publicly to a broad audience like Facebook that they watch a guilty pleasure show might be very comfortable chatting about it in a GetGlue chat room, Besser said. Others want to publicize what they are watching. Some 50 percent of check-ins on GetGlue are shared on another social network, Besser said. Shows that have “blown up socially” with high levels of community engagement include The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones, he said. Fans of those have been “sucked into an alternate universe and want to engage,” he said.

The second-screen world has challenges including monetization, ease of use and navigating the personalization aspect of the second-screen experience, panelists said. Chris Kermoian, general manager of Samsung Media Solutions Center America, talked about “challenges consumers face in a multi-device world” including what he called a “disjointed experience” of moving content from one device to another. He pitched Samsung’s WatchON feature, recently highlighted with the Galaxy S4 launch, which finds and suggests TV shows, controls a TV or cable box and allows consumers to put a show on TV on pause and resume watching on the Galaxy. More of that type of integration will follow, he said.

Trying to steer viewers to a second-screen experience is a quandary for mPortal’s customers -- service providers -- who “get paid a lot of money from advertisers when they broadcast something on the main screen,” Venkatesh said. That’s an argument against pulling viewers away from a cable or satellite provider’s primary source of revenue, he said. On the other hand, a second screen “does open up a secondary revenue opportunity where increasing the number of eyeballs” increases the cost per thousand viewers, he said. Another possibility is having “alternate advertisers that you could also sell this new space that heretofore wasn’t available,” he said.

On the viability of mobile commerce through the second-screen experience, panelists believe it will come but that all the pieces have to be in place. Venkatesh said T-commerce, as in television-commerce, is a “huge opportunity.” Home shopping channels have shown that shopping by TV is a big market. The experience to bring it all together is in the “first inning, second inning of the game,” he said. T-commerce “opens a whole new channel not only for service providers but for new entrants,” he said. The experience can get “tricky,” though, he said. When watching a football game, does a Robert Griffin III fan stop the game to purchase his jersey? he asked rhetorically. “Or do you come back later or tag it” and add it to an Amazon wish list, he said. “All of those things have to be thought out, but from a commerce perspective it’s a very large opportunity."

GetGlue is doing a campaign with eBay, promoting products from Scandal, Besser said, which has produced “good engagement.” He cited the oft-heard reference to Friends viewers wanting to be able to buy Jennifer Aniston’s sweater but he’s not sure that desire follows through to purchase. “They want to talk about it and want to want it,” but he hasn’t seen a meaningful enough volume of interest “to drive an industry.”

An issue that would have to be sorted out before T-commerce can be viable is how the revenue is shared between the content owner and distributor, said David Schlacht, DirecTV senior director-multimedia. The holy grail in the future is that every scene of every show “is basically a Web page,” he said. A viewer could hear a song and make a purchase during a show, he said. He believes T-commerce efforts will roll out over the next 12 months where companies experiment with purchasing opportunities connected to music or items used in a TV show. He hypothesized about American Idol trying to monetize songs. “Once there’s enough volume, Fox and DirecTV and other partners will figure out how to split that revenue,” he said.

Although the experience will evolve, the second-screen phenomenon will withstand the test of time, panelists said. GetGlue is putting its chips on the value of program discovery the second-screen experience brings to viewers and their ability to check in to share what they're watching and get additional value from social engagement after checking in.

Venkatesh of mPortal thinks in five or 10 years second screens and main screens will merge in some way because “consumers are looking for a unified experience” that today is “disjointed.” On where the second-screen experience is going, he envisioned a better discovery experience on a tablet than what consumers experience today through a set-top box. Kermolan of Samsung looked beyond the second-screen experience to a “multi-screen” one. “It’s starting already,” he said, citing the WatchON feature.