Turning Online Buzz Into Second Screen TV

Michael Hedges October 10, 2011 Follow on Twitter

Serious people are studying online buzz. Seriously. And they’re coming up with answers to questions only the serious would ask. It seems, they find, online buzz can boost television ratings.

“Social media will continue to play an increasingly important role in how consumers discover and engage with various forms of content, including TV,” announced Nielsen researcher Radha Subramanyam on the nielsenwire blog (October 6). Details come from a study by Nielsen and consultancy McKinsey’s joint venture NM Incite, which created a mathematical model from reams of television and social media data, presumably all from the United States.

Uncovered in all that data is a “statistically significant relationship” between online buzz and television ratings. When TV viewers, particularly those under 35 years, buzz online – tweeting, friending, liking, sharing, etc. - about TV shows the ratings go up, slightly. A 9% increase in online buzz about a program’s premiere yields a 1% ratings increase. As a program’s run progresses to finale more buzz (14%) is necessary to pump up that 1% in ratings.

To reveal this insight, researchers engaged in variable creation. “Buzz metrics included buzz volume (the raw number of messages about a TV show), messages per source (as a proxy for spread of discussion) and the number of authors (total number of individuals generating the messages). Fundamental television factors included the genre of the show, whether the program aired on broadcast or cable, and the length of time the show had been on-air (first season, second, etc.).  The amount of ad dollars spent promoting the show and prior ratings (both episode and season) were also considered.”

Conventional social media wisdom holds that people who watch television and use social media simultaneously are somehow more engaged, which must have added value to media buyers and advertisers. The new variable to watch is “two screen TV format.” The NM Incite study indicates increased “buzz to ratings relationships” among 18 to 34 year old men and women engaged with competition reality TV shows. Oh, how media buyers love the idea of the engaged consumer.

Television producers, logically, engage in anything that engages. Creating some buzz at the recently ended MIPCOM show in Cannes was the two-screen competition reality daytime game show Intuïtie, produced by Fremantle Media’s ScreenPop division, which just completed a two-week run on RTL4 in the Netherlands.

Sure to bring joy to television executives, Intuïtie (Intuition) uses no studio contestants. Home viewers simultaneously engaged with their smartphones or other similarly enabled second screen device play the game, which is built around making guesses about visuals that appear on the bigger screen. Certain to bring joy, home viewers participating must register and provide those data bits that give media buyers a head rush.

Fully engaged in Intuïtie are advertisers, who provide discount coupons, which are distributed immediately by email to home viewing two screen players.  About 8% of Intuïtie viewers actually played, a huge percentage compared with the 2% to 3% participation rate expected from, well, coupon redemption. Not to be forgotten, though, are the 92% of viewers less than engaged.

Second screen applications for television are barely out of the chute. Producers and their marketing departments will look more deeply into taking the social media buzz variable from theory into reality. The late Steve Jobs always said to trust your intuition.

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