TVloop Blog

The second season premiere of Flight of the Conchords, the quirky HBO comedy series, is scheduled to air on January 18.  But over 250,000 fans have already watched it on FunnyOrDie, the comedy site led by Will Farrell and Adam McKay according to NewTeeVee.  That compares favorably to the 100,000 or so fans that watched the season one premiere on MySpace last year indicating a signficant uptick in interest in the show.  The partnership between HBO and FunnyOrDie is not surprising considering HBO took a stake in the comedy site earlier this year as previously reported by VentureBeat.  It’s unclear how deep the relationship will go and whether Flight of the Conchord episodes will be available on the website throughout the season two run.  I’m guessing this is just a well-publicized advertisement for HBO and the series and that you’ll have to ante up for the monthly recurring charge on your cable bill to see more.

Whatever the case, let’s take a look at how the Addicted to Flight of the Conchords application has done within the TVLoop community.  A quick summary of numbers shows us that it has been relatively successful:

• Over 56,000 fans - an increase of almost 300% in 12 months
• Over 2500 total trivia questions available
• Almost 1000 favorite quotes added
• Almost 20,000 quizzes taken
• Over 200 photos submitted

As is the case with all TVLoop applications, all of that content was added and subsequently managed by the user community.  While the numbers pale in comparison to the most popular applications like Grey’s Anatomy, The Simpsons, and Family Guy, Addicted to Flight of the Conchords is definitely on an upward trajectory with additional growth likely as the date of the highly anticipated season premiere grows nearer.

The challenges facing the online advertising industry have been well documented across the blogosphere as well as traditional media.  I’ve touched on the subject a few times in recent posts here and here.  Most recently, Keith Rabois, VP of Strategy and Business Development at Slide, wrote a great post at Venture Beat discussing the merits of branded apps versus advertising in existing apps.  The comments to that post quickly turned to a “engaging ads” versus “display ad” discussion which significantly understates the advertising solutions available within existing applications.  I wrote a case study post over at the FanSection Blog earlier this month about a campaign we ran for the Texas Department of Tranportation involving sponsored trivia.  We recently ran a similar campaign for Disney to promote the release of the release of the Scrubs Season 7 DVD set.  Below is a quick summary of the campaign goals, solution, and results.

Client: Disney
Campaign Date: November 2008

Challenge

• Disney’s primary goal was to create a campaign to promote the launch of the Scrubs Season 7 DVD
• Key requirement was to promote audience discussion and viral distribution of the core message
• The target demographic was primarily the age 13-34 segment

Solution

• Utilized sponsored trivia on the Addicted to Scrubs application consisting of over 600K users and 75K monthly active users
• Sponsored trivia is comprised of sponsored questions and sponsored lifelines
• Implemented fan contest where all users answering Scrubs trivia were eligible to win
• Email blast to all Addicted to Scrubs users notifying them of the launch of the Season 7 DVD and the chance to win via the contest
• Cross-promoted the Addicted to Scrubs application, the DVD, and the fan contest via applications for similar shows

Engagement Oriented Results

• The campaign was successful having met all of the strategic goals of the client
• Reached 18K unique users with the campaign
• Over 52K sponsored trivia questions answered
• Over 19K click-thrus from the email blast

Conclusion
As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, the key to driving engaging advertising in social media is to integrate the brand into the product so that it becomes a beneficial part of the user experience.  We accomplished that goal with the Scrubs campaign by utilizing a combination of sponsored trivia and fan contests, and the result was an engaged subscriber base and a happy client.

Addicted to Scrubs Sponsored Trivia Question

Addicted to Scrubs Sponsored Trivia Answer

Friends is the first TV show to eclipse the one million mark on on the TVLoop community which comprises the top 5 social networks and the TVLoop.com destination website.  The total number of friends fans is 1,019,581 to be exact which put it #1 in the community with The Simpsons following a close second with 956,093 total fans.

So why is that interesting enough for a blog post?  Well first, being the first to do anything is pretty cool and one million is a very large number.  And second, this demonstrates the power of the social media medium that we have embraced to give fans access to their favorite TV content.  Friends has been off the air since May of 2004, yet consumers continue to create and consume content involving the show at a rapid pace.  For instance, here’s a quick run-down on the stats we have for Friends on the TVLoop community:

• 3,325 photos
• 4,077 quotes
• 20,516 trivia questions
• 549 quizzes

All of that content is competely user generated which demonstrates how active Friends fans are even thought the show has been gone for four years.  And just recently, we announced that Joost videos have been added to the TVLoop community which further enhances the user experience with Friends videos and full episodes.

The net take-away here is that social media allows consumers to embrace the content they want, when and where they want it.  A TV show doesn’t end just because it goes off the air as old fans and new fans continue to embrace the content well after the fact.  And passionate fans are more than happy to spend time creating the content they care about.  This can, and does, apply to advertisers as well.  Just because your campaign is over doesn’t mean that consumers aren’t out there somewhere discussing and embracing your product and brand in a very public way.  The more advertisers get used to that fact and embrace social media as an integral part to their marketing strategy, the more likely they will be to harness that discussion for the benefit of the brand.

James Hibberd from The Hollywood Reporter posted today on The Live Feed blog about a soon-to-be-released Deloitte study that says young people are watching less TV these days.  From the post:

Young Americans just aren’t watching TV like they used to.

Put another way, the older you get, the more you watch, according to a report due out Thursday from Deloitte indicating that “millennials,” the generation of ages 14-25, watch just 10.5 hours of TV a week.

That compares with 15.1 hours for those belonging to Generation X (ages 26-42), 19.2 hours for baby boomer (43-61) and 21.5 hours for matures (62-75).

I have no doubt that Deloitte’s data is correct, and that the age 14-25 demographic does in fact watch less broadcast TV…broadcast being the key word there.  What I would like to see is whether that means the demographic truly watches fewer TV programs, or is simply consuming that content in other formats.  There are a variety of ways to watch TV shows that don’t involve planting yourself on the couch every Thursday night at 8pm CST/9pm EST.  For instance, DVR numbers in general are up, but presumably a younger demographic is more likely to watch full episodes online.  And finally, there’s always the tried and true process of purchasing or renting full season DVDs.  The net result could be that the younger demographic called out in the Deloitte study is in fact watching as much or more TV content, they’re just doing it in a very different way than their parents or grandparents.  From a TVLoop community perspective, that explanation would make a lot more sense given the increasing popularity of our social networking applications and the recently launched TVLoop.com destination site.

We have a ton of user data for the TVLoop network, so we have the luxury of being able to step back every now and again to take a look at members are really doing on the network.  To that end, we launched a press release today pointing out a very interesting comparison between the Nielsen Ratings and the TVLoop community. The net of that announcement is the shows that members are truly embracing within the TVLoop community are vastly different than the ones they’re watching on TV according to Nielsen.  This is similar to a theme I wrote about on Sunday which compared the networks from a broadcast perspective to that of the TVLoop community.

Here are the top 10 shows according to the TVLoop community:

1. The Office
2. Grey’s Anatomy
3. Family Guy
4. Gossip Girl
5. One Tree Hill
6. House
7. The Simpsons
8. Heroes
9. How I Met Your Mother
10. Supernatural

For the purposes of this analysis, the top 10 list was compiled by looking at user growth for each currently on-air show measured by a combination of week-over-week and month-over-month increases.  We also took a look at audience engagement measured by usage of key engagement features including trivia, quizzes and discussion forums.  Of the top 10 shows that we came up with, only Grey’s Anatomy and House were in the Nielsen Ratings for the week ending Dec 7.  We also took a look at the Nielsen Buzz Metrics for Dec 5 and saw a list that more closely resembles the TVLoop community.  Of the TVLoop top 10, the following shows were also on the Buzz Metrics top 20: Grey’s Anatomy, Gossip Girl, The Simpsons, House, Family Guy, Heroes and How I Met Your Mother.

So why the difference in ratings and online fandom? Well the first answer is demographics meaning that the broadcast ratings look at the population while the online numbers definitely skew younger especially when you’re talking about the TVLoop community which is predominantly comprised of Facebook users today. Second, is that niche shows from a broadcast perspective tend to have more fervent followers online. Shows like Gossip Girl, One Tree Hill, and Supernatural are marginal successes in the broadcast world, but have huge followings online from fan sites to blogs to forums all discussing why Chuck Bass insists on wearing red pants. The result is that the show is most definitely not over when the 30 minutes or one hour is up on it’s given air night.  Instead, the the conversation, discussion, and interaction goes on constantly until the next episode and then starts over again and so on and so on.  This is nothing new as viewers have always gathered around the watercooler the morning after their favorite show, but only recently has that interaction extended to a virtual watercooler online.