Television, the love of the nation, breeding effectiveness & social integration
Neil Mortensen, research & planning director at Thinkbox, on the complementarity of TV and social…
Television, the love of the nation, breeding effectiveness and social integration
Yes, OK, I’ll admit it: I’ve played around a bit with the lyrics to The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy’s famous moan about TV. But I think it is a truer reflection of the reality of where TV is today.
I won’t bang on about the love and effectiveness bits (for once), but will focus here on the fascinating things happening around TV in the social sphere – not least its relationship with Twitter, new second screen apps like Zeebox, and the launch of Channel 4’s new linear channel, 4Seven.
4Seven is especially interesting. As if announced deliberately to give me some context for this piece, last week Channel 4 announced that 4Seven will launch this summer. It will be a new linear TV channel whose content will be based on the most popular and talked about shows from the previous week. Social media will be central to deciding what is on it.
This new approach to curating a linear TV channel demonstrates the complementarity of TV and social.
Broadcasters have long embraced social media both as a form of earned marketing but also as a source of viewer insight, although they exercise caution regarding the latter. Because of the immediate sharing of TV, social media offer a window into the effects that broadcast TV creates. It makes people’s love for TV visible, like cameras trained on a thousand water-coolers. Broadcasters and production companies can use this to shape programmes and market TV in a nimble, cost-effective way. There are even TV shows like Million Pound Drop and Bank Job which incorporate social into their formats.
So 4Seven’s launch is a natural next stage in this relationship; creating a channel for the people of the people. But it also does something else; it shows the continued primacy of linear viewing and of the first screen. People still want and prefer to watch linear, scheduled channels on their TV set.
Amid all the talk of second screen innovations for TV, we must not lose sight of the fact that there wouldn’t be a second screen without the first to feed off and complement. Zeebox is a great example of this: a second screen app designed to be a companion to what you’re watching on the first screen (and which has just advertised on the first screen resulting in 15,000 sign ups an hour via a second screen).
The first/second screen distinction is more about chronology of use than status, in the same way as a horse comes before a cart. It isn’t about who is best, but how they work together. But there is a hierarchy; a cart is not that useful without its horse.
The truth is that we still know very little about what people do with the second screen and when they do it. We know what they can do and claim to do but not what they actually are doing. To tackle this, Thinkbox is embarking on new research into two-screening, called Screen Life. We’re putting cameras in a range of households to actually film what they’re up to. We’re hoping to discover, behind the endless hype, what is going on. Our educated guess is that second screen activity will account for a fraction of the time people watch TV – but it is nonetheless a very interesting fraction, full of possibilities for viewers and advertisers.
The research will also no doubt show that occasionally second screen activity has nothing to do with the first screen, just as people have always done other things while watching TV. We won’t be very worried when we show this. It would be a bit weird if it didn’t happen.
Hopefully, if nothing else, Screen Life will help us to bring a bit more perspective to the conversation about social TV and two-screening. There is still a bit too much hype. A look at UKOM’s official figures for January shows that 65% of the UK went online in that month. That’s 35% who did not and therefore definitely are not busy two-screening. They’re just watching TV the way they always have.
Your Comments
In 2000 Wendy Gordon and Virginia Valentine won the best New Thinking Award at the MRS Conference for a paper on the 21st Century Consumer. This shows that the consumer now is not as they have always been. This is not 1959, when we sat transfixed as the white dot
disappeared when the TV set was turned off. The nature of our relationship with television and its content has evolved since then, both in terms of what we watch and what we watch it on. And now are we about to see that one screen experience change as the size and power of that passive ‘box in the corner’ becomes interactive? Is the industry really looking to see what are the implications of the next generation of TVs, not just for consumers, but for clients businesses and its own?
But what is the demographic profile of those 35% who are not online? (Is it desirable/valuable to advertisers?). I think there is a legitimate and warranted focus on the 65% of the audiences use of online while on TV (and the ability to target and interact with the advertising) while the 1st-screen media is being consumed.