TV Everywhere: You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby
When 2014 started, there was a lot of handwringing over the progress of TV Everywhere. But with more TVE deals getting done, awareness and adoption has grown. A year ago, only 19% of consumers were aware they had TVE capability, with that up to 54% today, CTAM pres/CEO John Lansing said (CTAM’s goal is to get that to 65% by the end of Jan).
With all of CTAM’s member companies having adopted at least some of the its recommendations for best practices, the organization felt it was time in late 3Q to begin a consumer awareness campaign. “But the conundrum for us was how to create a tent pole that everyone could participate in that didn’t require everyone to run the same spot or do the exact same thing because you would never get that done with companies, many of whom compete with each other,” Lansing told us.
Enter the “You Could Be Watching TV” umbrella campaign, CTAM’s 1st big consumer push with member companies. Ultimately, 15 different nets, including Fox Networks and A&E, put their own unique TVE campaigns under the CTAM tagline. Fox Networks had its “Stream it and Dream it” TVE campaign, and NBCU just announced its “Watch TV without the TV” consumer awareness campaign. CTAM’s key tactics right now include reaching out to influential bloggers and print outlets that do TV highlights listings to get them to incorporate TVE information to drive awareness and usage.
“The tagline came from one of our agencies working with the bloggers to help us emphasize that this has lots of situational viewing opportunities,” said CTAM communications & marketing svp Anne Cowan, who has led the umbrella campaign. It focuses on using TVE while waiting in line for the holidays, or while at work when there’s a big game, being stuck in a doctor’s office, etc. “It’s about a 5-week push right now. We’ll likely continue it after the holidays. It depends on the network content as the hook for the consumer,” Cowan said, adding that the goal was a 10mln reach during the 5-week campaign, and it already had reached 7mln with a few weeks to go. The total impression goal of 187mln was also close to being met with the campaign at 137mln with plenty of time remaining.
Going forward, CTAM will continue to work on adoption of its TVE recommendations for the industry. While 100% of its member companies have adopted some of the recommendations, its goal is for 75% of the recommendations to be adopted by participating companies (it’s in the high 50s-60% now, according to Lansing). What’s ahead are some of the more complicated recommendations, such as making it so that once you sign into one network, you’re signed into all of the nets in that family (i.e, signing in to FX would also mean you’re signed in to FXX) and length of sign-in times. “For phase 2, the driving energy will really be about getting awareness and adoption up to full saturation so that nobody has this product available to them and are unaware of it and that those people are using it and finding it to be a best-in-class experience for them against any IP-delivered service, whether it be Netflix or Hulu or anyone else, ” Lansing said.
