Aug
3
Stepping back from TV: 10 Steps To A Better Content Experience
Filed Under Advertising, Digital Signage, Social Networking, TV, digital ooh
While this post isn’t meant to slam TV, it is set up to focus on other forms of “entertainment” and how people consume.
I should throw in a disclaimer – I don’t really watch a lot of TV. Usually, it’s something I do to fall asleep…i.e. turn the TV on with a timer and pass out…it seems to put me to sleep faster so I use it 
Second disclaimer; I’m obviously in the media business so how I consume media is likely very different from the average Joe.
Last night I was bored after finishing work and felt like some entertainment so decided to do a little experiment and avoid TV all together. In it’s place, I watched YouTube and other online videos. I also wasn’t watching them on my LCD Flat Screen either – I have an iPod Touch and simply crashed in bed and went from site to site and video to video.
I went through highly rated and most viewed videos. I searched for topics of interest ranging from work to windsurfing. I scrolled through comments and used word of mouth and viral links to go check out stuff others thought was worthwhile. I probably consumed 40-50 videos in the time I was watching, ranging from arts and culture to business to comedy.
All in all, I thought it was quite a pleasant experience. This may sound benign to some of you as you may do this all the time but I don’t really get/make the time to go check some of these sites out outside of work so it was a little “new” to me to use it for entertainment.
An hour and a half later I looked up from my little screen and realized “Hey, I’m still up and watching…stuff”. I hadn’t dozed off!
It made me start thinking about what I had just been through and what it meant:
- I was more engaged with the content than I ever have been with my TV
- I was more active (sitting up, tactile response needed to search and sort videos, etc) Another way to maybe say this is it was more “personal” (likely because the media was actually in my hand)
- I hardly saw any advertising and when I did it was more contextual than TV so I didn’t mind it as much or at least understood that the ads were required to power the small companies producing the content – they just didn’t seem as faceless as the cable cos or big networks for some reason (remember, I’m speaking as a consumer of media right now). In addition, the ads themselves were closer to relevant, content wise, than watching Geckos and Cavemen in what seems like a perpetual loop on the “tube”.
- Alternatively, the ads weren’t pre-rolls but instead integrated into the videos more subtly which made them more appealing (e.g. bottom bars of a clickable ad for 5-10 seconds).
- It was a more fluid media consumption environment. Instead of flipping through the pages of DTV listings to find something, it was very easy to just glide from topic to topic or if I got bored simply search for another topic of interest to me.
- It was entertaining (more so than I find TV to be a lot of the time) because I chose the topics, right down to an artist I wanted to look into right then.
- It was timely (see above)
- It was educational (yes I actually “learned” stuff which I, surprisingly, like to do)
- I got to experience MORE – 50 videos is a lot of videos but I went over 50 topics in an hour and a half and some of the videos were 20 minutes…that’s a lot of consumption! I’m a knowledge hound so that suited me just fine. An hour and a half would have given me…3 episodes of Family Guy while I flipped channels during commercials to watch some movie I’ve already seen?
- While the production quality was generally low (they don’t have the big production budgets to make it otherwise), the content quality was surprisingly good (insightful, funny, educational, etc)
So what does this mean? Well, I don’t plan to go home and watch my iPod all night every night (it will mess up my sleeping habits It’s taught me another way I can actually enjoy what I consume more.
So why does this matter?This is just how I consume and what matters to me (some people just don’t like “learnin’ stuff” ) but:
If I could take all of the things I just related in my little Letterman Top 10 above and bake them into Digital OOH content and advertising strategies, I think we’d have a real winner on our hands. …and when I mean winner, I mean a huge hit. It’s definitely coming. As technology gets better and more fluid and people stop trying to repurpose TV into the Digital OOH medium, the content and ads become more relevant to the audience and what you can do to it and with it becomes much more active and engaging.
I’m not saying we should look to mobile video or smartphones as the guide for our success but the principles behind what makes them enjoyable and successful can definitely be applied in areas around our medium.
Food for thought on a Monday.
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3 Responses to “Stepping back from TV: 10 Steps To A Better Content Experience”
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Rob, terrific post. Terrific.
After reading this twice, it dawned on me what had happened to you, the holy grail of the digital engagement experience:
Customer control.
The ability for the customer to have the power to access, select, and control the messaging. And through the combined efforts of researchers and media planners, the advertising add-ons become part of the experience because they are so well placed.
Unless you’re buying an HDTV, the production quality (most likely the resolution) simply doesn’t matter. Eight of the top 20 films in the AFI 100 are black and white. The number one video on YouTube is a guy on a stage performing the evolution of dance. A close second is an Avril Lavigne video, followed by a baby biting his brother’s finger. Not exactly Spielberg-esque, but utterly engaging. (Look at the running times as well. You’re glued to the screen for six minutes of dance evolution. Six minutes is an eternity in advertising.)
For as hard as we work to create compelling content, the true engagement comes from the choice of the customer/viewer to absorb it. The combination of technology, creative, and customer control will be key drivers in the future.
um…all I can say is
…
I’m glad I’m surrounded by smart people
[...] Stepping back from TV: 10 Steps To A Better Content Experience (Rob Gorrie, >>Advertise Here!) Terrific post on 10 ways content can be more engaging. If we can do all 10, we win. Big. [...]