social tv

7 Creative Examples of How TV Brands Are Using Vine

From Lost Remote

AD: Twitters week-old app Vine is taking off, fast. With the ability to post right to Twitter, it offers a creative way for brands to create and share engaging rich media content that can go viral. Vine taps into a wildly popular consumer behavior in social – creating and sharing animated gifs. With access to endless amounts of video content, entertainment brands as a whole are poised to benefit immensely from this new app.

Although Vine is a social network within an app, the Twitter connectivity opens up endless possibilities outside the platform, which early reports indicate skews very young. Brands can use it to create content for Twitter first, embed those Tweets across their digital ecosystem, and focus on growing Vine fans later if the app’s demo matches their desired target. 


Click the volume icon for sound.

Excerpt: Twitter debuted its video app a week ago, and we’re starting to see some creative experiments by TV brands, both local and national. As we noted in last week’s story, Vine restricts clips to 6 seconds and requires you to shoot it with the iPhone — no way (yet) to import clips into the app. With those limits, some TV brands are giving it a swing. Without further ado, here are a few examples we’ve gleaned.

Read the full post on Lost Remote

Can Facebook’s New Graph Search Be An Engine of TV Show Discovery?

From: Social TV Digest

AD: Film, TV, and music are likely to be the most obvious use cases for Facebook’s new people-powered search engine (in super limited beta) as topics most are already inclined to ‘like’ and engage with on the platform. But, this new search requires a change in behavior and the desire to slice and dice friend data in this new way.

Many apps like one of my favorites, Fanhattan, already provide users ways to discover this type of information while providing more value than just information. Google has seen slow adoption of its +1 button, and Search, Plus Your World social search features, so I expect we will see something similar here…when we all finally get into the beta. 

Graph Search: Search Bar

Click to Expand: Graph Search: Search Bar

Excerpt: Combining search with the social graph could create Social TV’s new recommendation engine

This week, Facebook launched a limited beta release of Graph Search, an improvement to Facebook’s search tool. The social network touts it as a new way to search, enabling people to find information through the filter of their friends and the things they care about. If you haven’t done so already, go to facebook.com/graphsearch to get on the waitlist.

Once you get access to the beta release, you’ll be able to start searching a subset of Facebook social graph content, across four main areas — people, photos, places, and interests. Interests include TV-related queries such as: “tv shows my friends like,” “friends who live in Chicago and like Shameless,” or “people who like The Bachelor and live nearby.”

It’s important to highlight that Facebook’s vision for search is quite different from Google. A web search takes a keyword or phrase and gives you back a series of links that might be what you’re looking for. While Facebook Graph Search will strive to display a more relevant, personalized answer culled from what your friends, and their friends, have shared on Facebook.

Read full post on Social TV Digest

The End of Social TV

From AdAge

AD: Writer Simon Duminico shares interesting insights on the short falls of social TV, including the focus on programming windows to drive interaction, rather than year-round, multi-platform engagement with a show’s fans. He’s not wrong on this point, but there’s more.  

Social TV Fail Whale

Social TV Fail Whale

Excerpt: In those early days, working with Ad Age’s editorial partner Trendrr, the social-media monitoring firm, it was pretty amazing watching thousands, and then tens of thousands, and then millions of social-media comments rack up around individual shows. For TV people (showrunners and network marketing types, especially), I know it was thrilling. For me, as a media columnist, it was fascinating having a front-row seat as the whole second-screen phenomenon was birthed in real time and gained critical mass.

And then … it got boring. New social-TV records continue to get set — the phenomenon seems far from peaking — but they’re rarely surprising anymore.

Then, last December, after Nielsen bought SocialGuide, Nielsen and Twitter announced they were working on creating something called the Nielsen Twitter TV Rating — “a syndicated-standard metric around the reach of the TV conversation on Twitter” — in time for the fall 2013 season. I’m keeping an open mind, but a part of me felt that that was a jump-the-shark-moment for social TV. As I’ve written before, when it comes to social-media response, absolute numbers — especially when used to compare disparate shows — are largely meaningless. There are just way too many variables to correct for between viewer demographics and show genres (e.g., a low-rated CW drama can explode on Twitter thanks to tweet-happy teen girls, dwarfing the social-media response to, say, a top-rated police procedural over on older-skewing CBS).

So, yeah, what of the future of social TV? For starters, Trendrr is doing some interesting things with its curation tools — part of its “studio services” offerings — which are all about drawing insights for specific networks and showrunners from the social-media stream surrounding individual shows (i.e., the point is to listen to your audience). Bluefin Labs, another company that’s been sharing its data with Ad Age, is continuing to build out its sophisticated system for evaluating the efficacy and social reach of individual commercials.

But for my money, where it gets really interesting is when networks stop thinking about how to goose the social-media numbers surrounding the broadcast window and instead think of their shows as cross-platform (including social-media) brands that fans want to be able to engage with anytime they want. That’s the approach taken at, for example, USA Network, under digital chief Jesse Redniss. His team has pioneered in the creation of digital extensions of shows — everything from tablet comic books to elaborate, engrossing online games — that delight viewers (and sponsors) 24/7.

Read the full post on AdAge

Calling Fans of The Office (NBC): Tongal and Dunder Mifflin Partner to Crowdsource Super Bowl Ad

From Tongal

AD: Partnering with creative crowdsourcing platform, Tongal, NBC Universal has launched a fun campaign for Super Bowl XLVII and The Office. 

The Creative Brief: The goal of this project is to create a super funny and entertaining TV commercial – to possibly air in Scranton, PA during The Big Game in February 2013 – that will generate awareness, excitement and love for the expanded line of Dunder Mifflin products.

The Dunder Mifflin products should be the key focus of your commercial, and you must show their flagship product: Dunder Mifflin Copy Paper at least once in your commercial. Given the awesome subject matter here, we’re expecting some pretty damn funny stuff from you. It should be done in the spirit of “The Office” without coming across as a parody of it and engaging enough to generate continued online appeal beyond being a great and memorable TV commercial.

Documentary-style interviews in the corner of a drab office that could be confused with actual episodes should be avoided. But legendary Jim Halpert-style pranks, Dwight Schrute-style tactlessness or Michael Scott-style cluelessness is welcome!

Remember, the producers of “The Office” will be reviewing the entries, so be sure to put “quabity first.”

Thought Starters: How can your commercial help companies all over America connect with their inner Dunder Mifflin?

Read about the full project/contest on Tongal

Pew Study: The Rise of the “Connected Viewer”

AD: As we role into the new TV season, and all are hard at work on their engagement strategies, Pew Internet and American Life Project provides some meaningful second screen insights with its latest study, “The Rise of the Connected Viewer.”

From: Pew Internet and American Life Project

Second ScreenExcerpt:
Half of all adult cell phone owners now incorporate their mobile devices into their television watching experiences. These “connected viewers” used their cell phones for a wide range of activities during the 30 days preceding our April 2012 survey:

  • 38% of cell owners used their phone to keep themselves occupied during commercials or breaks in something they were watching
  • 23% used their phone to exchange text messages with someone else who was watching the same program in a different location
  • 22% used their phone to check whether something they heard on television was true
  • 20% used their phone to visit a website that was mentioned on television
  • 11% used their phone to see what other people were saying online about a program they were watching, and 11% posted their own comments online about a program they were watching using their mobile phone
  • 6% used their phone to vote for a reality show contestant
  • Taken together, 52% of all cell owners are “connected viewers”—meaning they use their phones while watching television for at least one of these reasons.

Read the full report here.

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