[opendtv] Why Your TV Show Needs To Always Be On | Broadcasting & Cable
- From: Craig Birkmaier <craig@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: OpenDTV Mail List <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 19 Jan 2015 18:05:36 -0500
http://www.broadcastingcable.com/news/syndication-and-distribution/why-your-tv-show-needs-always-be/137170
Why Your TV Show Needs To Always Be On
In this era of highly fragmented audiences and on-demand entertainment, the
opportunity for success is less about developing a TV show, and more about
building an always-on brand.
It’s a concept that many TV shows—including Warner Bros.’ Ellen and TMZ, CBS
Television Distribution’s Entertainment Tonight, NBC’s The Tonight Show with
Jimmy Fallon, ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live and many more—have honed to a fine art.
As content producers and programmers head to NATPE in Miami Beach this week,
how to build brands and monetize shows in an age of declining ratings is on
everyone’s minds. And it’s a topic that will get a lot of play as NATPE
continues to evolve from a syndication and distribution conference into a
content one, with attendees and exhibitors from across the television industry.
Today, development still starts with the TV show, but almost as much
consideration must be given to concurrent platforms, whether those are the Web,
YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, Vine, Snapchat or all
of the above. While social media performance isn’t counted in a TV show’s
ratings—something that needs to change—it’s certainly factored into a brand’s
overall performance and value.
As CBS Corp. CEO Leslie Moonves told the International Consumer Electronics
Show (CES) audience on Jan. 7, “Overnight ratings are virtually useless right
now. The idea of success or failure is very different. Social networking
becomes a metric that is very, very important.”
Ellen, for example, is averaging nearly 4 million viewers season to date,
according to Nielsen Media Research, through the week ended Dec. 21.
That’s the lowest number out of the following list: her show’s 17.4 million
followers on Facebook, 37.3 million followers on Twitter (where DeGeneres is
the 10th-most-followed user), 10.6 million subscribers on YouTube (and 3.4
billion views) and 8.6 million followers on Instagram. The show also launched
its own videosharing site, ellentube in October, which currently has more than
2 million subscribers and boasts 22 million views per month.
That said, TV shows are still mostly monetized based on C3—ratings for
commercials viewed within three days. The rest is gravy, but sometimes, that’s
a lot of gravy.
It Starts With the TV Show
Producers may have grand dreams for brands they are building, but the TV show
still comes first.
“No matter what, you need a big television show and a big brand for all of
those other things to operate,” says Mike Darnell, Warner Bros. president,
unscripted and alternative television. “It’s very difficult to do it in
reverse.”
“You still have to start with the TV show. You have to make it work on TV and
then think about how you can organically build out the digital and social
platforms and really build that into the DNA of the show,” says Hilary Estey
McLoughlin, CBS Television Distribution president, creative affairs. “Still,
it’s critical to build these shows as brands that are not just standalone
half-hours or hours.”
That lesson has been a hard-learned one in some cases, with NBC’s Million
Second Quiz and ABC’s Rising Star as convenient cautionary tales. Both shows
were designed to be highly interactive, with apps and websites, but neither
show scored high ratings.
“What we think about first is what’s the funniest thing we can do on the show
today, what’s the most compassionate thing?” says Andy Lassner, an executive
producer on Ellen. “Once we have that, we decide where it goes on social and
digital.”
“What we have always found is that if somebody comes to us and says ‘we want to
put out a viral video’ or ‘we want to make money on a social media platform,’
it’s the wrong way to go about it,” says Mary Connelly, also an Ellen executive
producer. “We let the content lead the day and then the monetization and the
‘viralness’ of something comes from that.”
If You Build It, They Will Come
Once the TV show is on and working, it’s time to build out the brand. Large
social media followings composed of millions of people have a way of attracting
advertisers like bees to honey. The trick is incorporating those hungry
advertisers in a way that won’t turn off audiences.
“As this went on and our followings grew, we started having these major
companies come to us and say, ‘can we have a meeting with you, we can help
you,’” says Lassner. “But we quickly realized that they wanted us to help them.
That’s how we learned we had something here.”
Today, Ellen probably turns down more sponsorship opportunities than it accepts.
Other related posts:
- » [opendtv] Why Your TV Show Needs To Always Be On | Broadcasting & Cable - Craig Birkmaier
