Social Media Engagement Is A Boon For TV, According To Forrester - Cross-Platform Analytics Informs Strategy And Value Chain

Posted by Gianluigi Cuccureddu SMP in Breaking News on July 29, 2011  |  0 Comments More from this author  |    |  Follow Gianluigi Cuccureddu SMP on: Facebook | LinkedIn | Twitter |

This is according to David Cooperstein of Forrester Research, who started his article with:

Despite being the largest advertising medium (Forrester projects TV marketers will spend $76 billion on advertising in 2011), TV still lags in its ability to measure anything deeper than basic tune-in. Over the past eight months, we have been covering how recent innovations in TV measurement are making TV ads more targeted and accountable. Forrester clients can read our earlier reports on measurement that discuss media measurement across digital and traditional channels and the future of set-top-box data for TV measurement.

We reported earlier on AppMarket about Bluefin Labs' advanced technology that makes a direct, real-time correlation between shows and ads that audiences are watching on TV and what the audience is saying via social media. A few weeks back they released a new product, called Bleufin Signals that "establishes social media engagement metrics for TV shows. The product analyzes billions of public social media comments and millions of minutes of TV data each month and interprets them into actionable metrics like response level (the volume of comments for a given TV program) and response share (a program’s share of social response during its specific airing time). TV networks will now be able to quantify social media engagement on their programs and drill down deeper than simple tune-in."

What could this kind of rich cross-platform analytics mean for the TV value chain?

As elaborated in this article on Appmarket.tv, two core aspects that are impacted by real-time and cross-platform communication and analysis are TV content and TV advertising pricing:

TV Content

By analysis conversations and behavior around and about a specific show or series or network, organizations can learn what viewers are about. Netnography is the branch of Ethnography that analyses the free behaviour of individuals on the internet that uses online marketing research techniques to provide useful insights. Social media insights are a powerful set of insights.

By having a better insight and moreover a continuous understanding of the viewer target audiences, TV content can be tuned and refined, increasing relevancy and quality as seen from the specific target audience. Advertisers with branded content can adapt their offerings better to their audience, ongoing.

TV Advertising pricing

TV advertising pricing is the effect caused by better adapted content, the relevanter content-target audience is, the more premium fees can be asked. Both are symbiotic and well executed provide a virtuous cycle of quality content, pricing and a viewers which are listened to.

Value chain and strategy impact

But the impact of analytics and data goes further than that. It influences, enriches and informs business strategy and the value chain. By understanding relationships between platforms, content, audiences and brands, TV organizations can incrementally adjust their strategy and/or execution. Besides that, a more efficient and effective value chain is created by listening and adapting to that what is understood from data.

CMO.com has referred to data-driven marketing, innovation can be added by opening the organization's activity directly and indirectly to external stakeholders through the use of social media (and other data sources), its data and technologies for the purpose of competitive advantages. Data enables, and a big challenge is to create understanding and extract actionable insights from all of it to compete.

More data will be created, more will be interconnected, increasing the richness of the data, but simultaniously challenging organization to react to it.