As Viewing Changes, So Should the Way We Program, Market and Measure

There were many great speakers and presentations during the morning keynotes and breakout sessions at the Media Insights & Engagement Conference today. Afternoon keynotes were great as well but that is for another (possibly someone else’s) blog.

I noticed some themes across the sessions I was at -- several new and a few that seem evergreen, all which are interrelated.  Here is my synopsis of them in no particular order:

Live TV isn’t dead.  However it is declining, even for the first time among those 50+, while digital viewership is up.

Audiences are becoming more and more fragmented. With so many content and platform choices it is therefore harder to reach viewers and just as hard to keep them. The metric used to define a successful show may need to change as viewing continues to become more multiplatform.

Because of fragmentation, programmers need to be smarter with how they spend their dollars and how they schedule their network.  All shows can’t be/don’t have to be multi-million dollar investments, and repeat programming can perform just as well at times as first run originals.

Marketers need to get more comfortable targeting audiences not demos.  With so much viewing shifting to digital there is more and more data available, making it easier to be more precise in targeting that enables you to deliver the right ad to the right person at the right time -- based on behavior, environment, psychographics, etc.

Advertising/advertisers need to get creative.  Since it is harder to get noticed these days, doing something different – whether it be running your ad in a theater or delivering a live ad, can garner greater recall and impact than traditional ads in traditional mediums.

As researchers, we need to shorten the research cycle and time to insights. In a world of digital and social data, what people said about your show on Twitter becomes irrelevant (or at least of diminishing interest and actionability) when reported on weeks after the fact.

I could leave it at that as AI is just about everywhere these days – including having a place in programming research to forecast audiences based on past behaviors and attitudes/emotions.

I look forward to tomorrow’s sessions to see if the above themes continue to get substantiated and built upon, or if we will hear about even more challenges (or I should day opportunities?) to tackle in the day-to-day job of helping to keep TV great!