An earlier post was all about the (UK) Ofcom Communications Market Report and the way in which TV and social media campaigns can work in tandem.

Deloitte has now looked into this as well, releasing a report to coincide with the upcoming Edinburgh Television Festival.   Deloitte commissioned research among 4000+ adults, and found that, as much as people like myself talk about ‘social TV’, only 7% of those polled had become fans of their favourite programmes.

At the same time, the generational shift that Ofcom found in its research, also comes into play here.   Among 18-24 year olds, 46% liked their favourite shows on Facebook.

Also, Deloitte’s research is about actively liking a programme, there is of course a stage before that of people simply tweeting about live TV while its taking place, or exchanging Facebook / IM messages about it.

TV ads skipped by 86%

Another reason why combining online +TV could become more attractive for brands could come down to 86% of viewers with PVRs skipping ads. This is the result of a second Deloitte study conducted to coincide with the Edinburgh TV Festival.

In fact, it’s younger viewers, the very ones likely to be online, who are more receptive to advertising messages.   Deloitte found that while a third of over 55s said that no form of advertising impacted them, only 13% of under 25s felt the same.

Image – ccharmon

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• Why combining TV + online can pay off for brands and broadcasters (liesdamnedliesstatistics.com)
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More stats from the 377 page (UK) Ofcom Communications Markets Report, in particular ones that reinforce the fact that TV-led campaigns or properties are very often more effective when combined with online.     Three findings in particular (with graphs)

1 – Live, scheduled TV carries a low attention threshold. Compared to other forms of media, consumers are least likely to give live TV and radio their undivided attention.     Social media and print have medium attention scores, while games and downloaded video content rank best when it comes to consumer focus (hence the wisdom of spending money on in-game promotions).

2 – We’re now more likely to ‘media stack.’ 20% of media time is now simultaneous – very often involving TV + the Internet and mobile phones.  Among the under 25s that proportion rises to 29%.  16-24 year olds managed to fit just over nine and a half hours’ worth of media into a little  over six and a half hours of actual time.

3 – The most popular YouTube channels are variations of mainstream media properties. It’s a myth that we want to spend our time on YouTube watching home made ‘world’s funniest animal’ type videos.   Instead, much as we do on TV, we want to see content with high production values, involving recognisable names.

Where’s the proof that TV + online work in tandem works?  Here are three random examples:

1 – PHD and Medialets developed a True Blood iPhone ad to support the last series.   Though we can question whether HBO’s 38% increase in viewers was down to the mobile campaign, the best click-through rate of 8.73% that the campaign achieved was way beyond the usual display ad rate of 0.02%.

2 – Speaking of click-throughs, Coke achieved one of 6%, when it ran a Promoted Tweets / Twitter World Cup campaign.   Running a World Cup promo while people were tweeting about matches made sense – Twitter saw a clear spike in activity, including a record for the number of tweets per second during the recent tournament.

3 – One of my favourite examples is this one:  US broadcaster Oxygen piloted a “real time viewing party” called Oxygen Live around one of its hit shows – Bad Girls Club.   This pulled in comments and conversations from several networks such as Twitter into an online hub while the show was airing.

Oxygen Live kicked off 30 mins before each show started, meaning that it was trending on Twitter 5 mins before each episode and there was a consistent increase in viewers over the hour.   In fact in the US West Coast when they *didn’t* run Oxygen Live, ratings were up 9% among women aged 18-49.   Once Oxygen Live launched that ratings then saw a much bigger increase, up to 57%.

And as far as a successful example of integrating TV advertising and an online campaign goes….Old Spice anyone?

As a final point, it’s worth noting that two of the new social networks that have created a buzz over the past few weeks, Miso and Glue, have a model that’s directly related to people checking into entertainment events and TV programmes, as opposed to locations.

We’ve got a more detailed summary of the Ofcom report in the latest (agency) Rabbit feed, the html version is here.

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• Ofcom: multi-tasking media junkies on the rise (channel4.com)
• TV viewing increases despite internet (guardian.co.uk)
• The media: how is it affecting our lives? (newstatesman.com)

Here are a bunch of charts and reports about the newspaper market worth looking at side by side.

On one hand, an OECD report (via a post by Erina Lin in sfnblog) again confirms that in the UK and US the newspaper market is in a steady period of decline.   And on the other hand, an article in AdAge, shows that digital revenues almost certainly aren’t making up the losses.

The OECD shows that between 2007-2009 not a single member country saw an increase in the newspaper market.  Note, that the OECD’s definition of the newspaper market is: “Online and offline circulation and advertising revenues of traditional newspaper publishers” – in other words everything that traditional papers do to make money.

The US (-30% decline) and the UK (-21%) very much led the way, though among English speaking countries, Australia bucked the trend, ‘only’ seeing a 3% fall in the same period.

Here is another chart from the same report showing that while seniors are still most likely to read a paper, the % who regularly read a newspaper in the US has been going down among all age groups.

50% of UK newspaper revenues down to sales
Though the US and UK lead the world in their shrinking newspaper industries, they are affected in different ways.

With 50% of revenue coming from circulations, UK newspapers are more at risk from changing demographics, with younger consumers in particular not being in the habit of buying a morning paper.   With 87% of revenue coming from advertising, US publishers have by comparison been hit harder by the general economic downturn.

US Newspapers now only have 30% of the digital advertising pie
However, circulations and ad revenues are clearly linked, and here is the bad news.

From the AdAge article, ‘Mounting Web Woes Pummel Newspapers’, US Newspapers are not succeeding in getting a decent share of the whole digital advertising pie.   Even as digital advertising as a whole increases in value, US papers’ share of the total has gone down to around 30%.

In fact, writing on Australian Marketing website Mumbrella over a year ago, journalism professor Stephen Quinn pointed out that while classified advertising used to represent 40% of newspaper profits back in 2000, thanks to the likes of Gumtree and Craigslist, that total had gone down to 23%.

More tellingly, Professor Quinn said that when looking at the New York Times, its online advertising revenues would only pay for a fifth of its news gathering budget.

Before we start writing off newspapers completely though, there are another set of figures from the OECD report worth looking at.  While the OECD countries saw their newspaper markets decline, when you look at emerging markets such as South Africa, India, China and Brazil, a completely different picture emerges.

While circulations in OECD countries went down year by year from 2003-2008 in the so-called BIICS (Brazil, India, Indonesia, China, South Africa) they steadily went up.    To take India as just one example, the % that regularly reads a newspaper went up from 17% in 2003 to 37% in 2008.

As a result, worldwide – certainly outside of the minority of countries where Internet penetration is 50% – the newspaper industry is actually a growth industry.

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There’s been a lot of research out about how social media recommendations can increase the chances of people buying products or services.

For instance, the other week Harris in the US found that 50% of under 35s followed the recommendations of social media friends, compared to 17% who acted on celebrity endorsements.   And last year Comscore released a study showing that ‘social search’ (social media activity and paid search together) was 233% more effective than search advertising alone.

However,  a recent study featured in Marketing Magazine in particular is worth noting.   It shows that people accessing an online retailer via social media are 10x more likely to buy something than a visitor that comes to the site cold.

According to Sage Pay, on average 7% of visitors to an online store will make a purchase.   However, if directed to the retailer via social media, the % of visitors who will go to the transaction section goes up to 71%.

Especially when compared with a click-through rate that can be as low as 0.02% for display ads, those figures are fairly compelling.   Yet, in the same Sage Pay survey, only 5% of marketers with responsibility for online marketing said that social media was the most effective communications channel.

This is one of the items that we featured this week at Rabbit on our regular ‘Rabbit Feed’ – more details here

Image – Daniel Weir, Via Flickr

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Marketing directors with money to spend take note.  Forget the measly 0.2% click through rates, online advertising really does work!

…or so says .Fox Networks which unveiled a ‘ground breaking‘ piece of research with Comscore to show that consumers exposed to video advertising (as opposed to online display advertising) were 28% more likely to visit a site and 2x as likely to conduct a brand search.

In addition, Comscore and .Fox found that video and display advertising saw “site visitation increase by more than a factor of seven over a four week period following exposure to an ad.”

A note of scepticism to start off with: Does an online ad really have a residual effect of four weeks? (the allotted time for people to take action).  And what about other brand messages that a consumer may have seen during that period to drive site visits as advertising rarely works in isolation.

However, Comscore’s findings that online video advertising is mildly less annoying for consumers and more effective than display is supported by other research.

Last month TubeMogul found that 16% of viewers click away on seeing a video pre-roll ad, which leaves 80%+ of the audience still intact…though for newspaper and magazine sites, exactly the ones who need to sell ads online, the news is worse.   There a quarter (25%) leave when the pre-roll starts.

Meanwhile as long as three years ago, Doubleclick found that click through rates for video advertising ranged from 0.4 to 0.74% as opposed to the 0.1 to 0.2% for normal display or banner ads.

Another finding from Comscore is also worth noting.   Only 38% watch TV online to avoid ads.   By comparison 71% do so because they missed an episode while 57% cite convenience.   Apparently people who watch online TV would also be willing to tolerate six or seven mins of ads per hour, compared to the four mins they are currently served up.

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While the New York Times reports that 2009 was officially the worst year for the newspaper industry in ‘decades’, journalism blogger and pundit Alan Mutter says 2010 could be even worse.

Three US based stats from Alan’s blog:

1 – Classified advertising is down a massive 64% from the $17.3 billion it brought US papers in 2005.  Thanks Craiglist, and in the UK, the likes of gumtree

2 – Retail advertising was down 36% over the same period

3 – National advertising was down 44% since 2005

The problem is of course also a demographic one.   Apparently in the US, the average age of newspaper readers is 55+ as shown in the video below (via Steveouting.com).

And the UK probably isn’t too different in that respect, a Parliamentary Committee two years ago found that newspaper readership fell 40% among 25-34 year olds, but rose by 4% among 55-64 year olds – and if anything that trend will have increased over the past two years, given that the UK nationals have lost more than the population of Wales in readers since then.

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A study that shows the limits of social media in helping people discover new content – but also shows the importance of online editorial endorsement  – comes from Knowledge Networks in the US (via Digital Media) .

Viewers were asked how they discover new content and how they decide what to watch, both for TV and online video.   For online video, social media from strangers ranked seventh in terms of recommendations, with verbal word of mouth (41%) and search (32%) coming top.

In other words, even on the Internet people are most likely to be directed to stuff that someone’s told them about face to face.

For regular TV, TV advertising is actually the prime source of content discovery at 46% – who said commercials were dead!  However, social media from strangers only scored 6%.   Meanwhile, just as they are for online videos, verbal recommendations are key in helping people find out about offline TV shows (38%)

Conclusions: Concentrate on online PR, and a search + social media strategy
So is the conclusion that a social media and online engagement strategy is largely a waste of time, and you might as well put your cash into both TV and search ads?  Hardly.

First of all, it’s obvious that even if someone tells you about a great new viral face to face they must have heard or read about it somewhere else.   As always off and online word of mouth have to very much work in tandem.

Secondly, stories or reviews on the Internet ranked highly (27%) in terms of helping people find out about new online videos.   In other words just as you would offline, editorial endorsement online from major blogs and news sources (the lines between the two are blurred anyway) works.

Finally, the Knowledge Networks study shows the effectiveness of search when it comes to helping people discover online video.

However if your social media and search strategy works together then search ends up being even more effective.   That’s shown by an earlier Comscore study that said that people exposed to both what they called “influenced social” and paid search had 233% heavier search behaviour.

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NMA has a piece on ‘social networks ignore mobile at their peril.‘ Though most of it is behind a pay-wall, the gist of it is that social media is being accessed more and more via cellphones.

In particular, NMA talks about specially commissioned research for Nielsen and the fact that 65 million Facebook users – so more than 1/5 of the total – now access their social networks from their mobiles.

These users are apparently 50% more active than purely web based users, my guess is that this is so due to the fact that purpose built apps make accessing social media via your phone fairly easy, while surfing the Internet can be an unsatisfactory experience.

Overall, the gist of article, about the growth of the mobile Internet, is of course right and it’s worth summarising a few recent stats that make the same point, namely:

• According to UK regulator OFCOM, for 16-24 year olds, mobile phones are their second most essential media, ahead of PCs+Internet (for other age groups, its reversed)
• A report conducted by Transpera in the US showed that once someone starts graduating onto mobile video with their phone, they are hooked and use it as their main way to go online. According to the results, 62% if mobile video users use their cellphones to browse the Internet more than they do their computers
• iPhone users are richer, younger and better educated than the average. Read – early adopters and people generally ahead of the curve use smartphones
• Mobile phones are becoming our remote controls for life, 2/3 of us even take them to bed with us! More to the point, 17% of people globally (and 26% in the US, 25% in the UK) check their emails via their cellphones
• Though mobile click through rates are pretty appalling (at least in Europe and the US – here in Africa they are actually quite high), once you serve up consumers with ‘location based’ advertising, it can work. According to Navteq, 72% of consumers found location based ads to be “acceptable” (whatever that means), but 19% who recalled seeing them would click through for info on what’s nearby

Back to the NMA piece, according to 3 mobile boss Kevin Murphy, ‘there’s now an “overwhelming awareness” among consumers of the ability to use social networks on mobile.’ What’s needed now is for social networks, and indeed brands, to take further advantage of that fact.

Image – Angelsk

The other month we posted about Tube Mogul’s stats showing that most online video viewers don’t last beyond the first minute. As a result it won’t come as a huge surprise to learn that Tube Mogul has now found that most Internet TV shows lose most of their viewers after the first episode.

As reported in Ad Age, online audiences suffer from a high boredom and low attention threshold. 64% of viewers drop off after episode one, and if you have a ten episode series by the end there are not many viewers left.

Previously web TV series could be produced and uploaded with the sheer novelty value attracting a certain amount of publicity that in turn made the investment worthwhile. Now advertisers want some kind of certainty about audiences before ponying up the ad or sponsorship cash, especially given the current climate.

According to Tremor Media CEO Jason Glickman, “the basic principle is there aren’t enough views to go around.”

Interestingly, the article makes the point that Internet video viewers are no longer as willing to be herded into featured picks or spots, so publisher endorsement is not what it once was.

A year ago a featured video as chosen by YouTube editors got 500,000+ views now they usually hit less than 100,000. Consumers are now savvy enough to find what they want without someone from on high providing a large direction sign.

At the same time, previous research published by Internet video site Veoh showed that heavily engaged viewers (ie those who watch more than an hour of Internet video a week), who account for 40% of all online viewers, are twice as likely to remember web TV than ordinary TV ads.

So, the lesson seems to be saying that even if the numbers by episode ten are small, they are at least paying attention and drinking your brand’s kool aid.

Image – Phoenix Daily Photo