The days of two million-strong TV audiences are over and it's far from business as usual for the networks and their advertisers. Zeebox Australia general manager Jimmy Storrier told AdNews that it's all about synchronisation. But he has hit out at Twitter for using broadcasters' content to make money and giving little back in return.
Storrier said Zeebox – which, unlike the broadcasters' proprietary second-screen apps, is channel-agnostic – was on track for a million downloads in Australia by the end of this year, but he would not be drawn on how many of those people used the app regularly. Twitter has over two million regular users in Australia and has been hailed by some as being the saviour of TV by driving users back to broadcast TV.
While broadcasters may welcome any deeper engagement of audiences and promotion to millions of local eyeballs, Storrier thinks the return is skewed away from the TV networks. "Only Twitter makes money [by piggybacking broadcasters' content]," he said.
“Twitter says to broadcasters, 'Use our hashtag, promote our platform for free... but we we won't give money back to you.' But I don't think Twitter will say no to somebody who [for example] wants to advertiser alongside #TheBachelor. That is bad news for broadcasters. Only Twitter makes money. Broadcasters need to think about that."
Storrier wants broadcasters to think more about how to engage eyeballs that are now looking at their phone or tablet, not just during the ad breaks but increasingly during airtime. Naturally, he said the solutions involve Zeebox and the firm will launch local research by the year end to back it up.
That research will follow a major US study into advertising engagement on the second screen which suggested that click-through rates and engagement are boosted by social integration. Conducted with Kraft, Viacom and ComScore, the six-month study found that people engage more with branded show pages using its app, and that a banner-style rich media ad unit featuring polls, videos and Twitter hashtags grabbed more eyeballs. Click-through rates for those formats averaged 1.2%.
"Advertisers have 15 or 30 seconds to engage on TV and that's always a challenge," said Storrier. One which has been exacerbated by people using their phone or tablet during ad breaks, as well as during the shows themselves. (Storrier doesn't like the word second screen, arguing that "Nobody says, 'I'm just going to use my second screen.'")
A synchronised approach is the answer, he said, touting Zeebox's credentials “where people don't have to jump off onto other platforms” as the delivery mechanism. "Fragmentation has been the issue with [the explosion] of digital channels and the days of two million audiences are over. People are doing different things, so how do we catch that fragmented audience?"
To that end, he said, and the firm will soon launch an audio recognition feature so that the app syncs with whatever the viewer is watching. While refusing to be drawn on active users, Storrier claimed that those that used the app in Australia came back three times a week and had an average engagement time of 45 minutes.
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