THE ADNEWS NGEN BLOG: Storytelling in the age of multi-screening

Today, I’d like to tell you all a story, about stories.

People have been telling stories for over 40,000 years, yet at work today, we all use PowerPoint to tell the majority of our stories. PowerPoint has been around 23 years.

I agree with Seth Godin’s belief that “marketing is storytelling” and what I’ve found interesting is the new opportunity to tell stories across multiple screens. We know people have been using more than one screen for years, but recently, we’ve started to gain behavioral insight into how different screens are used with thanks to Nielsen, Google, OzTAM, Mi9 and many other international research reports. What we can do now is start to understand how people use screens and more importantly, when and how frequently. We can also start to think about how to apply this ‘new’ behavior to communications and within the context of storytelling.

I believe that with this new opportunity to learn from multi-screen behaviors, advertisers need to have a clear plan about how their communications will work on the second and even third screens.

Here’s why…

More people are watching TV on ‘other’ screens.
The latest Nielsen Multi-screen report (published 28 March, 2013) revealed overall traditional television screen usage is growing, with viewing of Playback TV and other screen usage continuing to rise.

- Playback viewing increased in 2012 across all age groups, especially those 40+.
- Over a third of people 13-17’s total TV screen time was dedicated to other screen usage, more than double that of the people 40-54 and four times more than 55+.

Big TV events drive multi-screen usage.
The Olympics is perhaps the biggest TV event and the Mi9 Olympics Insights Report revealed that 75% Australian Olympics viewers ‘consumed’ the Games on more than one media platform in a 24-hour period. People watching TV only in a 24-hour period represented 15% of total viewers, while 42% accessed content via both TV and online - the difference was ‘multi-screeners’ who consumed almost twice as many hours of Olympic content.

The role of screens has been redefined by their consumption
This Mi9 study also revealed that each screen played a different, but complimentary role to the Olympic Games consumption:
- TV was the primary screen used to access content.
- Mobile phones were considered a companion during the commute to work and as a second screen with TV during prime time.
- The PC facilitated content access at work.
- Tablet owners were dual-screening during prime time.

What does this all mean for communications and storytelling?

With all this multi-screen information now available, we really need to apply these behavioral insights to communications and our brands. This means developing a cross-screen communication architecture and create an approach to tell brand stories.

My director here at MediaCom, Mike Deane, and I have devised three cross-screen planning pillars to help plan cross-screen communication architecture. We should consider how advertising on different screens could be used to compliment each other, compliment creative and most importantly, tell stories. Here are our three pillars:

1. Simultaneous. This is when people are consuming more than one screen at a time. This screen consumption behavior gives us the opportunity to try and close the e-commerce loop by pairing brand ads on TV with retail ads on second screens.

2. Continuous. This is when people consume different screens at different times. This behavior provides the opportunity to continue the story over a longer period of time and provide interest across different day-parts or even weeks.

3. Timeless. This means planning media moments around device consumption (mobile, tablet or PC), irrespective of time. This behavior provides the opportunity to drive intrigue with content that does not depend on time. This suits advertisers with extremely strong brand awareness and consistent positioning. The best examples I can think of are Corona’s “From Where You’d Rather Be” campaign and Peroni.

That’s why I believe that with this new opportunity to learn from multi-screen behaviors, advertisers need to have a clear plan about how their ads will work on the second and even third screens

This is taken from an excerpt from the “MediaCom Entertainment Division: 10 Hot Planning Considerations for 2013”, written by Andrew Da Silva and Mike Deane.

Andrew Da Silva
Manager, Client Communications Planning
MediaCom