Captivate: Developing ICONIC Content for Location-Based Video

Intelligent: Research and listen to your viewers continually in order to make smart decisions about story timeliness, variety, themes, providers, length, aesthetics and relevance. Captivate employs a panel of 9,000 viewers and surveys them at the beginning of each quarter to gather feedback on the previous stories in an effort to look for improvement.

Contexual: Take a deep dive into data on your audience and environment to help put stories in context. Knowing how your audience interacts within the environment in which they collect your information and entertainment is key. For example, inside an office elevator viewers are taking a mental break from their workday and want to be entertained and connected to the world outside their office. Time of day and day of week are also considerations for context. Starting on Thursdays, Captivate will help workers get geared up for the weekends with updates on events, restaurants, or getaways and will often offer adjacent advertising by relevant travel and entertainment companies.

Original: Networks need to own their content and avoid simply regurgitating others’ stories. Some of Captivate’s most notable content includes “View from Your Office,” which has viewers regularly submitting photos of city skylines and other landmarks right from their office; “Word of the Day,” which guides viewers on relevant usage of rare but meaningful words; and most recently, “Office Satisfaction,” which reveals insights on business professionals from Captivate’s Office Pulse research.

Native:  Opening the door to advertiser-supplied native content has been an ongoing initiative for many of the world’s top publishers including Captivate. It’s important to identify quality native content that is beyond standard ad copy and valuable to your viewers and the environment in which they engage.

Interactive: Nothing proves engagement and viewer approval as well as interaction. If consumers want to engage with a network by submitting content, participating in sweepstakes, or regularly telling you (unsolicited) how great you are, you can pat yourself on the back for proving interaction and engagement. However, to make it an expected way of life for you and your viewers, you need to commit to supporting it and schedule engagement initiatives in your programming and promotions calendar each year.

Collaborative: Another form of content that is customized for the advertiser and the viewer is collaborative content. This content comes from matching a client’s brand objectives with the wants and needs of a particular audience type. Starbucks presents “Smart Splurges” to Captivate’s audience to remind them that there are reasons to spend more on themselves once in a while. Geico highlights “Road Trips” featuring Geico’s Gecko and Orbitz created “Three Day Weekend” features with research establishing that the campaign led to the brand being 80% more likely to be associated with three-day weekends than the previous year.

Keeping content ICONIC is a great way to start building value for viewers, advertisers and networks as long as you have commitment, resources and strategic support across the board.

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