Gaining Back Some of That Lost Audience Size

Despite this, we have seen very little evidence of efforts for video channels to test new ways of growing audience.

Usually, when brands realize they are trending down, they do something about it. Sometimes what they do works and they recover, and it’s often by finding new users they never had before.

Let’s say you have a video channel that in the past has averaged a 1.0 rating and now you are down to ratings to the right of the decimal point. The good news is that 99% of the population is your oyster! This is an on-purpose overstatement since with an average 1.0 rating you might have reached more than 10% of the population in a year, but you had a core which made up most of that average 1.0 rating, and occasional or accidental others who cycled through to see specific instances of content, or were on rare occasions captive because of co-viewing someone else’s choice of your network.

Without overstatement, and leaving aside special tentpole sports events and the like, every network tends to serve a small slice of the population. Viewers have too much to do and too little disposable time to spend much of it exploring all their video viewing options.

And networks do not invest enough in tune-in and subscriber acquisition advertising. This is a hangover from the early days of television when programmers were accustomed to certain ways of doing things. At the time, each of the three networks averaged about 30% of the total audience and reached about 90% of viewers each week. Using their own air to promote shows more than sufficed. This method resulted in an average 75% awareness level for new shows. Today, the average awareness level for new shows is in the 20%-30% range according to Screen Engine, a figure that seems high.

Networks must now pay money to advertise outside of their own airtime, and they do so grudgingly, with short arms and deep pockets. This is a huge mistake.

The potential to get new viewers is enormous. Most of the population has no idea how good some of your shows are. You have never reached them to demonstrate that.

It gets better. There are technologies that can identify the audiences who have the highest chance of becoming loyal viewers to your specific program. An example is the technology I developed, which was proven to work, averaging 18% adoption rates for new shows. Today, RMT with partner Samba/Semasio is tracking 300 million US IDs and detecting the motivational signals that would drive a person to watch your content.

If you have a themed network where there is a pattern among the types of programs you schedule, using motivational signals to attract viewers who would be the most receptive to one of your shows, and ensuring with addressable ads that they see promos for other shows on your network, you can obtain new replacement audience for those viewers you may have recently lost.

Just like testing a stain remover on a corner of your carpet before you use it across the whole carpet, you can pretest in small geographies whether these new tune-in technologies really get you new, loyal viewers (they do). The cost of these pretests is peanuts, and the benefit of potentially regaining lost audience is invaluable.

Posted at MediaVillage through the Thought Leadership self-publishing platform.

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The opinions expressed here are the author's views and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillage.org/MyersBizNet.