Creators seeking audience attention have proliferated across platforms and so has the data to tell them if they’re doing it right.
LAS VEGAS — Media’s challenge today is not in getting audiences to consume media — they are consuming more media than ever before — but in grabbing and holding their attention. Even more challenging? Holding audiences’ attention at scale, which is something that today is done best by major live sporting events like the Super Bowl or March Madness, and live breaking news like the devastating wildfires that ravaged Los Angeles in January.
“People are spending a tremendous amount of time consuming media, but in an ever-increasingly fragmented way,” said Paul LeFort, managing director, local TV client services, Nielsen.
Panelists at TVNewsCheck’s Programming Everywhere event here on Sunday, April 6, discussed the strategies and techniques they are using to keep audiences’ attention focused on their platforms. These can be anything from designing simple but sticky user interfaces to keep viewers in the ecosystem to deploying algorithms that understand user behavior, launching content across multiple owned platforms, and, finally, simply producing content that authentically engages the viewer.
Content providers recognize that they are asking viewers to spend their most valuable commodity — time — with them and so they have to make it worth audiences’ whiles. Moreover, if viewers aren’t happy with the experience or information they are getting on that particular platform, it is easier than ever to go elsewhere.
Audiences Still Watch TV — Lots Of TV
Viewers are still spending plenty of time watching television. According to Nielsen, a combination of live, time-shifted and connected TV occupies the majority of viewers’ media-consumption time. In Q3 2024, that totaled 32 hours and 29 minutes a week, which was actually up a bit from two years prior, when viewers spent 32 hours each week watching TV. Over the course of those two years, people’s time spent watching live and time-shifted TV declined by about two and a half hours each week while time spent watching CTV increased by more than three hours each week.
“Time spent is really the most fundamental measure of engagement, because time is people’s most valuable resource,” LeFort said.
When live breaking news happens, such as this year’s wildfires in Los Angeles, time spent watching local TV — regardless of platform — skyrockets. Viewers collectively watched more than a billion hours of local TV on live linear and streaming feeds during the course of the fires, LeFort said.
“The idea of localism resonates today as much as ever, regardless of platform. A platform may give you a global reach, but localism resonates in the community,” LaFort said.
For broadcasters, that means focusing locally but thinking globally — taking viewers beyond local linear and on to digital and social media platforms, podcast streams and more. To that end, Sinclair Inc. has its own podcast studio and is launching a studio dedicated to producing content for TikTok.
“It first starts in a small circumference and then it gets wider. However, now you have to be relevant on every platform,” said Rob Weisbord, COO and president of local media, Sinclair. “Broadcast TV still has the largest reach. Now the different niches that play in the gaps have to play in the 360 cycle.”
‘Attention Is Currency’
Large media companies, such as NBCUniversal, are using technology to keep viewers’ attention.
“We’re competing on how [audiences] spend their time, so we really have to think about what we can do to attract and earn their attention. Attention for us is not just a metric, it’s a currency,” said Monica Williams, SVP, digital products and operations, content distribution group, NBCU.
“On the product side, it’s about how you design for intentional consumption, not just passive consumption,” Williams added. “That starts with really understanding your audience. Every second counts. Because there are so many options out there, the first few seconds of any sort of product interaction is so important that you have to really obsess over that entry point. From a product standpoint, personalization is no longer an option. You really have to leverage technology to serve the right content at the right time with the right context. And lastly, there’s something to be said for providing easy navigation and an intuitive experience that lets you build trust with the audience.”
Smaller creators, such as Edison Lopez, rely on providing a constantstream of authentic content with which their viewers deeply connect.
“The difference is individuality,” Lopez said. “On my feed I’m just me. I’ll post my educational videos but I also post on what I’m doing. I offer stories, Q&As and polls asking ‘what do you guys want to see from me next?’ The things I post are the things I enjoy. If it works, it works. If it doesn’t, I’lllook for different ways of editing.”
“What he’s talking about is vulnerability, added moderator Albert Thompson, managing director, digital innovation, Walton Isaacson. “Brands haven’t looked consumers in the eye since COVID. The only ones really clocking consumers are the creators.”
Data Drives Discovery
Regardless of platform, all content providers rely on data to help them serve their audiences, whether that’s standard TV ratings, impressions or metadata that adds context to content. That data both helps providers decide what content to offer and how to help audiences discover that content. But unlocking access to that data can be tricky.
“It would require a true partnership [between us and the TV manufacturers],” said NBCU’s Williams. “The relationship is no longer a transactional relationship where we are just delivering the distribution of our product. Now it’s about what we can do to co-create experiences together for our audience. Data transparency would be amazing.”
Social content creators, such as Lopez, also rely on analytics but in a different way.
“Analytics are huge for creators,” Lopez said. “We get to see things like when people log off of a video, so I know what to do for the next video to try to keep them there longer. The hashtags that we use are also crucial because that’s what gets us on people’s algorithms.”
Owned television station groups are supplementing traditional ratings with other ways of studying their audiences, helping stations to reach audiences wherever they may be.
“We have second-by-second ratings, and we look at that, but how we generate a lot of content is through social listening tools, so we know what the community is talking about,” Weisbord said.
Pairing data with content helps providers offer viewers a better process of discovery, Williams said.
“Discovery is such a key focus, and it’s a challenge everyone can relate to,” she said. “Especially now with the proliferation of content and services, it really is so much harder because basically viewers are left to do the work. Discovery is almost as much a part of the content experience as the content itself.”
AI: Best Friend And Worst Enemy
Artificial intelligence (AI) was a central topic at NAB this year and these panelists said it has become a part of their work processes.
“AI will help build efficiencies, but right now you have to have a human element involved,” Weisbord said. “I look at AI’s inputs to get better outputs.”
Nielsen has been using AI and machine learning to process “petabytes of data” every day for quite a while, LeFort said. “There’s a lot of promise but there are also a lot of pitfalls we have to be wary of.”
NBCU is using AI to amplify the content experience, Williams said. “We’re going to see not just content at scale but experience at scale so understanding behaviors and really being able to curate and generate that content experience is what I’m most excited about.”
Lopez is excited about tapping into AI’s automated translation skills to take his content more global. He also uses ChatGPT to help him structure his videos, although he’s realized he has to carefully check ChatGPT’s outputs.
“AI can be your best friend or your worst enemy,” Lopez said. “I don’t know where it will all go; it’s scary to the creative side.”
