The theme of Lee Hunt's annual "Best Practices" session was "Dynamic Branding." Lee gave us a quick overview of a "well-branded hour," courtesy of USA Network. He then began to unpack the ingredients that go into Dynamic Branding.
Lee's overall theory is based upon "The Broken Window Theory" from Malcolm Gladwell: taking care of little details is how you take care of your brand's big picture.
Social TV and Feedback
- TV lends itself to social media multitasking.
- 76 percent of viewers post live. They love being in the moment.
- Social conversation has quadrupled in prime time over the past year.
- Social media "makes TV better" via a "virtuous cycle between the screen on the wall and the one in the hand."
- This is good. But the best feature of social media is FEEDBACK.
- Future is decoding the myriad of social conversations.
Differentiation
- How do we differentiate when so many shows are similar?
- The one hour wheel: 3,600 seconds
- Pre-break Erosion: viewership falloff just before the break
- It's a real problem because of C3 (commercials) ratings
- Billboards: lots of viewership falloff in the A position, not in the Z position
- Be careful how you bump out of a program
Where the Rubber Meets the Road
- Long (over 7-10 sec) opens are problematic, viewers use that time to surf the competition.
- Lose bumps and billboards, they all contribute to viewership falloff!
- Shorten show opens, or better yet, refresh them (ex. The Simpsons)
Lee Hunt, as always, delivers. He is the master at sifting disparate data masses to find patterns, then distill them down into usable best practices for us mere mortals in the television business. His findings always seem to reinforce much of what I know intuitively, but find hard to objectively express to my clients.
Joel Pilger is the President and Founder of Impossible (www.impossiblepictures.com) in Denver, CO.