When companies buy advertising space during a major television event, they are supposedly paying a premium for viewers’ attention. But we viewers have never liked having our attention bought and sold-it’s been a cat-and-mouse game to get us to actually watch commercials since the invention of the remote control in 1950. Interesting fact, by the way-the remote control was invented by Zenith Radio Corporation’s engineering team expressly for the purpose of providing an escape hatch from commercials.
Now, as MediaPost’s George Simpson has noted, it seems that social media may have provided us with yet another way to deprive TV advertisers of our attention. The conclusion of Lost, for example, spawned 437,613 tweets, and the number of tweets sent spiked during every commercial break. Simpson observes:
This probably gives a little heartburn to the media buyers who bought time on the finale (probably at a premium, since the ratings were expected to be high — if you can call under 14 million viewers high any more). Moreover, only about 200,000 viewers watched the big ending from start to finish. Most were too busy thumbing their cell phones to look up at the commercials.
Simpson doesn’t understand why anyone would want to tweet about “Lost” to begin with, but of course if you paid any attention to the show at all (or had friends who did), you know that half the fun was trying to decode Lost’s sprawling, incomprehensible mythology, an activity best undertaken with a group of other like-minded fans. Twitter provided Lost geeks with the opportunity to discuss the show with an entire Twitterverse of fellow fans during commercial breaks, inadvertently depriving media buyers of their eyeballs.
There is a lesson to be learned here: Certain traditional marketing tactics are becoming less and less powerful as consumers become better and better at screening them out.
Used wisely, social media gives you an opportunity to create an experience that’s more interactive and draws your customers in without annoying them. It can also be a great place to harness the power of word of mouth. People appreciate getting recommendations from their family, friends and other social networking connections, so these have more power than all but the catchiest TV jingle.
While there are very few companies that can get by on social media alone, integrating it into your existing marketing mix gives you a powerful tool to help you connect with your customers- especially the ones who head for Twitter when the commercials start!
This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 9th, 2010 at 9:57 pm and is filed under Social Media and Marketing Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
I have only watched the first season of Lost, but I understand what you’re talking about. It’s what Seth Godin is writing about in his book Permission Marketing and why it’s important to be building a tribe / community.
We don’t care about being interrupted by commercials anymore, we do something else during the breaks, other than wait for the show to resume. I’m probably not on Twitter, but I’m making a sandwich or at the bathroom or something completely different… I’m not watching the commercials.
We’ve been using Facebook ads to recruit new students to our college this year (last year as well) and it works great. Facebook ads are not seen upon as interruption, they’re just there, part of Facebook and not annoying. They’re rather cheap as well, at least if you compare them to Google AdWords.
You are absolutely right Jens, there are so many things to distract people from one form of advertising these days, that one medium simply isn’t enough any more. You could spend thousands on a commercial segment only to have most of your viewers skip it with Tivo or switch their attention to Twitter on their iPhone.
It’s important that marketers figure out the best way to utilize the power of social media, so that deals and offers can still be presented to customers who want them. Social Media, if used correctly, can be non-intrusive, and customers can even single out the services/offers they want. As long as marketers, businesses, and of course customers work together, social media can be used as a fundamental marketing medium, giving the customer what they want, without interrupting their daily activities.