As the iPad prepares to celebrate its 3rd birthday later this month Alex Woodford, Digital Strategy Director at AKA, discusses the opportunities and challenges presented by the emergence of connected TVs and second screen viewing.
It’s no secret that people are presented with huge choices when it comes to what screen they’d like to watch their favourite programme on. Take into account all the different types of screens available, plus the variety of operating platforms, catch up services and brands of device and you are faced with countless possibilities.
Advertising can appear challenging in this context – targeting the right people with the right creative and the right message, on the right type of screen at the right time can feel like an impossible task.
TV viewing is as popular as ever but the total number of TVs per household in the UK is actually dropping. While there might be less TVs, those that are being purchased are now normally connected or smart TV models, ones that enable you to access online services while watching programmes all on one screen.
From a marketer’s point of view, this development represents a brilliant way to get rich content delivered in a large, impactful, accountable format. Couple this with traditional online targeting methods and suddenly delivering the right content to the right audience doesn’t seem so difficult. It’s important to note that currently only 33% of these screens are ever connected to the internet. That said, while 33% might not sound much, it’s still 300% more than the same time last year – progress, and definitely an opportunity to keep an eye on going forwards.
More secondary screens
While there might be less TVs in the house, there are certainly far more secondary screens than ever before. There’s lots of talk about ‘second screening’ – the act of using a second device, e.g. tablet, while watching your primary screen, e.g. TV. Many broadcasters are actively encouraging this activity to take place and recent figures showed 85% of the UK population do so regularly.
According to Twitter, 62% of all tweets are from mobile/tablet devises and 60% of these tweets are related to television content, including advertising, so Twitter outreach and social calls to action embedded within creative makes sense. Yet only 60% of advertisers have mobile/tablet optimised destinations to send this mobile traffic to. Happily, in the live entertainment sector, we are ahead of the game. Up to half of all our traffic comes from tablets and mobiles, all landing on aka’s optimised sites. Combine that traffic with research from the IAB / Google that shows tablet users are more likely to make online purchases through that device than any other, makes for a clear case to redirect our marketing and advertising resources.
There are challenges of course – creative possibilities through standard tablet advertising are not as rich as those possible on desktop devices, and the reporting may not be as detailed. Plus it’s another channel to allocate budget to, in a time of increasingly tightened purse strings and one can feasible expect that these niggles in reporting and versatility will soon be ironed out.
What we’re talking about a market that did not exist three years ago, that is now generating the second largest amount of traffic to your sites (and rising). We need to act fast, experiment, learn and start harvesting the opportunities this ‘second screen’ market provides.