With media content continuing to fragment, programmers must produce dedicated fare that appeals to consumer segments on various platforms, while mining different advertising opportunities.
Christy Tanner, executive vice president and general manager of CBS Corp.'s CBS News Digital said at the Future of Television Conference in New York on Sept. 24 that it is likely that many working in the news business have rarely heard about customer segmentation. For its part, CBS News Digital has identified eight news segments that it markets and programs toward.
While major events will always rise to the top of news flow, the challenge, Tanner said, is to produce quality journalism that can be segmented to these different viewer groups.
In the mobile arena, for instance, CBS pushes specific items and stories around different types of news. Users, in turn, have the option to turn off specific notifications to improve the experience for them.
WE tv (US) President and General Manager Mark Juris said the network has benefited from confessional content emanating from reality series "Marriage Boot Camp: Hip Hop Edition." The bonus content aired on AMC Networks Inc.'s sister company Urban Movie Channel, resulting in a significant number of customer additions for the subscription video-on-demand service aimed at African-American and urban audiences, during the show’s first season.
Despite the additional cost to produce the bonus content, the expanded programming not only buttressed Urban Movie Channel’s subscriber base, but pushed viewership back to the cable channel, said Juris. The tactic will be deployed again when the show’s second season debuts in early 2020.
Melissa Rosenthal, executive vice president of Cheddar, said the news organization’s mission is to provide technology and financial coverage aimed at younger viewers.
Part of that goal is to "distill the organization's voice" into different content segments. For example, Rosenthal said Cheddar, now owned by Altice USA Inc., creates short-form content focusing on technology for Facebook Inc. It also produces company and executive profiles and stories about corporate business models in the eight- to 10-minute range for Google LLC's YouTube LLC.
"That's kind of our sweet spot for YouTube," she said, adding that stories of that length would not perform as well on Cheddar's live newscasts.
Laura Molen, president of advertising sales and partnerships at NBCUniversal Media LLC, said a client wanted to reach a young millennial audience via the "E! People’s Choice Awards" in 2018. The telecast averaged about 1 million viewers in that group, Molen said, but the coverage was supplemented by a live look-in at singer Camila Cabello on Snap Inc.'s Snapchat. That content format connected with 2.3 million watchers, extending the client's reach.
Molen said NBCU's sales strategy is to tap the "whole ecosystem" and find different ways for brands to associate with content that viewers are passionate about. That approach will be applied as NBCU brings ad-supported streaming service Peacock to market in April 2020.
Still, as content winds up on an ever-expanding array of outlets, Juris said programmers are not getting their fair share of audience credit and, in turn, ad dollars.
Since consumers are viewing content in myriad ways — from short bursts while on the move, to binge-watching a series' entire season in a day or two, to viewing over the course of a much longer tail — measurement is not being aggregated in ways that truly inform advertisers, distributors and programming providers about the depth and breadth of today's multi-screen audiences, the executive said.
