How Brands Can Succeed With Sponsored Live Video Experiences
Phase Three is the video-on-demand (VOD) window. Our primary focus is the experience economy and the attention economy. Consumers today are more interested in what’s happening as close to real time as possible. Our typical VOD window is 30 days.
Working within this limited time frame makes things simpler on the licensing side. The brand is not licensing this music for a television show or for film in perpetuity, which is a difficult, cumbersome negotiation with all the rightsholders that isn’t cost-effective for premium experiences with short shelf lives. For most of the live experiences we deliver with our brands, it’s more about the three phases that follow one another in rapid succession: Live Live, replay, and the VOD window.
The live video production also benefits the music artist—live streaming has proven instrumental in driving future ticket sales. According to Michael Rapino, CEO of Live Nation, “The more live streams we serve the more tickets we sell.”
Live-streamed music provides an incredible advertisement to see artists’ future shows. Live streaming also provides discovery and can drive merchandise sales and fan incentive packages. Finally, the live-produced video is a compelling asset for the artist to showcase.
Leveraging Evergreen Content
In some instances, the long-term viability of the live content and the ability to repurpose it in other forms justify extended licensing and can stretch the value of the branded experiences well beyond the time of the event. The beauty of live is that once the experience is executed, you have content that can live in other windows if you can find an effective way to package it.
A lot of our brands have had success with ongoing strategies. An Alicia Keys show we did with American Express led to a series called Unstaged. For Unstaged, Amex takes an iconic venue and brings in a big artist who’s about to release a record. Then it adds a director— such as David Lynch, Spike Lee, or Terry Gilliam—to direct these high-visibility artists like John Legend, the Roots, Arcade Fire, or Mary J. Blige (Figure 3).
Figure 3. John Legend and the Roots onUnstaged, directed by Spike Lee
Focusing on that series rather than the live event itself, Amex reached 22 million people in 2012. More importantly, viewers tuned in for 25 minutes of average watch time (Figure 4). That’s tremendous watch time for a brand that’s having a hard time getting 4 seconds of attention today.
Figure 4. Keeping viewers engaged onUnstaged with a “Vote for the Encore” interaction
Metrics
Delivering these types of experiences also returns terrific data to the brands we work with. Through our video player experience, we can tell them where people are watching from and who is on iOS versus Android. If we’re measuring the sentiment and the social stream, we can provide additional benefits like polling and trivia.
Great data comes back not only to the brand but also, potentially, to the promoter. Years ago, Lollapalooza was based exclusively in Chicago. The festival promoter was able to review the viewership data and saw that viewers were watching from all over the world. Today, Lollapalooza is in Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Berlin, and Paris, with future expansion planned. I’m sure some of that viewing data helped in the planning and growth of the brand. The data and metrics of live streaming can guide brands, promoters, and artists on how to plan future strategies.
Gamification
We’ve seen that viewers of live experiences appreciate a certain degree of gamification. Within the context of a lean-in live event stream, there are lots of ways to engage the audience, including polls or trivia quizzes. Here are two examples of live experiences that took gamification even further.
In 2017, Snickers did a live commercial in the third quarter of the Super Bowl. It decided to augment that with a 36-hour continuous live stream that aired Thursday into Friday before the game on Facebook, Twitter, and Snickers live.com. The live stream had YouTube stars, an NFL player, and other celebrities and even involved the audience.
In the live broadcast commercial, Adam Driver comes out of a saloon on the set of a Western movie. Not realizing the cameras are rolling and the commercial is live, he knocks over the entire set, conveying the Snickers message that you are not at your best when you’re hungry. Among other chances to get in on the action during the 36-hour live stream, viewers could actually pick the name of the saloon in the background (Figure 5). That type of cool interactivity was very successful for Snickers. The project yielded 5 million live streams, 20 million units of branded content consumed, and 1.5 billion organic impressions.
Figure 5. The 36-hour Snickers live stream leading up to its Super Bowl commercial
For the Pro Bowl in January 2018, the NFL partnered with comedian Keegan-Michael Key to host a competition that was livestreamed on Facebook. The topic was the best team touchdown celebrations of the season. There were four finalists, and the audience was able vote in real time, with the winner announced on Super Bowl weekend.
With those kinds of opportunities for viewer participation, watch times tend to expand along with viewership. The most successful engagements by far feature multiple channels of video, social streams, polling and trivia widgets, and even a curated photo wall.
To take it even a step further, with Coca-Cola, we powered Vive Latino, the largest rock festival in Mexico. Coca-Cola streamed more than 80 bands in a webcast in 2 12-hour days across three live channels. We allowed viewers to go into the live-schedule widget and enter their mobile number (Figure 6). A viewer could go into the widget and think, “I’m Andrew. I’m a fan of Prophets of Rage, Jake Bugg, and G-Eazy,” and then enter in his mobile the band’s set time showing what day and stage they would be performing on and at what time. Then he would get an SMS push notification from Coke that says, “The artist that you want to see will be live on Channel 2 in five minutes. Tune in and watch,” along with a link to the live stream.
Figure 6. Navigating live channels in the Coca-Cola-branded Vive Latino live stream
For Coca-Cola, this approach was very successful. The average watch time on mobile devices for the festival was 29 minutes, and the average time on desktop was 113 minutes on the Coca-Cola viewing hub we developed for the company.
Transforming the Viewer
With all of the brands and events we work with, in terms of experiences, it comes down to one key question: How do we help transform the viewer into a participant? In other words, how do we take a passive viewer and get him or her to participate in the experience, engage, and share it out? When we do that, we see the audience and viewing time grow substantially, which delivers tremendous benefit to brands.
Of course, you need to have compelling content. Frequency matters too. When you do this on a consistent basis—weekly, monthly, quarterly—viewers start to realize, for example, “AT&T’s going to be bringing us some really interesting stuff on an ongoing basis.” Inviting viewers back to engage with your experiences is key to expanding viewership and watch time.
Most of all, we’ve seen that if you’re not allowing viewers to transform themselves into participants, they’re probably not going to watch very long, and they’re probably not going to come back. Executed correctly, live streaming connects brands with their most desired demographic and delivers their most desired outcome: engagement.
[This article appears in the June 2019 issue of Streaming Media Magazine as "How to Optimize Branded Live Experiences."]
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