Smart? Using "smart" and "TV" in the same sentence: Isn't that a
contradiction in terms?
Smart would be eliminating promotional spots from TV or
grouping them at the beginning or the end of a show, rather than
breaking it apart every 10 minutes. It's so much better to watch a
TV series on DVD, as the flow isn't broken, your concentration is
focused and you don't have to wonder why Madison Ave has to
make at least one person in every commercial into an idiot.
No, I don't think making promotional spots "smart" is a good
idea.
Hulu CEO: What if TV promotional spots were smart?
November 10, 2010 | Length: 00:02:13
At the NewTeeVee conference in San Francisco, Hulu CEO Jason Kilar talks about how the company is using data analysis and interactivity to change the way TV promos are presented to its users.
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>> We all get presented television spots for new TV series, which is hey, get ready for this new television series called whatever, or a new episode that you might not be aware of. And historically in the last 60 years, they haven't been smart. They've been basically just inserted by hand against a popular program, and they're stitched together and that's the way they work. What we did is we actually asked ourselves, what if television promotional spots were actually smart? What would that world look like? And so here's what it looks like on Hulu, which is imagine you're watching Community, great series on NBC. You're watching the show. It goes to commercial break. We address you by name. And it says, Damen, did you know that fans of Community are 3 times more likely to watch this show? And this is a show from Britain called Peep Show, really funny show, that our algorithm, as we've studied the data of the users on Hulu, there's a preponderance of people who watch Community who also watch Peep Show. Probably almost no one in this room knows Peep Show, but the reality is that it's the kind of show that people who like Community would love, based on the data that we've actually scrubbed. So what we do is we put this in a very personalized sight, sound and motion message, and we actually show scenes from Peep Show. We stitched together a great montage. We'd talk about what other people are saying about Peep Show; in this case, the Guardian from the UK and then at the end, we actually let people -- and we always show this by the way at the end of a television series, so at the end of Community. And we let people decide either bookmark it for future viewing, or even just go and watch it right then and there. Usually on the Internet, if you're getting close to 1% response rate, you're doing really, really well. This gets a 10% response rate. So 1 out of every 10 people that is presented with this spot either bookmarks it so they can watch it the next time they're at Hulu, or it goes directly to the series. So you're talking about fundamentally reinventing the way that people launch, in this case new TV programs, certainly on Hulu.
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