More Screens Mean More Engagement, MTV Says

By Jon Lafayette

MTV, which sees itself as a leader in making its content available to its mostly younger viewers on multiple screens, says television remains most often the place where engagement initially is formed with programming.

Engagement grows as the viewer interacts with programming on other platforms, and understanding how the level of engagement changes has “critical implications for an advertiser,” MTV says in its latest Multi Screen Engagement Study.

The key points to take into account, according to MTV, are:

—The more involved a viewer is with the content, the more effective the advertising is for that viewer.

—The more involved the viewer, the more cross-platform activity they engage in, and therefore crossing platforms with an advertising campaign increases the likelihood of targeting the most involved viewers.

—The pattern is repeated across virtually every program measured, which in this study encompassed about two dozen television shows.

MTV works with Harris Interactive to identify the audiences most likely to move across screens and be open to advertising.

The latest survey, using data from 20,000 respondents and evaluating both MTV shows and programs from other networks and Web sites, finds that consumers form different levels of engagement with content.

MTV identifies two types of behavior among consumers of television-based programming who follow that content online.

“Not all people who consume television-based content online are created equal,” the MTV report says. “There is a dramatic scale of engagement between the seekers (who discover television-based content online) and generators (who reinterpret that content).”

MTV says seekers’ online behavior includes finding old episodes, reading cast biographies, looking at cast pictures, viewing TV schedules and reading blogs and forums.

On the other hand, the generators take their experience a step further. These consumers talk about shows, either face-to-face in the real world or through texts or instant messaging. They also create avatars and post on blogs and forums.

When viewers have an extremely strong emotional connection with content, they move from being seekers to generators. In the case of MTV’s series “The Hills,” engagement increases with each screen experienced, powered by that emotional connection, MTV says.

And this is where sponsors can cash in.

MTV says, “These viewers with higher engagement are more likely to remember seeing an ad, internalize the message and be motivated by it to share more about the content and advertising with others, when compared with those that are less engaged.”

Web-based technologies are altering consumers’ relationship with brands, MTV says, particularly among those who are most tightly engaged with the program. While old-fashioned television is still the biggest driver of brand awareness, multiplatform campaigns perform at double to triple the effectiveness of a single platform.

MTV says the results of this research have a clear impact on the way advertisers assess the importance of approaching consumers through multiple platforms.

“Simply said, the value of television advertising grows as viewers connect with marketing messages across screens,” the report says.