In the digital age, the television viewing experience isn’t just happening on one screen anymore. People are live-tweeting their TV shows, gossiping about plot lines and exchanging inside jokes through a variety of online networks, including Facebook, Twitter, blogs and forums.
It’s a lucrative opportunity for TV networks and their advertisers to extend their contact with viewers outside the live television experience, which is where apps like Beamly come in.
What It Is:
With the Beamly app (formerly known as ZeeBox,) fans of TV can find fellow fans and media related to their favorite TV shows in and engage them in like-minded online communities. It’s like a more personalized version of Twitter, where you only interact with fellow users who share your love for a particular TV show. If Twitter is where conversations happen in real-time, Beamly is where you go to continue the conversation in detail, before and after the show airs.
“We don’t see Twitter as a competitor, they’re much more of a complement to what we do,” says Jason Forbes, executive vice president and managing director of Beamly. “However, many TV fans find it difficult to keep up with the sheer volume of the tweet stream and the lack of quality and depth of its content.”
In addition, Forbes says most of the tweets sent out by people about TV shows end up being irrelevant for 95% of their followers. By joining Beamly, users get to join a social network that’s specifically geared towards their interest in a show, which greatly amplifies their participation.
Currently, the Beamly app has over 2 million monthly active users, most of whom are under the age of 35 and female, and Forbes says the newly relaunched app is designed with that demographic in mind. He says users typically spend a 500 minutes a week on the app, which shows that they’re not just using it during live viewing, with the bulk of engagement coming before and after the show airs. “We’ve evolved from being just a second screen app,” says Forbes. “ We have a much stickier experience.”
How It Works:
The app delivers content in two ways, through a personalized news feed with information about their favorite shows, and “TV rooms,” which are online communities about a specific show or topic where they can engage with other users.
The news feed gives users a personalized stream of news and information related to the shows they select for following. This includes posts from gossip blogs, entertainment news, fan sites and forums. In addition to curated content, there’s also a Beamly editorial team that churns out original articles, images and GIFs about those TV shows stimulate even more conversation.
Beamly also hosts over 10,000 “TV Rooms” which basically operate as fan forums for specific shows or topics. Users can select which TV Room they want to join and immediately start interacting with fellow enthusiasts through commenting, asking questions, posting images, GIFs, links to articles and YouTube videos.
In addition, a Beamly TV room for a specific show can be embedded in to website to showcase all the conversation surrounding it. Bravo is currently embedding the TV rooms for its shows on all their official websites.
Opportunity for Marketers:
Beamly is part owned by television networks NBC and Bravo, so it’s currently being offered as a second-screen viewing and advertising opportunity to their advertisers. The app doesn’t have its own sales team, instead relying on the more well resourced sales staff at the TV networks to sell ads for them.
In addition to 30 seconds ad spots during the TV show, the network will also offer brands a chance to target the same viewer on a second screen like Beamly. This works pretty much the same way as Twitter’s TV targeting service. However, on Twitter the user has to tweet about the show in order to receive a targeted ad. In Beamly, the user just has to be using the app, and they will get an ad in the app at the same time, (Beamly’s patented SpotSync feature.)
Instead of watching the same 30 second commercial on the app, Beamly offers a much more targeted ad experience to the app user. Let’s say the user views an Audi ad while watching Bad Girls on Bravo. When they open their app to talk about the show, they might see an invitation to visit a nearby Audi dealership, a discount coupon or a link to a competition. When they click on it, the ad expands, filling up the mobile screen. Since users log into the app using a Facebook authentication process, all the info on their Facebook profile can be used to tailor the ad to specifically to them.
