NBC Stations Eye Growth In Instagram, Voice

Lora Dennis

When it comes to digital strategy, a one-size-fits-all approach just won’t cut it for NBCUniversal Owned Television Stations.

Lora Dennis, SVP digital media for the group, says that goes for the platforms that the individual stations iterate on as well as the playbook for social media. She says NBCU’s stations use an opportunity index to assess which platforms to best develop a presence on, which sometimes leads to a first-mover advantage in unlikely places like voice and Instagram’s nascent IGTV.

In this interview with TVNewsCheck Special Projects Editor Michael Depp, Dennis discusses the potential NBCU sees on those platforms, its daily digital collaborations with its Telemundo stations and its decentralized approach to social media.

An edited transcript.

What’s changing about how, where and when audiences are consuming your content digitally?

Everything. In the time that I’ve been here, mobile audiences have gone from 10% to 80% of our audience. Now we’re definitely seeing, overall, the marketplace moving into the OTT platforms, so we’ve moved into those spaces as well with Roku and Apple TV. When I started this job we were on three platforms, maybe four. Now we’re on 15. So that’s really an indication of the need to be where your audience is and making sure local content is surfacing.

If you’re on 15 different platforms, UX [user experience] must be a challenge. What’s the most important thing there — that audiences have consistency across all those platforms?

It’s a balance. You want your brand to have consistency in terms of them knowing who you are, but at the same time you want to be able to serve those audiences in a native experience. Vertical video is not something we needed to think about five years ago. Audio wasn’t something we were focused on. But as consumers are going around with earbuds and using Siri and Alexa, we need to be thinking about how do we take the content that we’re creating in our markets and make it so we can move across platforms in an efficient way, and yet be able to customize it enough that it feels native on the platform.

Given the exodus to mobile, what’s the desktop site’s primary role?

We certainly want to serve that audience that’s either at work or wanting to stream. We do a lot of breaking news in streaming and a lot of that happens during the day, so we need to be on that platform. We’ve created what we call an opportunity index: Is this platform growing? How does it serve our audience? Is it valuable from a monetization standpoint? How much effort are we giving to this platform?

After a turbulent couple of years for Facebook, has that impacted NBC’s stations’ presence on the platforms? Have you adjusted your strategy?

We used to get a lot more traffic from that platform than we do. An indication of the value of local news is that Google and Facebook have both invested significant amounts of money in local news, and we’re excited by that and think there’s better opportunity to highlight local content.

Do your stations follow a single social media strategy or is each station left to chart its own course? How much of that is centralized?

It’s pretty decentralized. The general approach of our division is a decentralized one. Stations are making editorial decisions in what they’re posting. We provide guidance and best practices and share those across the group, but it’s up to each station whether they want to launch on a new platform. Often times our best ideas come from the station that tests and tries something, and we leverage it and try to scale it across the group.

WNBC New York seems to have something with its daily, two-minute Listen Up briefings. How did they come about?

That was an initiative by the station wanting to be first on Instagram. They were probably the first to do something in IGTV. It’s a great-looking product that has value from an audience perspective as well as a monetization perspective. We saw good traction in terms of referrals and engagement on those platforms and a willingness by the platform to work with us.

For people who haven’t seen these briefings yet, how would you describe them?

It’s a daily news update that provides you with information about your community in a very native experience. They have interactivity. There’s an opportunity to vote on things and weigh in on topics. That’s not something generally you see a lot of in the space.

You’ve scaled those Listen Up pieces out to other markets now. How are they playing outside of New York?

They’re all seeing growth. We have 40 stations around the country. These experiments are received differently in each. We have to be very thoughtful of how we assess success in each of them. New York obviously has huge audience possibility, so we are careful not to draw some blanket conclusion of what success looks like.

Since you’ve seen these platforms proliferate in your tenure in this job, how much of a strain has that put on workflow?

It depends on the stations and the resources that they have. This comes down to the individual stations’ priorities. Some of our stations do podcasts, some don’t. Nobody really got into Snap because there isn’t a way to geotarget. Some are very low touch, so it’s simply a set-it-and-forget-it kind of thing, whereas other ones you really have to mine and manage. If it’s YouTube, you have to think about what keywords do we have, what does the end card look like.

Ten years ago when I came into this job and was working in Chicago, you needed to be able to write well, write great headlines and be thinking about Facebook. Now the skill set required, whether it’s Google AMP and SEO or thinking about YouTube and audio and interactives and video editing and text on videos — there’s so much more.

In the last year and a half, we’ve spent a significant amount of time recruiting bilingual journalists. Finding a bilingual journalist who can write well in both languages is not easy. But it has been incredibly helpful for our duopoly stations to have teams and augment what we’re doing by having people who can work in both languages.

How frequent are those collaborations between the NBC and Telemundo stations, and where’s digital fitting in to bridge them?

In all but one of our duopoly markets, the digital leads for both NBC and Telemundo. In terms of collaboration, it’s happening every moment of every day. It’s not, ‘let’s work on something for next month or the ratings period.’

In the early days, it was “can somebody translate this.” The audiences are very different, so we don’t make broad assumptions that something that might work for a Telemundo audience is naturally going to work for an English-language NBC audience. Our goal is to do more integration, not less.

When we last checked in with NBC Left Field, the network’s storytelling skunk works division, there was talk beginning of possible collaborations with the owned stations. Since Left Field is digital in its DNA, have any of those collaborations crossed your threshold?

We have a video innovation team of our own based on the West Coast. They certainly talk and have had discussions around stories and things that we’re both working on. As with all of the brands across NBCU, we talk every day about how we can best collaborate around content. Our investigative units work closely together — both network and local — and it’s a continuation of that.

Left Field seemed to be pushing the vocabulary around what a news story looks like. Is your digital content impacting your on-air content?

Absolutely. An indication of the success metric is many of stations that have done stories that may have started on digital platforms have also aired on television. We want to move in both directions.

Voice is still hanging around the periphery for most news stations, but NBC’s stations were early movers on this platform on both Amazon and Google. You also had a grant to help further develop the next generation of audio news. So what is that next-generation starting to look like?

I don’t want to give too much away. We started in the text-to-voice space and then data showed that actual voice of talent was more enriching, so we moved more in that direction. Google is really wanting to do more around creating playlists of sorts around content. It’s about how we make sure local content is getting surfaced on these platforms. With audio platforms, it’s very difficult to find local news. You have to really be seeking it out. And so these efforts that we’re working with Google are about how we surface content by topic rather than by brand so that discovery becomes simpler for the consumer.

Will voice have any real monetization potential for news stations?

We’ve been told by Amazon and Google that that’s down the road. They want to work on the product first. As with all new platforms, we have to assess the opportunity index. We have to leverage the lift and the value proposition for us. Not a lot of people are doing local news, so if we can provide something on a platform that is valuable, we think that’s worth it. We’re constantly assessing.

Some of what you’ve seen us doing in the audio space is leveraging what we’re doing in Instagram Stories, so it’s taking a preexisting product and moving it to audio, so the lift is pretty low. We have to be very thoughtful about doing heavy lifts on platforms where we don’t see a path to audience growth, engagement or revenue potential.