How Local TV Can Survive In An OTT World

Local TV can survive — even thrive — in an increasingly competitive, fractured video ecosystem if stations nurture and promote their brands like never before, according to speakers at this week’s Promax BDA Station Summit in Las Vegas.

Setting the stage with original research unveiled at the conference was Andrew Finlayson, EVP digital and social strategies at SmithGeiger, who challenged marketers to understand the threat — and the opportunity — in the increasing dominance of OTT.

“There’s a fierce battle for audiences,” he said. “The world is going video. You should be leaders as you have established video brands.”

Outlining her strategy for building a great local TV brand, including offering “Google-proof news” and keeping marketing local was Valari Staab, who rose from promo producer to become president of NBCUniversal Owned Television Stations.

“There are things about our business that aren’t consumer friendly,” she said. “Linear TV doesn’t give you exactly what you want at any given time. You have to have reasons for people to stay connected to you.”

Quoting Gloria Lee, VP of ABC affiliate marketing and promotion, who likened today’s TV consumer to a person walking through a casino and being constantly assaulted with things clamoring for their attention, Finlayson told marketers a TV station must aim to become that consumer’s best friend.

“Brands really matter,” he said. “Marketing has to change if we are going to survive. We can no longer just bag and tag. What we have to do is conversational choreography.”

Key challenges uncovered in SmithGeiger’s recent consumer survey:

• 84% of Americans have smartphones and those devices are never more than a meter away from their owners.
• 69% of Americans have access to SVOD services like Netflix, Amazon or Hulu.
• 64% own tablets and those devices nearly always live on the coffee table or bedside stand — right next to the TV remote.
• 47% of Americans use gaming consoles — “the gateway drug for young people discovering video online.”
• Americans spend 50 minutes per day inside the Facebook universe.

Despite all that competition, there is good news in the data, Finlayson said.  

While consumers spend eight hours and 13 minutes daily on one of several screens, four hours and 17 minutes of those are devoted to the TV set. “The big screen is still the biggest screen in the house,” he said.

What’s more, among the most popular types of programming, local news ranks third with 53% of consumers tuning in, compared with 62% watching movies, 54% watching TV dramas and 46% watching national news.

The challenge for marketers lies in how people find out what to watch these days. Word of mouth ranks No. 1, with 54% of consumers reporting this method of discovery. Channel surfing and Facebook ranked second, each with 44%. “If you don’t have a concrete, hour-by-hour strategy for marketing on Facebook, you don’t know how to do marketing these days,” Finlayson said.

Even so, 43% of consumers surveyed by SmithGeiger said they find what to watch by tuning to their favorite channel, while 34% find shows via promotional spots on TV.

“We are in the reminder business,” Finlayson said. “We have to keep reminding people we have great content on a great station.”

While 81% of DVR viewers will fast-forward through commercials, 55% will stop if they see a news promo, and 51% will pay attention to local news promos during commercial breaks.

“Make a commitment to these promos,” Finlayson said. “Don’t just run the same one over and over all evening. Make these the best promos on your air.”

The bottom line, Finlayson said, is that live, linear TV still matters but no one is immune to OTT disruption. “Your brand is under attack right now.”

To compete, stations could start with seven “actionables” designed to assure local TV’s place in a growing video marketplace.

• Emphasize Your Lineup. Noting that consumers can now ask Alexa “what’s on NBC tonight and get the lineup as its answer, Finlayson urged marketers to “constantly remind people what you have on your station.”
• Invest in reaching out via the smartphone. “Use the assets your network sends you and check out how ESPN reminds people about upcoming sporting events.
• People don’t watch TV anymore. They listen to it while looking down at a tablet. “You have fresh compelling content but you have to get through people’s ears. This means your promos suck: same music, same boring voice-over, same anchor who just wants to go to dinner. You have to break through to the ear.”
• Time shifting is reality, but linear TV offers something exciting: event TV. “The big shows you have on your air are what drive the conversation in America. Emphasize the value of watching live and use social media to remind people what’s coming up in five minutes.”
• Use social signals — social media content is often about TV. “If you aren’t all admins on your Facebook page, you are missing out on the conversation we need to have with the audience every day,” Finlayson said.
• Connect with your loyalists — the people who give you the most viewing. “Make them feel special on social media by targeting them with relevant posts,” and “use your anchors as recruiters.”

• Get aggressive about promoting your station’s OTT experience. “Leading stations remind people that they are available on all screens.”

 Staab, who appeared as part of the Station Summit’s professional development track, outlined the steps she took to build strong brands at the NBC Owned Stations. First, she refused to take the job of CEO unless NBC CEO Steve Burke agreed to let her be in charge of the stations. “The network couldn’t tell the stations what to do,” she said, “and that applies to NBC as well as Telemundo,” a group she also oversees.

Once she became CEO, Staab put her general managers in charge of their stations. “GMs must be wildly respectful of preemptions,” she said, but they do have the power to preempt, even if they disagree with me, that have the power.”

Staab’s next step lay in assuring that the stations were creating “Google-proof news.”

“You can be assigned a story that’s being done by all the other stations, so we want you to have elements that they did not find,” Staab said. “We want newsrooms that are breaking news and finding enterprise stories.”

To jump-start this process, NBC put investigative units in each station. Once the news product began shaping up, marketing could kick in and begin building the station’s brand and consistently promoting it, Staab said.

Sheb acknowledged that local TV viewership is down. “But you can still make money and be successful with lower ratings. You have to be smart about it. It costs us a tremendous amount of money to provide local news so you have to be smart about monetizing the different places where you put your content.”

The Internet has made local TV a more challenging business, Staab said, “but there is no such thing as an easy business. If you want to leave and go find an easy business, good luck.”

Local TV is “wildly healthy in revenue,” Staab said, adding that every effort at Internet local news has not been successful. “We have that in our favor. We are still relevant and important,” Staab said, “and we have to covet that, protect it, reinforce it and grow it. 

“In all my years of broadcasting, our demise has been predicted five or six times and we have continually managed to reinvent ourselves. We will continue to do that.”