Shazam: Connecting TV and Digital Like Never Before - Part 1

Through 2012, buzz words like “dual screening”, “companion consumption” and “omni-channel marketing” hit an all-time high, and with good reason. Several key ingredients matured to a point where brands could start taking action. And Shazam is the player who is leading the charge.

So what do I think marketers should do? Well, Shazam (and a few other smaller players) presents exciting opportunity to convert the huge reach of TV into deep digital relationships at a scale I’ve never seen before. While it’s exciting and powerful it does require a slight shift in thinking as it’s a new dynamic, two channels working together.

TV drives reach and ad spend, but dual screening is huge

First off, it’s critical to recognize that, despite excitement around digital and mobile, TV is the dominant channel in advertising spend and individual reach globally. In all markets globally, the ad spend for TV outstrips digital, with estimate of TV spend sitting around 43 percent on TV, compared to 18 percent in digital. (Source: Aegis Media)

While TV ownership, usage, and ad spend is dominant, mobile has either caught up or growing fast in spend, usage, and penetration. Although in almost all reports, digital drives high ROI, which is exciting, but also slightly unfair as the scale of spend is between half to a third of TV, and as digital increases its spend ROI will decline, it’s a statistical thing.

The impact of mobile on TV and vice versa in Asia Pacific

In Australia 60 percent + use their mobile, tablet or laptop while watching TV. Across Asia Pacific while we’re watching TV 18 percent of us are sharing our TV experience on Facebook/Twitter, 18 percent are chatting with friends online through our mobile and 9 percent joined a Facebook page related to the TV ad or show they’re currently watching (Source: Casbaa).

According to Shazam “40 per cent of tablet and smartphone owners use their devices to read email or scan the news while watching TV. Instead of fighting this attention-deficit trend, Shazam says media companies and marketers should embrace it.” (Source: BusinessWeek)

If we look at the scale, it’s varied across all regions with India and China being at the most extreme of each end. In China, the regular users of TV sits around 1,230 million with mobile at 906 million, a strong TV market with a nearly equal mobile market. Whereas in India, the scale is flipped with only 520 million people using TV compared to 791 million on mobile. (Source: Casbaa)

China’s lead in digital in the region is reflected globally with China (Source: ReadWriteWeb), and other markets like Australia, Singapore and Japan leading digital consumption rates globally, with the U.S. playing catch-up. On top of this China’s growth in all advertising has resulted in Asia Pacific’s advertising spend overtaking that of the rest of the world combined (Source: eMarketer)

Furthermore the China Metro population are the global leaders in mobile usage rates, with the highest usage rates at all levels, including 54 percent of them being Super-Connected, according to Forrester.

(Source: ReadWriteWeb)

The scale of this trend is leading brands to explore companion experiences

In 2012, I was asked and heard opinions on multi-device experience strategy almost every day. But it was mostly hypothetical with a few great examples.

The potential of having someone who’s interested in a TV, magazine, radio or newspaper ad connect with your brand instantly is truly powerful. These high reach mediums that deliver cut through could potentially drive the scale of traffic and engagement in digital never observed before.

Lots of reports demonstrate customers that engage with multiple channels are much more valuable. A recent study cited by Casbaa demonstrated that TV has a halo effect on other forms of advertising, where TV indexes 100 effectiveness on brand awareness it increases to 135 when combined with non-TV advertising like digital.

In terms of turning this hypothesis into reality, we’ve seen QR codes, NFC, Bluetooth and loads of other technologies trying to tackle this issue, but until recently it’s all been very clunky.

250M Shazam users are responding to this trend

It’s the 9th most downloaded app globally because it provides a great service, for free. It’s core proposition allows its users to identify what song or show they’re watching/listening to in their lounge room, at a gig, on radio or at a mates place. With 1 click it listens to the TV show or music track is identified by Shazam all kinds of information is served up like upcoming gigs, artist information, where to buy the track and more.

This gets exciting for brands with their TV advertising product. Their “Shazam this Ad” function lets brands encode their TV advert so when someone Shazam’s the advert a rich mobile experience can be delivered. Brands can build mobile optimized experiences like streaming video content, competition entry forms, download this song and basically anything mobile browsers are capable of. Some brands are delivering a range of experiences like giving away popular music tracks, coupons, and chances to win product or just entertaining extensions of the campaign.

The potential is limitless.

Where it gets really juicy is the scale in which people are responding. It depends on the reach of a given TV campaign, but some recent case studies in Australia are seeing 50,000 to 150,000 taking action. One example in the U.K. received over 30k “Shazams” from a single TV spot for Pepsi during X-Factor.

In Part 2 tomorrow, I’ll share case studies from Cornetto, Old Navy, and Toyota as well as resources on integrating TV advertising with Shazam.