WHERE VIEWERS GO, WFLA TAMPA WILL FOLLOW

Market Share by Arthur Greenwald
WHERE VIEWERS GO, WFLA TAMPA WILL FOLLOW
TVNEWSDAY, Feb. 18, 8:37 AM ET
Link to Article: http://www.tvnewsday.com/articles/2008/02/18/daily.5/?promo

Jennifer Yarter, a researcher at the NBC affil, is closely tracking the digital habits of consumers so the station can offer new services and sell against the ones that are watching and win over the ones that aren't.

By Arthur Greenwald
When it comes to prognosticating how TV stations can make money from new media, I’m often reminded of Will Rogers’ famous observation that “It’s not what we don’t know that gets us intro trouble. It’s what we know that ain’t so.”

Here’s a fresh example: Earlier this month, the Solutions Research Group’s Digital Life America study reported that 43 percent of U.S. Internet users—that’s 80 million people—have watched one of their favorite TV shows online. That’s up from 25 percent one year ago. And 20 percent of all users say they watch TV online at least “weekly.”

Top online attractions include Heroes, Grey’s Anatomy, Dancing with the Stars, Ugly Betty, Chuck, CSI, House, Kitchen Nightmares, Smallville and Gossip Girl.

So what’s a station executive to do? Complain to your network’s affiliate relations chief? Double-check your portfolio to see if early retirement is an option?

Jennifer Yarter took a different approach. As research manager of Media General’s WFLA in Tampa, Fla., Yarter was determined to turn this information into useful action. She began by grilling her fellow tech-savvy twenty-somethings about their own media viewing habits.
As Yarter wrote in a letter to MediaPost.com, “Nearly everyone told me that their household currently has a high-speed Internet connection, but no connection to cable or satellite TV. The consensus was: "I don't need cable. Anything I want to watch on TV, I can get on the Internet."
Now, if this signals a trend, it’s really bad news for stations—a growing group of young viewers who not only prefer to ignore your service, they don’t even have a way to receive it.

Yarter described how she quickly dove into the Scarborough Research data for Tampa. “I estimate the total number of (Internet-only) homes to be about 7.5 percent of the total Tampa Market. But while 7.5 percent is nothing to scoff about, among adults 18-34, 11.4 percent (of the homes) are Internet-only.”

Then Yarter asked a crucial and provocative question: “Is there a place for the local television affiliate in this new Internet-driven consumer-focused media world?”

I was impressed. Neither a cheerleader for new media nor an apologist for the old, Yarter may be the herald of a new breed of station researcher who’s equally at home digging into the Nielsens or watching Heroes on an iPhone.

Naturally, I called her to ask what became ominous findings. Did it cause a panic at WFLA? Quite the opposite, Yarter assured me. “At WFLA we’re already looking beyond what it means to be just a television station,” said Yarter. “We’re actively developing different platforms to distribute video content—whether it’s on the Internet, on iTunes, or on cell phones.”

Like other Media General stations, says Yarter, WFLA has been creating a “converged market” for almost 10 years now, a fact reflected on its co-branded website Tampa Bay Online, which also features content from Media General’s Tampa Tribune and Centro, their Spanish language paper. Although the companies remain autonomous, Yarter explains, “all three news organizations are in one building working towards one common goal: to deliver their content through one mobile technology.”

OK, so that’s the goal. But how do you turn information about, say, Internet-only viewers into an action plan? That’s a problem, admits Yarter. “The Nielsens of the world are very slow in catching up with all of this new technology. It’s very difficult to know who’s actually watching—older viewers? Women? Young men?”

Yarter’s solution: “I tend to look at a lot of Scarborough data. It may not say specifically that viewers are watching NewsChannel 8 online, but it can tell us how many people say they’ve watched a TV station’s newscast in the past month. I can cross-reference that data with page view data on our own site and (draw some conclusions) about who has watched. For example, I can show that those who watch online video tend to have higher incomes or buy more electronics. These are things that can help advertisers reach the right audience.”

In other words, a strategy not unlike what worked for local cable ad sales until people meters finally delivered meaningful cable ratings. “Exactly,” Yarter agrees. “The cable people had to sell more on the concept of the cable networks—the kind of people who like to watch the Home & Garden Channel or fishing—rather than the actual channel ratings.”

A gross inference? Maybe. But apparently it works until something better comes along, says Yarter.

“We carry NBC Weather Plus on our digital subchannel. It’s a great product. We can do a lot of great things with product placement on it, but I don’t have any ratings because it doesn’t reach the minimum cume for Nielsen to record it. I know that Nielsen Media Research is working on its A2—Anytime, Anywhere Media Measurement plan. They’re still a couple of years away from having anything tangible.”

Armed with these insights, Yarter helps the WFLA sales team turn inferred viewers into paid advertising.

"It’s easy to get sales reps to go out there and sell spots and dots. But now we make sure our TV and newspaper and Internet reps all know a little bit about selling each of these media. We want them all to cross-sell everything a little bit more. They’ve got to convince the client, who may not know anything about the Internet or a podcast’s reach or how these media benefit their product.”

In the past three years, Media General has made great strides in cross-selling, says Yarter, “but in the future it’s going to become even more of a challenge with all these new media.”
Not to mention having to adapt to sudden changes in the media environment like the apparent growth of Internet-only households. But even here, Yarter cites a comfortable precedent. “One good example I have is the cell phone-only household. It used to be that if you didn’t have a home phone, you were not in the Nielsen sample.”

“It used to be that only a very small percentage relied solely on cell phones. Last year it was 18 percent of our sample. Enough that Nielsen changed its methodology to include them. But now we have to figure out, ‘who are these people?’

“We’re finding out that cellphone-only households tend to be lower income, they’re more ethnic, they tend to be renters, a lot are college students and they tend to be broadcast-only homes. They don’t have satellite or cable although they might have Internet.”

Yarter also discovered these homes watched a lot less TV than other viewers, including less news, although they do watch the Daily Show on Comedy Central and they’re interested in politics.

“On the other hand, they don’t have health insurance. A lot of them haven’t gone to a doctor recently. So this 18 percent is simply not going to care when we cover new medical procedures or miracle drugs.”

Of course, that’s no reason to change the main newscast and risk alienating traditional viewers, but it does suggest opportunities for shorter, targeted newscasts that play solely on broadband and eventually mobile TV.

Meeting each technical innovation with the right content has become something of a mission for Yarter. “No company can afford to jump full force into every new technology,” she says. “Our company has to look closely and figure out what is truly the Next Big Thing and which is a flash-in-the-pan.”

One piece of content not likely to change is WFLA’s nom du guerre NewsChannel 8.
“I’ve monitored the Nielsen diaries and regardless of our cable or digital channel, viewers still call us Channel 8. So that’s how we’ll keep branding ourselves. We’re NewsChannel 8. Our weather is StormTeam 8. Our help line is 8 On Your Side. We have a very strong reputation within this community. Our anchors and meteorologist are well known. So we’d like to carry that positive association into all these new platforms we’re working in.

Besides, laughs Yarter, “What else are we going to call ourselves? NewsChannel Text Alert on your Cell Phone?”

Market Share by Arthur Greenwald looks at what TV stations are doing to promote ratings and sales every Monday in TVNEWSDAY. Tell us about your efforts by writing to Arthur at greenwald@tvnewsday.com.
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