Social Media: The New Home for Film and Television Advertisement?

In today’s increasingly interconnected world, it is hard to find young people who are not connected to at least one form of social media. And due to the fact that most people nowadays have smart phones, they are never more than a few feet from their social media accounts at any given time. This goes along with the fact that I have noticed many people around my age no longer watch as much conventional cable television as they used to, and at least in my case, when I do watch cable television; I either skip or ignore all of the commercials. Before the advent of the Internet, studios were dependent on commercials in order to spread the word of new films and shows they were producing. Now, corporations are now looking for new media from which to try and promote their products, and due to ad saturation among consumers, they need new and unique methods of advertising. Enter social media; where websites and apps like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat have all capitalized on this fact by using their media as platforms for different types of ads, which make up a large portion of their profits.

But, as social scientists like Alexis Madrigal have noticed, we live in the era of The Stream, where there is an emphasis on nowness and instantaneity that is difficult to break through. As a result of these social changes, I became curious as to how the different types of social media advertising effect viewership of film and television shows. In essence, I was asking what viewers’ relationship was with conventional television as well as social media, and how this effected what programs they watched and how they discovered them. I conducted video interviews with fellow Skidmore College students in order to answer my questions, and while this cannot serve as a complete and objective survey of the full population; I did learn a lot about how college students use social media and how they perceive their relationship with ads to be. More importantly, I learned that social media ads have a profound effect on how we consume film and television.

My first questions were about what types of social media students were using and how often they used them:

I assumed that the most popular social media outlet being used would be Facebook, due to how long it has been around and how many users it has. However, it seems as though, while most students do have a Facebook, the ones I spoke to are more keen on newer and more specified types of social media, particularly photo sharing mediums. Instagram seemed to be especially popular amongst female students, with some claiming to check it at least once an hour, when possible.

“I probably check Instagram every hour, like before class, in class, after class, first thing when I wake up.”

Amongst male students, there was a mix between Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook, with less of a particular emphasis on any one medium. But, significantly, most respondents claimed to use assorted social media for at least one hour per day, with many using it for multiple hours or any time they receive an update, which gets them online immediately. Amongst males and females respondents, the amount of social media use was really surprising, and while this is a survey of a relatively closed community at Skidmore College, I still found it worth noting that every single respondent did have a social media account of one form or another. For young students today, it seems as though it is almost impossible to be separated from the world of social media, and this means that we are never far from advertisments.

The main thing that I hoped to discover with these interviews was how social media ads effect people’s viewership of television and film, which meant I needed to understand how they interacted with older forms of advertising. And the place where viewers used to be exposed to ads for new shows and movies was on TV, where you still can’t go more than a single commercial break without seeing one. So I asked the students about whether or not they paid attention to commercials on television in order to see what connection they maintain with older forms of advertising:

For the most part, the students I interviewed do not pay attention to traditional commercials on television.

“ I absolutely don’t pay attention to commercials on TV.”

As I suspected, most younger people are no longer tuned in to television commercials, which has to do with multiple factors like digital video recorders, Internet media providers like Netflix, and overall ad saturation. So there is no single reason why students have stopped paying attention to commercials, but the fact is that they spend more time paying attention to their social media accounts than they do watching commercials, which is a stark difference from even a few years ago. This leaves the door open for advertising on social media, which most of my interviewees claimed to notice and pay more attention to.

Next, I asked questions about what types of social media ads stand out to the students I interviewed, in order to see if what they paid attention to varied from traditional forms of advertising:

This question yielded very diverse results, which has a lot to do with the fact that ads on social media are now tailored to users based upon their search preferences and other factors of their, and their friends’, Internet usage. I asked this question in the hope of interviewees discussing their experiences with a lot of film and television trailers because that would help me understand my exact question, but students noticed too many different ads for me to draw any precise conclusions as to what they notice most.

“I usually see ads for movies and TV on Facebook.”

So, multiple respondents did mention noticing trailers and sneak peaks on Facebook and claimed that they would click on them if they “were interesting.” But, one important factor about trailers and other ads related to film and television is that users often share them on their own rather than seeing them as suggested or sponsored ads. Take the trailer for the upcoming Star Wars movie; it was shared hundreds of thousands of times by users, which Disney did not pay for, and that makes this a very potent form of ad. It’s a whole new type of advertising where viewers most likely to watch a film or show are the ones proliferating the ads for said program, which does the job of saving studios money and also effectively reaching out to target markets.

To address the impact of sharing, my next question was if friends on social media sharing film and television related content affected whether or not students would watch that content. And I followed up by asking whether or not they personally shared content:

“Yes, I watch what my friends post or like.”

Most of my respondents said that they were much more likely to watch a film or television show if it was recommended by a friend. And on top of that, they were more likely to watch a trailer or another form of promotion if a friend shared it on social media, which was emphasized by the fact that almost every respondent had a recent example to back up their answer. This is interesting to note because it seems that paid advertisements are less effective when it comes to trying to entice new viewers to see television shows and films. One would think that advertisements based on extremely complex algorithms would be able to draw viewers, but it seems that the computers haven’t quite caught up with humans yet. Users do see suggested posts on social media, but the value placed on what friends share is much higher, which is hardly surpising, but has big implications for advertising via social networks. Social media offers a great opportunity to spread content via word of mouth, which used to be limited to actually speaking with people; but now, a single user can spread a message to a potentially unlimited audience with just a few clicks on their computer’s mouse. I doubt this will mean that companies will start to spend less on traditional advertisements (the numbers are actually going up), but as the generation of technologically literate youth grows up, we could look at this as the beginning of a shift in how ads are delivered to us.

“No, I don’t really share that much.”

Not all of my respondents claimed to share ads on their own, but some of them did. Still, all of them claimed to have recently watched trailers for new movies that were posted on social media by their friends. And regardless of how often they claimed to share, or whether or not they did it at all; every single student interacted in some way, shape, or form with social media advertisements. This might not be a surprising fact, but when you compare this phenomenon with how people consumed advertisements less than a decade ago, it is an unbelievable shift in how content providers bring in viewers.

This emphasizes how ads are changing because there is not just a focus on traditional media and trailers anymore; when the new Terminator movie released over the summer, Snapchat users could take a picture of their face with robot parts superimposed over them, which many people did because it looked funny, but it also made them undeniably aware of the new Terminator movie.

However, despite the number of people interacting with the Terminator ads, the movie was a complete flop domestically, where the new forms of social media ads were heavily used. So just because people see and take part in these new ad experiments does not mean that they serve the intended function of putting those people in theatre seats. However, what remains important is that most of the students I interviewed did say that they watched trailers shared by friends; and those who did also said that they were much more likely to see the movie if a friend gave the trailer a positive review, which is free advertising that works better than paid advertising. If you had walked into an ad agency on Madison Avenue just a few years ago and said that soon, the American youth would be sharing ads with one another rather than paying attention to the ads they spent millions putting on TV; you would have been laughed out of the building.

There is clearly a shift in how advertisements for movies and television are delivered to viewers, but many of the new forms of advertising do not seem to work any better than traditional forms. What does seem to have an impact on viewership is users’ ability to utilize social media to share content to an extremely wide audience that would not gain the same viewership via traditional ad distribution, such as cable television commercials. New reports claim that over half of Americans now use Netflix, which does not even take into account other streaming media services, but does make clear that Americans are moving away from traditional cable and satellite television. This means that the importance of social media advertising will only continue to rise in coming years due to the difficulty of advertising through mediums such as Netflix or Amazon Prime, which do not offer traditional commercials. For the time being, trailers for films and TV shows will remain the main driver of box office sales, but the advent of social media has created entirely new ways for advertisers to target audiences that are likely to watch their content and also take advantage of cost-free sharing by social media users.

As we move into the future, it is likely that these new types of social media ads on apps such as Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat will continue to appear in new and creative forms with the possibility that they will permanently change how people consume film and television. This matters because as people spend more and more time on social media, and ads become more engrained in these media, we are finding ourselves engulfed in a stream that is composed as much of ads as it is social interaction. And what is truly crazy about this phenomenon is that we, as a society, are contributing to this mountain of ads by sharing them with one another. But, it might not be a bad thing, because we ignore the ads that we don’t want to see, and we share the ads we actually like. If we end up watching the shows and movies that we truly want to see, and studios can effectively target the viewers who will likely watch their programs; isn’t this a better form of advertising than traditional commercials?