A New Year’s resolution for the TV networks: Make viewers care about your brand again
Remember TGIF and NBC Thursday nights? I’d bet most American adults could more easily name the networks behind their favorite TV shows from childhood than they can name the networks that their current favorite shows air on. (I know this anecdotally from quizzing Uber drivers. I realize that’s annoying, but I still have a 4.67 rating.) Today, you’re more likely to name the platforms where you watch your favorite content — there might be one that you catch on Amazon and another you’ve got in your queue on Netflix, plus a few that you watch on Hulu.
This signals the need for a shift in strategy for the networks. If they continue to focus exclusively on producing content, other brands will continue to pilfer that content’s financial and branding value. But if they put genuine effort into becoming platforms for viewing content on demand they can restore the relevance of their brand and continue to invest in content.
Knowing the network, after all, used to be an essential part of being able to tune in to your favorite shows. I knew Home Improvement, Roseanne, and MacGyver were on ABC. If I was trying to watch Seinfeld, I flipped channels until I saw the NBC Peacock…and once they had me, they turned me into a fan of Friends, thanks to that strategic Thursday night primetime lineup. I knew to look for WB to watch Dawson’s Creek and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and so forth.
This deteriorating familiarity with the networks as brands is because of changes in the TV experience. In the ‘70s, you’d likely turn on one of the (three) networks when you got home and leave it on until you went to sleep — there wasn’t much to choose from, and walking over to turn the dial was a hassle. In the ‘90s, you might still have the TV on all evening, but you were more likely to flip around. You had quite a bit more to choose from thanks to the gradual expansion of TV programming into basic and then premium cable channels, and it was a lot easier to switch thanks to the remote control that you ideally hadn’t lost somewhere between your couch cushions.
Somewhat paradoxically, this increase in options made the networks’ brands more important. In this transitional, pre-digital era of expanding content options and easy-to-use remote controls, the networks had to schedule programming in a way that built a brand of content that could own a night. They could get you to tune in on the promise of their brand, and that would ideally keep you from changing the channel (think NBC Thursdays in ‘95 with “Friends,” “Seinfeld,” and “ER”.) Channel surfing (or waiting for that scrolling TV guide) was annoying — and the best networks had branded themselves so well that you wouldn’t want to switch off that Thursday night lineup.
The inconvenience of searching for content was the main function supporting network brand familiarity. But on-demand viewing and the Google-style searchability that accompanies it, plus the fact that there’s now so much quality content that no one could ever hope to keep up with it all when it originally airs, is making network familiarity obsolete. Knowing which network is behind “This Is Us” is a waste of brain space, even if you’re a fan of the show. And the networks are letting this hold on their own brands slip away.
Viewers in our era, millennials especially, seem to be constantly building a queue of shows they’re “trying to get to.” Shows get added to the queue mostly by recommendations and word-of-mouth. And when it comes time to move on to the next show in the queue, there is no need to remember the network…you just Google how to watch it.
Take the example of “The Goldbergs,” which airs on ABC. If you Google “How to watch The Goldbergs,” six of the top eight results have nothing to do with ABC. Even if you do click on the couple of results that route you to ABC.go.com, you’re greeted with symbols of locked padlocks and requests to verify in order to watch what looks like only a handful of episodes. (To be fair, this problem isn’t unique to ABC — it’s true of all the networks.) Three of the top eight search results suggest Hulu, where it’s made clear that you can watch all 82 Episodes, and there’s an ad-free option. One search result is for Amazon’s a-la-carte option. Another result is for TV.com (which is just another search tool that highly suggests watching on Hulu). And the last result is an ad for HBO.
What this means? Watch intent now prioritizes platform over network when it comes to brand recognition, and this is of huge importance.
It seems the New York Times understands this shifting trend in how people find and consume video content. Their new product, called “Watching,” mimics the behavior in the form of a digital tool that lets you put together a “watchlist” and discover new content based on your interests. And it’s serving up content recommendations from all different eras and viewing platforms. “New Classics” like The Wonder Years and The Office, are steep competition. That’s what every show is up against now, not just what’s airing at the same time a few channels away.
But what’s more indicative of how things have shifted is that even if you explicitly search for a current TV sitcom on the NYT tool, the list of places where you can watch the program includes Amazon, Hulu, Apple, Google, YouTube, and Vudu — sometimes not even mentioning the network that sitcom airs on. And for “New Classics” shows like The Office and The Wonder Years, if you click on those recommendations, there’s only one place to watch: Netflix.
There are parallels between what’s happening today and what happened with the expansion of options during the rise of basic and premium cable. At first, these new channels aired mostly network reruns, bringing new life (and money) to their library of content that would have otherwise collected dust. This supplemented the networks’ investments in content and kept them at the top of the heap.
The same could be argued for selling library content to, say, Netflix today. But the difference is that back then there was a finite number of broadcast and cable channels, and a limited number of hours in the day to fill each of those channels with linear content. And in an on-demand world, that limitation no longer applies. All content is available from one service or another at any given moment — it’s a truly open marketplace competing for the limited resource of human attention. So, when a network sells content to some other distributer, it’s not because their limited time slots are full; it’s because someone else is willing to pay them more money than they’d expect to make from that content on their own. That should be a red flag.
The good news for networks is that the expansion of content options presented by on-demand viewing does provide an opportunity to strengthen network brands (just like the expansion of options brought on by basic and premium cable did). Again, it comes in the search experience. In linear TV you recognized a brand when you decided what channel to watch…in on-demand TV you recognize a brand when you decide what app to open. A network can build brand value by changing their perception of themselves from creators of content to creators of a product that stands out as a desirable platform on which to watch content.
This means that networks must completely rethink the on-demand viewing experience and bring it up to par with the new kids on the block (Netflix, Hulu) who, to their credit, made viewing experience a priority from the start. This 2008 Time article introduces “A new website called Hulu” as a “single, easy-to-use site to watch any episode you want — without having to sift through all the promotional clutter on official TV sites. In fact, you don’t even have to know which network a show airs on.”
When all content existed on the same linear platform (TV) there were fewer ways to differentiate the viewing experience. But now content search, recommendations, ad load, message targeting, and UX all influence what content people watch and where. Networks need to stop using their owned and operated properties as promotion machines for their content and focus on promoting a competitive viewing experience.
Reward viewers for completing an old series or staying up to date on a new one. Give access to ad-free episodes. Let viewers gift ad-free episodes to friends. Create a sense of community and conversation. Recommend shows based on the viewer’s interests (instead of the network’s).
Netflix, Hulu, and HBO are winning because they understand the search moment as a branding opportunity for the experience they provide, not just the content they provide. If networks don’t try to compete on that front, very soon the mass cultural experience of binging on a network’s full line-up will completely give way to platform binging. “NBC Thursday nights” will be eclipsed by “Netflix and chill” — if they haven’t been already.
