• by David Kaplan , March 14, 2005

As marketers keep their fingers crossed over the potential of multi-platform campaigns, a new study from Interpublic Group's Initiative portends strong possibilities as Showtime's "dual-platform" premiere of "Fat Actress" seems to have clicked with viewers on the other side of TV and computer screens.

As part of its study, Initiative took a look at the "Fat Actress" debut on Monday, March 7th at 10 p.m. According to Initiative, the Kirstie Alley vehicle delivered a .62 household rating and 942,000 viewers on Showtime.

"Versus other program premieres, the show, which was highly promoted, performed at the level of other new series entries for Showtime this season: 'The L-Word,' which had a 0.66 household rating and 'Dead Like Me' with a 0.67 rating," said Stacey Lynn Koerner, executive vice president, director of global research integration for Initiative. "Another Showtime program, 'Huff,' also highly promoted, delivered a more disappointing 0.27 household rating this past fall. To put this in context, one of Showtime's more well-known original series, 'Queer As Folk,' premiered in December 2000 with a 0.98 household rating. So it was uncertain how 'Fat Actress' would fare as a dual platform on cable and streaming video."

Showtime had an arrangement to run the streaming video of 'Fat Actress' through Yahoo.com. While the dual distribution was touted in the media trade press, the actual streaming media opportunity was initially difficult for consumers to find, Koerner said.

Market researcher comScore measured the streaming media activity for the premiere Monday, March 7th through Tuesday, March 8th, and found that the pilot stream was initiated by 150,922 unique visitors. Some visitors played the pilot stream more than once, since the number of streams totaled 176,569.

In addition to the pilot, visitors to the Yahoo! site also had an opportunity to watch individual scenes and other related media streams. The total Yahoo! offering attracted 196,993 unique visitors that either initiated the pilot or related streaming content. With multiple views, the total number of visitors reached 389,128 by the end of the day on Tuesday, March 8th.

"The Showtime premiere on Yahoo! bolsters the growing viability of streaming media as an alternative or complementary distribution mechanism for entertainment content," Koerner said. Estimating unique users at a one-to-one ratio to unique machines, she noted in her report, the Yahoo.com effort produced 16 percent of the total Showtime audience delivery on the pilot, and 40-plus percent on all related streaming content at Yahoo.com.

"That's a particularly significant showing," she noted.

The show was also helped along by promotions from DirecTV and TiVo, Koerner said.

Through March 6th--one day before the show's premiere--TiVo reported that 0.95 percent of its subscribers used the Season Pass feature to schedule upcoming recordings of Showtime's 'Fat Actress.' Slightly more than 2 percent had scheduled at least one recording of the show--a significant showing for a cable program, Koerner said.

"The rate at which the number of TiVo Season Passes requested grew over the period was accelerated, likely due to the fact that DirecTV promoted the premiere through a TiVo Showcase in DirecTV households," Koerner said. "The success of DirecTV's efforts to motivate TiVo subscribers to schedule upcoming recordings suggests that new platforms like TiVo can be successful at driving interest in new entertainment and advertising content. So a combination of new distribution channels is likely the way of the future."

Showtime says additional dual platforms are more than likely. In terms of why it worked in the case of "Fat Actress," it's a question of having all the right elements, a Showtime spokesman said.

"Kirstie Alley is a known entity and had been in the news about her weight, and we were able to pick up the momentum from the publicity that she had been receiving," a Showtime spokesman said. "I think we've learned that this sort of thing can be successful and we're certainly going to try to emulate it."