Commentary

Facebook Copying Playbook Of Other Media Companies -- Like Viacom?

by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, October 9, 2015

Facebook believes it can outperform TV networks when it comes to Millennials and Hispanics -- and that marketers, especially those who also advertise on TV, will come running.

This has been corporate media thinking for a long time. You get them young; you should have them forever (or at least as long your TV/media executive contract holds out).

Viacom always believed this to be case, and had a plan: 1) get young viewers interested in Nickelodeon, and then 2) move them along with MTV and VH1, before finally 3) handing them off to Nick at Nite and TV Land as they got older.

Well, perhaps that only lasts so long. Look at what shape Viacom is in now.

Viacom planned to grab broadcast TV dollars. Then, as now, advertising on TV continues to be largest media platform, around $80 billion a year.

For its own part, TV networks look to younger viewers as well -- and that means those 18- to 49-years-olds. That said, the median age for all four of the major English-speaking broadcast networks now is over --or virtually at -- 50 years old, and going up. CBS is at 59, ABC and NBC at 54, Fox at 49, and CW at 44.

But broadcast network content on digital platforms -- you know, the playground that Facebook and Twitter romp on -- also skews younger.

But look at total media use time: Facebook gets under five hours of weekly face time from millennials, according to research. But those same millennials still spend close to 28 hours a week watching TV.

You have to believe professionally produced TV content continues means something to a lot of people -- even those 18 to 24 years old.

facebook, hispanics, millennials, social media, tv

7 comments about "Facebook Copying Playbook Of Other Media Companies -- Like Viacom?".

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Jonathan Hutter from Northern Light Health, October 9, 2015 at 4:09 p.m.
People are going to be interested in professionally produced or high quality content for a long long time. Is that on Facebook now? People only get snippets and teasers that drive them to other media for the full content.

Suppose Facebook were able to provide this. At some point in the future, people will be saying "remember when we used to watch this on Facebook?" And their kids will say, "what's Facebook?"
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Ed Papazian from Media Dynamics Inc, October 9, 2015 at 7:57 p.m.

Jonathan, according to some people---not me, however-----millennials are gravitating more and more to user-generated "video" content which they happily gobble up on their smartphones and YouTube. Can it be that "network quality" programming has seen its day? If so, what are the implications for Hollywood? If millennials can get what they want from their smartphones and YouTube free of charge, why shell out $10-12 to go see a movie?

Leonard Zachary from T___n__, October 12, 2015 at 2:30 p.m.

Unfortunately the payTV model is trending "broken". Any live sports event, any major network feed is all available on the Internet for nothing. Linear TV is not going away... someone will re-invent the linear TV expereince unfortunately innovation is not generated from legacy media players. Major broadcast TV networks are not going away...they'll just be half the size in revenue and assets. Read the Thomas Gray poem....

Ed Papazian from Media Dynamics Inc, October 12, 2015 at 3:27 p.m.

Leonard, a little help please. You say that any major network's live sports coverage is available free on the Internet---if I understand you. How does one go about accessing one of these events and are you also saying that other network fare is also available? If so, how does one access all of this content and how many people are doing so?

Jed Petrick from Balleehoo, Inc., October 13, 2015 at 8:19 a.m.

Still, Facebook may have a little edge someplace. A Nielsen study found in a typical month, 12.2% of millennials can be reached on TV only (using the top 10 networks) — against 14.2% who can only be reached on Facebook.

Weak comparison. Can someone who has access to this stuff please examine the reach for the Top 10 millenial TV program services instead of the older skewing Top 10 services? Seems a little more fair and realistic.

Ed Papazian from Media Dynamics, October 13, 2015 at 8:51 a.m.

Jed, I can't help you on your request but, in principle, this kind of analysis has little merit. Even if it was true that 14% of "millennials" can't be reached by TV ----which I doubt, taking all of the TV channels as a base and a monthly time frame into account----so what? What advertiser in his right mind is worried about targeting the small number of people in any target group who never watch TV? The same thing goes for digital. Why lose sleep over the equally small number of people who only watch TV and can't be reached by digital? Most consumers use many media and the main concern should be about those who are, in fact, "duplicated" where media reach is concerned, and whatever synsrgies can be developed to exploit this.

Ed Papazian from Media Dynamics Inc, October 13, 2015 at 1:22 p.m.

Eric, I agree with you (and Leonard ) that millennials are watching less of traditional TV than older people and that the percentages in this regard are rising---but slowly, not at the breakneck pace that is sometimes claimed. As a matter of fact, we have just done an analysis of this based on Nielsen data for our umpcoming annual, "TV Dimensions 2016", which shows that a typical adult aged 18-34 does about 19 hours a week of live and delayed viewing to traditional TV---TV network, station, cable and syndicated fare in all dayparts. In addition, Nielsen provides similar estimates for DVD/Blu-Ray, Multimedia devices ( AppleTV, Roku, etc. ) video usage on PCs and Video usage on smartphones, which adds up to about 4.5-5.0 hours per week per 18-to-34-year-old. So, the traditional TV share of all viewing, based on these figures is roughly 80%.

The ad-free business is trickier as one has to figure out how much of the viewing on each platform is to content that has or does not have ads. Here, we came up with an estimate for an average adult that finds that roughly 16% of all TV/video consumption is ad-free while the corresponding figure for millennials is 23%.In both cases we are including the SVOD services in the calculations.

I wouldn't be surprised to see the ad-free percentages rising at a fairly measured but significant pace over the next few years and I should add that it would help greatly if Nielsen would publish usage tonnage figures for the SVOD services, if possible by age and income groups. Out-of-home viewing also needs a lot of work to get a proper fix on and we didn't even try to include it in our estimates.

The basic point is that 18-34s are reachable via traditional TV to a significant extent if the advertiser and its agency make the right media buying decisions and spread out their buys. This, along with teens, is and has always been the hardest to target using TV, and the diversion of viewing time to alternative platforms is not making things any easier. However, it is misleading in the extreme to contend that "very little" of the typical millennial's current viewing time is devoted to ad-supported fare.