How Can Niche OTT Providers Build an Audience?
Learn more about the OTT market at Streaming Media's next event.
Watch the complete presentation from Streaming Media West, OTT201. How Niche Video Services Can Find Success, in the Streaming Media Conference Video Portal.
Read the complete transcript of this clip:
Jon Cody: We target what we believe are underserved, passionate communities. Communities are people that are bound together by shared love of something and we found the most effective way to market to those people is essentially through paid media inside of Facebook and Instagram mostly although others as well.
For reasons that you know, I'm not sure I understand we've as a world decided to share our loves and interests on the front end of social media. Facebook in particular has done a very good job of taking that date on the back end and providing it to advertisers like us and unlike some other areas. Those platforms in particular you can advertise, move an audience, and have that audience convert to your owned and operated channels.
Gene Pao: So one of the luxuries that we have with our content--even though it's classic content-- it does have recognition and it does have a fan base. A fan base may be dormant, and so what we try to do is we try to leverage the talent or leverage something that's going on in pop culture to gain exposure for the content that we are offering and we do that primarily through programming stunts.
So for example, coming up on Thanksgiving, we always do the Mystery Science Theater 3000 turkey day marathon. It's something that the fans have always enjoyed back when it was on television, and since we brought it back online, fans have embraced that as well and they've been able to interact with other viewers.
\So that's been very successful, and what we do is we leverage the talent and create promotional stunts, and then that builds buzz within the community and hopefully it sort of spreads the word out. But we feel like that unless we have something that we can latch onto--whether it's talent drafting another event that's going on--it's really hard to break through and get exposure for your content.
William Marks: We spend a lot of time with our distribution partners and this may come from our heritage, or the mothership of being a cable network so we spend a lot of time specifically with Roku, with XUMO, with the teams on the other platforms trying to figure out what programming they think is doing well, how to be highlighted in partnerships that they're doing.
We have a tremendous team. Some of them I'm lucky enough to have them in the room to fill this room a little bit today, that focus on that and really get it. Just tremendous partnership-level responds from those distributors and again, it's very similar to what we do in cable where we're constantly working with Comcast or Charter or Verizon to say, "Hey, feature us, or let's do something together with a sponsor or with a third party," and that's how we tend to drive.
Longer viewing times and we have some paid media for install campaigns, but primarily it's focusing on the distributor, 'cause at the end of the day that's how the consumer is getting your stuff. It's that piece of glass or that app or channel lineup is where they're going to find your content, so keeping those distributors happy and featuring you, we think is a big ROI for us.
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