Measuring the digital explosion

As more viewers watch TV online than ever before, Fishbowl Worldwide Media head Bruce Gersh tells Michael Pickard keeping the audience engaged is key.

When PayPal president Scott Thompson was named as the new CEO of internet giant Yahoo! in January, he wasted no time suggesting the importance that measuring online audiences will play in the future of the company.

“The data these internet businesses create, the ability to use analytical technology to build a better business for your customers – I feel certain that wealth of data will be exploitable for next-generation products and experiences,” he said.

He’s not alone. Last year, David Abraham, CEO of Channel 4 in the UK, described audience data as “the new oil” when he spoke about the terrestrial network’s plans to harvest information about its viewers to improve content and provide better-targeted advertising.

Bruce Gersh, CEO and president of LA-based Fishbowl Worldwide Media, agrees that measuring and utilising audience data is one of the talking points that will shape the digital space in 2012.

The past year has seen more and more viewers migrate online as video-on-demand services including Netflix and Hulu build their archive libraries while moving into original content. However, Gersh says that audience measurement will not only come to mean the number of times a show may be streamed but the number of viewers who are interacting with their favourite programme elsewhere on the web.

“If you look at the data we can gather from YouTube and Facebook, it’s not only about people that are watching, it’s about people that are talking and experiencing,” he says. “As time goes on, advertisers are not only going to want to follow the content to its original destination, they’re going to follow it through its entire lifecycle. We’re hoping we, as producers, will be able to provide an advertiser with a rich experience of content that starts on Yahoo! and flows to Facebook or YouTube, Tumblr or Twitter and that community really starts talking about it and the advertiser can follow it with that community.

“The big dollars are on television but as audiences shift and TV becomes everywhere, everybody will have to figure out how to measure audiences. It’s going to be the big discussion of 2012.”

Fishbowl’s digital arm has already had considerable success with shortform online shows. Ultimate Proposal, which follows people who propose to their partners in increasingly extreme surroundings, is carried on Yahoo! and has its own YouTube channel, while clip show CuteWinFail is also on YouTube. It also piloted a web toon called The Potts.

Gersh, who founded Fishbowl with TV producer Vin Di Bona (America’s Funniest Home Videos) in 2010, sees online video continuing to grow this year, boosted by TV-quality production, the expansion of online brands and the investment put into VoD by players such as YouTube.

YouTube last year unveiled plans to roll out 100 thematic channels at a cost of US$100m, with partners including Fremantle-Media, Electus and Lionsgate. In January Fishbowl launched a pets-themed channel, Petsami. The channel puts a twist on animal programming by letting humans into the secret lives of their pets through new content.

“Consumers are really starting to watch video online en masse,” Gersh says. “We’re also seeing the quality elevated to TV levels. It opens up a whole new platform for producers like ourselves to develop content that can go straight to consumers.”

With the growth of online video, there’s also an opportunity to build brands on the web before transferring them, and their ready-made audience, to terrestrial TV. “Web video is always going to start with a great creative idea,” says Gersh. “The beauty of launching it on the web is it’s a much more efficient way of testing content, but not much content for the web has migrated to TV yet. You will see more of it in time, but it will still be driven by a great creative idea.”

Gersh says online broadcasters face similar challenges to traditional broadcasters, such as how to get an audience to watch your program in the first place. Ultimately, however, he believes audiences will only watch TV shows – online or otherwise – if the content they are tuning into is entertaining enough to keep their attention. “Discovery and watching content anytime, anywhere on any device is going to grow to a greater degree as tablets and strategies continue to evolve,” says Gersh.

“There will be a lot of discussion about YouTube channels, advertising, measurement and how to monetise it. But when we watch shows on a television, the reason we watch them is because they’re entertaining, and we can’t forget that one main component.”