As a student of marketing and advertising, along with current work within the marketing of events, I have learnt the importance of audience measurement. Obviously for anyone selling advertising of any sort, it is extremely beneficial to have the ability to monitor the audience that people will be advertising towards. This allows execution of the advertising to be used to its highest potential.
In the Australian television industry, Nielsen and their sub-branch OzTam monitor the ratings across the board for free-to-air networks. In an innovative new method of measurement, they are about to begin utilising Nielsen Twitter TV ratings. This will have the ability to measure the total activity (Tweets, Unique Authors) and the reach (Impressions, Unique Audience) of TV-related conversation on Twitter.
With Australia being only the third country this has been introduced, it’s a huge surprise that it’s taken this long to do so, when you think about how many TV shows already use live Twitter feeds as an element of their broadcasted TV show. Now I don’t watch much television, but when I have watched the odd shows such as The Project, even Q & A or been forced to watch an episode of Big Brother with my girlfriend, I’ve noticed the viewer’s Tweets of opinions, supposed jokes and ramblings rolling across the TV screen.
It makes perfect sense why the producers would encourage this, it lets their viewers have a sense of involvement, which in turns increases engagement. It is free promotion for their show as the relevant hashtags trend as people vent about some housemates ridiculous catty behaviour. Regardless of how ridiculous you may think those Tweets are about some ‘character’ on a reality show, if there is 20 000 ridiculous tweets about a show, it still tells you that at least 20 000 people are actively watching the show.
(The fact that their is a need for this app, just shows how prevalent discussing television shows on Twitter has become.)
Not only can audience monitoring mean that advertising space can be sold more accordingly on TV and the radio, but on the smaller scales it can upsell minor advertising on the internet. Personal users such as on Facebook can be targeted, all having benefits for companies across the board. I know when marketing the aforementioned events, you could boost your post for say $10 but as you typed in keywords such as ‘Wollongong’, ‘Music’ and ‘Triple J’ to generalise, Facebook could tell me the exact amount of people they reckoned it could directly target with my advertising, for a cost of course.
Admittedly, whilst any money of mine going to Facebook I’m not too happy with, being able to find and target my market that directly is an extremely handy thing, and is something that has resulted from both advances in technology, rises in use of social media, and the drop in some elements of privacy. It is both extremely exciting and equally scary to see how far audience measurement and targeting progresses to within the next five years.
ankledeepin 