Best Practices for Turning Streaming Viewers Into Participants
From concerts to sports and other tentpole live events, from leveraging influencers to social interactions to gamification, delivering fully optimised interactive entertainment experiences is the name of the game for engaging audiences and serving brands with large-scale live streams. Bulldog DM'ss John Petrocelli, who has been delivering some of the biggest events in the business for more than a decade, discusses best practices for high-engagement live streams in this conversation with Ring Digital’s Brian Ring at Streaming Media Connect 2024.
The new dominance of interactive viewing experiences
Ring notes that interactive TV is increasingly becoming part of the viewing experience. “It's maybe not in the exact device or in the exact way you might've thought 20 years ago, but it's all kind of coming together,” he says.
The importance of converting viewers into participants through interactive tools and social media
Petrocelli says, “We've looked at how do we help our clients put interactive tools in place to really engage that viewer and get them to stay, invite their friends, and come back to subsequent experiences. What we hear back from our brand clients is, ‘I can't get anyone's attention for four seconds, but we just executed this interactive experience and had an average watch time of 14 minutes. That's a pretty significant home run.”
He breaks down what works best for keeping interactive streaming engaging via specific curation and targeting. “People want to have a social stream, they want to talk about what they're watching,” he says. “We believe that needs to be curated. It just can't be this random firehose of nonsense and polarizing commentary. If the conversations are related to the video, people are going to lean in and they're going to watch longer. And then it's things like chat pulling, trivia, graphics, calls to action, and even a dynamic schedule widget that's a companion to that viewing experience. That's where we start to [observe] watch time really grow and expand.”
Successful case studies like Shaq's Funhouse and the Snickers live Super Bowl commercial
Petrocelli cites several successful case studies, such as Shaq’s Funhouse, the Snicker live Super Bowl commercial, and the importance of entertainment-centric interactive experiences.
“The music media and entertainment around these big sporting events are almost as big as the actual in-game events themselves,” he says. “And for the Super Bowl here in LA, it was Shaq's Funhouse - this real concert carnival experience with Diplo, Lil Wayne…major, major artists...and we distribute that across multiple social platforms for the promoter Medium Rare.
“One of the key drivers of tuning into that experience was that there were 20 different TikTok influencers at and throughout that overall experience, and we're across all 20 of their accounts. It's almost like the rate effect that you see on Twitch. You might remember the Live Super Bowl commercial that Snickers did a couple of years ago with Adam Driver. He's in a saloon. Before that experience, there was a 36-hour pre-broadcast of a live stream with influencers, NFL athletes, and all kinds of weird, quirky games you could play. One of the polling opportunities was that you could pick the name of the saloon that would appear in the live commercial on Sunday. This was Thursday going into Friday. So there was a whole live voting on what the name would be. And he comes out and says he forgets that they're actually in the commercial. The whole commercial is about how you're not yourself when you're hungry and you don't have a Snickers. And he knocks the saloon over, and the whole set catches fire. But that's an example of teeing up that big moment way ahead of time. AT&T used to go to the Super Bowl and have that Super Saturday live-stream concert experience and broadcast with artists like Jennifer Lopez or the Foo Fighters. So [there is] certainly great business around entertainment-centric experiences with interactivity woven in to tee up the game for the brands.”
Join us in February 2025 for more thought leadership, actionable insights, and lively debate at Streaming Media Connect.
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