Fighting the Drift – How to Convert a Smartphone User to an Active TV Consumer

As a broadcast professional, you’re used to thinking about television from behind the screen, but take a moment to consider your own viewing habits. How do you watch TV? Chances are, you’ve got the television on in the living room and a smartphone in your hand, checking the weather, news, or a social media feed.

If this is how you, a broadcaster, interact with TV, you can bet that the average viewer is also splitting their attention between devices. In fact, studies show exactly that: Nielsen says that 85% of mobile owners use their tablet or smartphone while watching TV, and research from the Consumer Technology Association found that when Millennials watch TV, 88% of the time it’s with another device in hand.

This may seem like a problem at first. Broadcasters invest heavily in content and advertisers pay good money to put their brand in front of viewers’ eyes - yet many people are tuning out. But what if, instead of seeing multitasking as a problem, we started to see it as an opportunity? Instead of asking how we can get audiences to stop looking at their phones, it’s time for broadcasters and advertisers to ask how they can meet them there.

What’s Going On?

The first step is understanding what users are doing on their devices. Research shows that users are:

• Searching for more information related to the show that they are watching
• Joining conversations about the show
• Checking sports scores during game
• Shopping

Steering viewers in the right direction means creating a simple path from the primary screen in the living room to the mobile device in the viewer’s hand. One way to do that is with a scan code that can appear on any broadcast content – either during commercials, or within shows and programs themselves.

The Sodyo Solution

Sodyo has introduced a solution that utilizes a colored matrix scan code, called a Sodyo Marker, which serves as a call to action for viewers. How did we arrive at this solution among myriads of other options?

The Sodyo marker enables people to simply point their device’s camera at the code to interact, in a similar manner as one would scan a QR code, however, the Sodyo Marker can easily be scanned from across the room, takes up very little space on the screen, and works much faster providing a better user experience. The ease of use and similarity to an existing, understood technology helps lower the barrier to entry so that audiences can get straight to the content they want without having to learn a new technology.

Not only does this leverage ubiquitous mobile devices to benefit networks and advertisers, but it also helps draw eyes back to the primary screen as audiences start to look for those opportunities to go deeper with broadcast content.

If you think your network could benefit from an engagement tool like this, you'd like to see it in action, or just want to know more about how Sodyo’s technology works, click below to contact us.