ABC Partners HuffPost To Explore Audio Ads On Amazon Echo And Google Home

What Happened
ABC is teaming up with The Huffington Post to explore audio ads delivered via the voice=based interfaces of Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant. Aiming to promote the launch of the upcoming season of “American Crime,” the Disney-owned network will work with HuffPost to integrate content into the publisher’s existing Daily Flash Briefing on Amazon Alexa and Weekly News Quiz on Google Home throughout March.

What Brands Need To Do
This partnership marks one of the first advertiser integrations into an existing conversational skill. By plugging American Crime within HuffPost’s news briefing skills, ABC devices a winning strategy to reach an informed and socially invested audience demo via Google Home and Amazon Echo devices. As Amazon and Google begin to build an ad model on their virtual assistant services, it is important that marketers start to develop a conversational strategy and find the right partners to deliver their brand messages.

How We Can Help
The Lab has extensive experience in building Alexa Skills and chatbots to reach consumers on conversational interfaces. So much so that we’ve built a dedicated conversational practice called Dialogue. The “Miller Time” Alexa Skill we developed with Drizly for Miller Lite is a good example of how Dialogue can help brands build a conversational customer experience, supercharged by our stack of technology partners with best-in-class solutions and an insights engine that extracts business intelligence from conversational data.

If you’d like to learn more about how to effectively reach consumers on conversational interfaces, or to leverage the Lab’s expertise to take on related client opportunities within the IPG Mediabrands, please contact our Client Services Director Samantha Holland ([email protected]) to schedule a visit to the Lab.

 


Source: AdAge

ABC Relaunches OTT Streaming Service With Back Catalogue And New Content

What Happened
ABC has relaunched its over-the-air streaming service, adding seven short-form, web-exclusive series and 38 shows from its back catalogue. The service will remain free and ad-supported. The relaunch also comes with an interface redesign for its iOS apps that improves content discovery and navigation, as well as expanding its local live streaming to 14 markets in a new pact with Hearst.

What Brands Need To Do
ABC is taking a decidedly different approach in building out its OTT streaming service than its broadcast competitors. Last year, CBS and NBC both launched their own subscription-based SVOD services, CBS All Access and Seeso, respectively, whereas the alphabet network is sticking with the ad-supported model. Regardless, all three networks share the same strategy of developing exclusive content for their streaming services in order to capture an audience that is shifting away from linear TV. For brands, this primarily means two things: One, brands should consider increasing ad buys on ad-supported streaming services. Two, brands need to develop branded content or work with content creators on brand integrations in order to reach viewers on ad-free services.

For more information on how brands can reach viewers on OTT platforms with ads or branded content, please check out the Appified TV section in our Outlook 2016.

 


Sources: Variety

ABC Uses Custom Hashtag-Emoji Combo To Unlock Previews On Twitter

What Happened
Following Coca-Cola’s debut of the first-ever branded emoji on Twitter last week, ABC is tapping into the marketing potential of emojis to promote the new season premiere of its Thursday night  lineup. Fans of the three “TGIT” shows can tweet special hashtag-emoji combinations designated by ABC (Scandal, for example, asks for a combo of #Scandal and a wine glass emoji) to unlock exclusive video content from the corresponding shows via auto-generated private messages.

What Brands Should Do
Although it remains unclear if ABC actually paid twitter for this activation, since there’s no new emoji specifically created for this promotional efforts. Nevertheless, it provides an interesting new use case of how brands can innovatively tap into emoji’s unique marketing potential on social networks. The reward of exclusive previews incentivizes fans to engage with the campaign and help spread the message, a clever tactic that all brands with social marketing efforts could emulate and put to good use.  

 


Source: Marketing Land

ABC News Viewers Loves Watching Live on Apple TV

ABC News channel launched its native streaming app on Apple TV a month ago, and the viewers seems to be loving it. Due to the closed nature of Apple’s ecosystem, stats on app usage on their platform are rarely publicized, but today, ABC reported that ABC News users watch 50% more live video on Apple TV than on desktop and mobile combined. This report once again proves that the American audience is embracing over-the-top video channels.

ABC Offers Mobile Streaming of Live TV

ABC is providing a live-stream of local programming via their mobile app in a landmark move for a major broadcaster.  Amidst competition from streaming services like Netflix and over the air service Aereo, ABC expedited their mobile viewing project initially planned for 2014 as they will be rolling out in select cities in time for the upfronts.  The new offering is only available to paying cable subscribers however and will feature the same ads offered on abc.com.