When I posted about Bravo TV’s engagement-rich Web site, my request for an interview went unanswered, so a few questions went unanswered.
Fortunately, some of my questions were answered in a DM News interview with Bravo’s Lisa Hsia – Senior VP of new media, Bravo.
It was a short interview (and worth a couple minutes of your time). Two key questions revolved around emerging technology and the value Bravo TV places on engagement:
Q: What strategy does Bravo take with emerging technology?
A: The way I look at it, we’re not only an entertainment company, we’re in the engagement business. We’re increasingly having success monetizing engagement. For the Project Runway mobile fan club, we had 92% participation while normal engagement is 1%–2%. We also did voting with cable remotes [for Top Chef] with Time Warner and Dish Network. With Time Warner, we had 26% participation. In the beginning it was just an experiment. Now, sponsors come on board because they want the engagement our users have.
Q: How does this engagement add value for advertisers?
A: With Bravo’s Info Frame [an interactive panel allowing viewers to participate in polls, games and chats during programming], the consumer is interacting during the program as well as during the commercials themselves. The advertisers can also interact and, presumably, if they’re engaging during the program, they’re going to engage during advertisements.
The numbers repeated in the first answer would make any marketing exec (or ad salesman) sit up a little straighter.
Yet the second answer (How does this engagement add value for advertisers?) is conspicuous mostly for its lack of numbers.
At this point, engagement is hard to quantify, which is why so many organizations are standing on the sidelines.
While I had criticisms of Bravo TV’s site (it’s confusing and hard to navigate), you have to applaud them for taking risks – and enjoying the payoffs.
Stay engaged, Tom Chandler
bravo, bravo tv, engagement, engagement marketing, dmnews
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Bravo TV has ridden the reality TV wave with a long list of “reality” TV hits, including The Queer Eye For the Straight Guy, Project Runway, Top Chef and others.
“Reality” shows engage readers by offering them compelling characters struggling with real-life situations or competitive pressures (imposed by the programs themselves).
Of course, television isn’t interactive, and in an attempt to bind fans to the shows (which often suffer several months-long breaks between the broadcast of “seasons”), Bravo has embraced engagement marketing tactics; they’ve launched a long list of blogs authored by show participants and judges.
It’s an interesting engagement marketing strategy — one marred only by the poor technology behind the site.
Blogs Everywhere
As I write this, Bravo’s blog count is at 72 blogs and rising. That’s a lot of blogs, and more are added as new shows are released and others move into new seasons.
Still, participation looks good; despite the lack of truly interactive blogs (blog authors rarely respond to reader comments), the more popular posts garner several hundred comments.
Clearly, Bravo is betting heavily on blogs — which makes their flawed implementation of them all the more confusing.
Get the Technology Right
Outside of a very, very cluttered appearance and sometimes confusing user interface, Bravo TV’s blogs have a problem.
Each blog entry is broken up across several relatively short pages, so reading a single entry can involve moving through a lot of pages — and every time the page is redrawn, all reader comments are loaded again.
That means viewers with slow connections (or gasp — dialup) could wait for several hundred comments to load in order to read only a few paragraphs of an entry.
Then they’d get to do it all over again when trying to read the next few paragraphs. It’s either a horrendous oversight, or an attempt to maximize the number of pageviews (usually for advertising purposes) — a shortsighted tactic given the value of engaged fans.
Active Engagement
An e-mail to Bravo TV’s press contact went unanswered, so I can’t speak to the traffic numbers or the network’s own perception of the strategy’s success or failure.
The fact that they’re adding new blogs — and basing so much of their site’s content around them — suggests they’re still happy with the choice of blogs as tools of engagement.
It’s an exceptional engagement marketing strategy; rather than fill their site with content generated by third parties, Bravo jams their online presence with content generated by the very stars of their shows.
Judging by the response from judges and participants, the stars are seizing the opportunity to promote their own brand.
Suddenly, generating arresting content becomes a win/win situation for both network and its emerging reality stars — not to mention the fans, who gain a measure of access they don’t enjoy anywhere else.
It’s an interesting — and compelling — example of engagement marketing on a grand scale.
