Is Binge Watching the Next Video Marketing Metric?. Many people have stories about their relationships to television when they were growing up. As a result, people are becoming accustomed to watching their favorite shows in multi-episode sprints and demanding seasons to be released in their entirety from the start. There’s no way you can make readers actually binge on your brand. Encouraging the Binge There are clearly a few differences that prevent brands from treating themselves like Netflix, not the least of which being that such streaming services offer video content as their product rather than promotional material—meaning they can devote considerably more time, effort, and budget to its creation. There are two primary forms that at the content level encourage this kind of viewing behavior. For great examples of how this looks on both small and large scale, music brands like Musicbed and KEXP Radio provide awesome Youtube hubs to see what well curated and grown series can look like through their series of artist “session” videos. Episodic content should always have the first episode of any series at one click away (end of video recommendations are a great space for this) for viewers who discover your content halfway through, while series content should make every effort to make sure that autoplaying content continues to meet your audience’s tastes and doesn’t repeat content—segmenting thematically can really help with this. The more cost-intensive-yet-effective method of hosting this binge content is to create a specialized video hub on your own website. This is a story that only time can tell.
Many people have stories about their relationships to television when they were growing up. Some warmly remember how their families gathered around a favorite weekly TV show for dinner, while others recall the regimented half-hour their mothers gave them each day. For some it was a reward after a long day; for others, an escape from the anxiety of hard days to come. The small box that grew bigger every year, a bringer of very real news and provider of fantasy all in one. Binge watching, streaming, offline show content—none of these really entered into the traditional TV formula in the decades that followed the television’s creation.
Traditional TV has been dead for years, and now cable consumption, as you’ve likely heard, is diminishing.
Today, the field for television content has dramatically changed. Ads grow in their domination of air time while increasingly more users are “cutting the cord” in favor of specialized online services. Meanwhile, online streaming platforms continue to see strong growth with Netflix leading the field. As a result, people are becoming accustomed to watching their favorite shows in multi-episode sprints and demanding seasons to be released in their entirety from the start. Binge watching, which was once only possible through infrequent “marathons” has now become a norm that Netflix has begun to research and work into its own formula. Television is moving online, and in a space with more content, fewer interruptions, and greater variety, viewers seem happy about it.
But you know all that, most likely because if you’re not a Netflix subscriber, you know someone who is. You’ve heard them talk about the weekends they’ve lost to shows such as Black Mirror, Narcos, even Mad Men (for the third time). And one night before bed, it hit you: people are willingly devoting hours to this content because they love it. And maybe if they loved your brand story that much, they would do the same for you.
Here’s the problem: more likely than not, you’re among the 83 percent of marketers who would love to create more video content, if only you had the time and resources to do so. Even if you had it, you wouldn’t know where to start. There’s no way you can make readers actually binge on your brand.
Or so you assume.
Encouraging the Binge
There are clearly a few differences that prevent brands from treating themselves like Netflix, not the least of which being that such streaming services offer video content as their product rather than promotional material—meaning they can devote considerably more time, effort, and budget to its creation. But there are still a number of ways in which marketers can encourage binge-viewing behavior within their own communities, without much change to their existing content engines.
The most fundamental place to begin the pursuit of bingeingess has to happen at the content level. If your video content doesn’t lend itself to continuous viewing, then there’s no combination of video presentation or infrastructure that’s going to be able to keep your audience watching. There are two primary forms that at the content level encourage this kind of viewing behavior.
1. Episodic video
Episodic video content typically involves recurring characters, themes, visual style, and plot that grow which each subsequent episode. The advantage of this form is that it most closely mimics television-style content and—if engaging enough—has the highest potential to keep people watching one after the other. However, this form does make it a bit more difficult to onboard people halfway through, presenting some challenges when it comes to promoting your content with each release (though this difficulty is somewhat reduced if with “full season” releasing models.)
Pepsi continues to produce one of…
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