With the growth of smartphone and tablets, entertainment marketers face the dual threat of diluted audience engagement and loss of viewer loyalty if they don’t develop meaningful and creative Second Screen experiences that directly relate what’s happening on viewer devices to what’s happening on the TV.

“If they’re playing Flappy Bird, if they’re answering their Gmail, if they’re on Tinder, then their attention to TV is diluted,” said Jeroen Doucet, Managing Director of ComingNext TV.

Doucet was speaking on the opening day of the 2014 PromaxBDA Europe Conference at London’s Park Plaza Westminster Hotel.

He used three recent examples from Dutch TV that underscored why it pays to orchestrate your efforts between the first and second screen to rejuvenate your audience, increase tune-in, and drive viewers both to the program and its advertisers.

“Kassa,” a long-running Dutch consumer-affairs watchdog show filmed before a live audience, had seen the average age of its viewers rise to 58 years old in the decades since its premiere in 1989.

“Kassa” producers introduced the “Kassa Panel,” a Second Screen app that integrated the viewers directly into the show’s content.

App users share their opinions on which products would be reviewed and answer questions—like whether they believe what a guest is saying—with the answers instantly fed back to the guests during the broadcast and integrated into the discussion.

“The viewer is not just doing something on the Second Screen for themselves, but is also doing something for other viewers,” Doucet said.

In addition to successfully lowering the average viewer age, “Kassa Panel” became a trending topic on Twitter each week after a show aired.

Another popular Dutch show, the soap “Goede Tijden, Slechte Tijden” (GTST), entered the 2013 summer hiatus with a cliffhanger episode that featured nine characters jumping out of an airplane.

The closing moments of the season finale showed that one of the characters’ parachutes failed to open, without revealing which one.

GTST producers launched the “Spring Levend” app (rough translation: “alive and kicking,”) which revealed week-by-week over the summer hiatus one cast member who survived. Fans were given the opportunity to access exclusive additional content throughout the week. And producers created a number of games that rewarded app users with weekly prizes.

A group of app players were selected to compete in their own summer reality competition, with the winner taking a plane ride where another “safe” cast member revealed themselves. And all of the app players were invited to stream the season premiere with the big reveal a week before broadcast viewers.

In the end, GTST ratings jumped from 1.8 million for the cliffhanger, to 2.25 million for the season premiere—roughly 34 percent of the market share in The Netherlands.

One more Dutch show, “Divorce,” used a Second Screen app to drive viewers both to the show and an advertiser who had extensive product integration.

“Divorce” and Volkswagen created an in-season Easter Egg hunt of sorts for viewers. 39 sets of Volkswagen keys were hidden throughout the season. Each time a viewer spotted a set of keys in the story, they had to tap on the image of a hand in the accompanying Second Screen app to “grab” the keys.

After collecting five keys, a viewer was entered for a chance to win a new Beetle.

Viewers had to pay attention to the show rather than, say, Tinder, in order to find the keys and have a chance of winning, while Volkswagen activated viewers in a new and creative.

“In the end, they were driving viewers to both the advertiser and the show,” Doucet said.

Yaron Gat, head of promotion and creative at Israel’s Keshet Broadcasting, also stressed the importance of engaging viewers on social media in new and creative ways when it came to on-air promos.

He used the example of Israel’s “Big Brother,” which launched a countdown campaign ahead in the 20 days leading up to the 2013 season premiere last May that featured a different promo each day.

“It had a simple principle, every day we would air a brand new promo showing the number of days until the season launched,” Gat said.

Keshet had kept the premiere date of the popular reality competition a closely guarded secret for months.

After announcing the premiere date with a short spot featuring the number 20, social media in Israel exploded in anticipation. The following day, a new promo with the number 19, and so on. (Check out one example from day 9, above).

At the end of each promo, the number would be destroyed in some fashion, highlighting the countdown aspect of the campaign.

People would try to guess what would happen to the number each day in the hours between when a still image was posted to the show’s Facebook page in the morning, and the first spot was broadcast later that day.

“Viewers began filming their own promos,” Gat said, so Keshet created a UGC campaign called “Everyone’s Counting Down,” that featured amateur spots on the air.

“The possibility of having your clip broadcast just increased the phenomenon further,” he said.

Gat stressed that in today’s rapidly shifting TV landscape, with more viewers than ever use a Second Screen as they watch, marketing departments have to forge a strong connection between their on-air promotion and their social media strategy in order to retain engaged viewers.

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