The ever-popular America’s Next Top Model, (or “Top Model” to fans), is a competitive reality show fronted and produced by former model Tyra Banks. Following the success of our live Social TV experiment with Four Weddings, Living TV wanted to provide a hosted discussion before, during and after the show.
The primary objective was to create a compelling reason to watch the show live. As we discovered in Four Weddings, it’s possible to use live continuity (the voiceover), to read out comments and poll results to create the feeling of a live event around a pre-recorded show. A secondary aim was to encourage the ‘super-fans’ to sign-up to the show’s mailing list.
Encouraging audiences to watch live is important because time-shifting reduces linear TV ad revenues
Using the reac.tv comment stream and a live polling gadget, we created a place for the hardcore fans to hang out and compete to win fashion vouchers. The discussion was hosted by one of our journalists, who researched the show every week and came prepared with opinion polls, challenges and controversial topics to fire up the debate.
Every 15 minutes, the host would pick out the best challenge response or wittiest comment, and the winner would get a £20 high-street fashion voucher.
Although our policy is to minimise registration, we required email addresses from people who wanted to compete for prizes. They were also given the ability to join the Top Model mailing list, and on the first show we saw an impressive 24% take-up.
Next Top Model proved how valuable small prizes can be, and how willing the second-screen audience is to opt-into beneficial services. A step towards synchronised, contextual advertising alongside TV.
