Weekend Slices: Nielsen's streaming surprise<>Lego to woo adult superfans<>Brands Are Helping Consumers Build Their Own<>How Finimize grew to 1 million email subscribers<>McKinsey on tech in retail
Nielsen kind of shook up the business world by announcing that streaming accounts for only 26% of Americans watching TV. And Netflix is just 6%!
Last week, Nielsen unveiled the first true independent measurement of cross-platform viewing on TV, The Gauge, a panel-based, representative tracker of what 300+ million Americans are watching each month, broken out by linear TV (broadcast and cable), streaming and other (video games, DVDs, etc.).
Nielsen revealed that broadcast and cable still account for 64% of total TV viewing, with streaming only representing 26% of viewing -- and Netflix, the dominant streamer, only at 6%.
Many “media folks” were surprised by those numbers.
Read all about it in the MediaPost article.
Lego has taken note that adults have been spending time with Lego during these strange times. They have decided to set up ‘story telling’ tables for adults to interact virtually with creators of Lego designs.
Adult brick fans, called AFOLs (adult fan of Lego) in Legospeak, are an increasingly important demographic for the Danish toymaker, as – freed from the constraints of pocket money – they spend hundreds of pounds on kits ranging from technical builds, such as supercars and space shuttles, to ones based on TV shows such as Friends and Stranger Things.
The new feature makes its debut in Lego’s new flagship store in New York, which opens on Thursday. The 666-sq-metre (7,175-sq ft) two-storey shop on Fifth Avenue also has an interactive ticketed attraction called “the Brick Lab” which promises to bring “physical Lego builds to life”. Models made by visitors are scanned, enabling them to appear in an animated space or New York-themed adventure.
Read the full story in The Guardian.
Cannes (where the ad agencies’ annual pilgrimage is held) has revealed an interesting trend of brand’s helping consumers brand themselves.
Two of the festival's most lauded works -- VMLY&R's "I Am" campaign for Starbucks, and McCann's "True Name" for Mastercard -- enabled consumers to do the latter, literally helping transgender people rebrand their own names.
Meanwhile, Ogilvy's "Naming The Invisible" campaign for Pakistan's Telenor helped millions of unregistered Pakistanis brand themselves officially with their government via a birth certificate registration app.
In both the cases of Starbucks' "I Am," which turned local Starbucks retail outlets into notary public offices so that transgender Brazilians could legally change their names, and Telenor's "Naming The Invisible," the campaigns were actionable and took on a legal merit that went above and beyond the ad industry's normal image-building efforts.
It’s MediaPost again with the story.
Read about how Max Rofagha’s Finimize, a newsletter, grew to over 1 million subscribers.
Finally, one more take on how tech will revolutionize retail. I thought this would have moved on from ‘will’ to ‘is’ by now. That aside, a good read from McKinsey.
That’s all the slices you get this week, have a great weekend. Enjoy the football, if that’s your thing..
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