The seven biggest reasons why your audiences are scrolling on their mobile phones when they could be watching your expensive TV ad break

There was once a time when audiences were captive, and the way to get the public’s attention was to pay for it. In the UK, from September 1955 until November 1982, there was just one commercial TV channel. So, if you bought a prime spot in the centre break of News At Ten, you could pretty much guarantee that millions of people were going to be watching it.

Today – as we all know – that’s no longer so.

Today, even if people are ‘watching it,’ chances are they may not actually be watching it.

Alongside an accelerating decline in traditional ‘linear’ TV viewing, we’re seeing whole generations for whom what’s on the big screen right now has to compete, moment by moment, with whatever they happen to be scrolling on their smartphone or tablet.

‘Second screening’ may be over a decade old now, but it’s grown and spread across the generations to the point where, in 2023, YouGov data across 17 markets showed a clear majority of viewers looking at their phones or tablets while watching TV. In the UK only one in ten never look at their mobile devices while watching TV, while over half (55%) say they do it ‘very often’ or ‘fairly often’.

In fact, research shows that in a single year, the average adult now scrolls a distance of 78 miles on their phone. The majority of what they’re scrolling through is posts on social media and video-sharing sites. Facebook. Instagram. TikTok. YouTube.

So, what is it they’re finding there that’s so interesting?

A good place to start is to take a look at the world’s most popular YouTube channel. It’s run by a 26-year-old from Greenville, North Carolina, by the name of Jimmy Donaldson, a.k.a Mr Beast. Since starting out in 2012, he’s amassed some 295 million subscribers. Over half of them have subscribed in the last two years alone. His success has grown so fast, and so phenomenal, that it’s enabled him to employ a team of 250 writers, editors, producers and stunt co-ordinators. It’s also earned him personal wealth estimated at around half a billion dollars.

Some of his early videos were quirky, to say the least.

His ‘breakthrough’ film, launched in 2017 when he was just 22 years old, saw him looking at the camera, counting from 1 to 100,000. And that was it. The whole thing took 40 hours to film. Speeded up for YouTube, it would take you just under 24 hours to watch the whole thing. Then there was the video of him watching paint dry for an hour, and an unsuccessful attempt to spin a fidget-spinner for an entire day.

At this point, if you’re sitting there rolling your eyes and thinking, And this is meant to be popular? I’d ask you to just bear with me.

His more recent content includes:

• $456,000 Squid Game in Real Life (541 million views). Getting 456 people to play cult Korean TV show’s Squid Game with a huge cash prize.
• Last to leave the circle wins $500,000 (377 million views). Putting 100 people in a circle and leaving them there until only one remained to collect the half-a-million in cash.
• $1 vs. $1,000,000 Hotel Room (316 million views). In which he stayed in, and compared, hotel rooms from the world’s cheapest to the world’s most expensive.

If we can understand what Mr Beast and other social media stars offer that allows them to get so many subscribers and achieve such success, it offers a clue to what it is that people find so compelling about that phone in their hand when they’re meant to be ‘watching’ TV.

So here are the seven things you get from Mr Beast and from many of the other highest-performing channels on YouTube and other social media.

1. Uniqueness. Even in his early days of counting to 100,000 and all-day fidget-spinning, Mr Beast offered things you just wouldn’t see anywhere else. Why you’d actually want to see them is a whole other question.
2. Adversity. There’s a human element to many most-watched online videos – we like to see people struggling to overcome overwhelming odds to gain something of value.
3. Trending. Many of the most popular social media videos are built around topics that are not only familiar but also trending, as Squid Game was for Mr Beast in 2021.
4. Superlatives. High-ranking videos promise audiences the biggest, best, most definitive thing of their kind. The biggest prize ever. The craziest stunt. The worst celebrity gaffes.
5. Familiarity. Even from the thumbnail and title, audiences are more likely to click on a link when they instantly recognise the subject or presenter.
6. Education. In addition to all this, the most popular videos often teach us something we didn’t know or couldn’t previously do.

That’s six things. But we mentioned seven.

So the seventh is…

7. All of the above, all at once. Or at least, as many as possible of the six things listed above as can be stacked together into a single video. If a video is unique, that might be worth a look. If it offers uniqueness and quality, that’s even better. If it offers uniqueness, quality, familiarity and a trending subject, things start to get interesting. And if on top of that you have a main subject overcoming adversity, and you teach the audience something new while you’re at it, that’s when you start getting into the kind of multimillion-view territory that makes people look down at their phones instead of up at the TV. And that makes 26-year-old content creators like Mr Beast astonishingly rich.

The best advertising has always grabbed audiences’ attention, drawn them in and made them want to watch. But alongside the best advertising, there were historically dozens of ‘good enough’ ads which you sat through them and ended up taking note of because you couldn’t be bothered to change the channel or go and make a cup of tea. The mobile device has created a real-time Darwinist environment in which every second of every communication faces intense competition for your audience’s attention.

If you don’t grab them, the second screen will.

[1] https://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/sharpest-ever-decline-linear-tv-viewers-2022/1832240

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/media-network/media-network-blog/2012/sep/10/second-screen-experience-mobile-tablet-tv

[1] https://business.yougov.com/content/46785-where-are-people-most-likely-to-second-screen-with-mobile-phones

[1] https://www.londondaily.news/the-average-adult-scrolls-the-equivalent-of-three-marathons-a-year-on-their-phone/

First published by Warc.com on 1 July 2024.