77 percent of teens and tweens rely on friends to find out cool new brands, followed by seeing those brands in the store, 71 percent, or on a TV commercial, 51 percent.

So word of mouth continues to be the primary method of driving teen consumption, which I doubt differs too much from adult behavior, but it’s interesting to see that TV is still relatively high on the list at 51%.  So once again, all of this talk about the death knell of television among this demographic is greatly exaggerated.  One of the more interesting points of the research is the piece about social networks.  Only 24% of teens/tweens surveyed said that they find out about new brands on social networks such as Facebook or MySpace, and only 29% said they were a “fan” of a brand on one of the sites.  I really thought both of those numbers would be higher if for no other reason than the amount of time teens spend on social networking sites.

So what does this mean for online advertisers and publishers?  Well for starters, I would love to see the breakout between teens and tweens.  Depending on the upper age range they targeted for the study, the differences could be quite large.  The thought process of a 17 year old differs significantly from that of a 12 year old.  As a result, their behaviors both online and off will be very different.  Whatever the case, I see the low percentage of users being influenced by social network advertising as an opportunity to get better at it.  Given the amount of time that this age demographic spends online, there’s no reason that social sites shouldn’t be first or second when it comes to driving consumer behavior.  The big question is whether that’s better done through word-of-mouth and sharing info, or through more traditional components such as display ads and brand sponsorships.  The answer is likely somewhere in the middle with a bit of a skew towards word-of-mouth.  Lots of progress has been made on this within the last year and I look forward to seeing how the industry continues to evolve.

So as reported in a previous post here at the TVLoop Blog, the common theme around blogs and in the press the last several months have focused on the death of broadcast TV as more teens moved to online video.  In reality, 92% of teens watch TV while only 3% watch TV online.  That huge disparity doesn’t appear to be changing any time soon.

One opinion that is often reported as fact is that teens prefer to watch TV online.  That couldn’t be further from the truth according to the latest study from independent analyst Bruce Leichtman.  According to the study which was summarized on The Live Feed blog, only 8% of teens from the study watch re-purposed TV shows online.  That compares to the 24% and 20% that watch news clips and user-generated video respectively.  So while many people assume that teens are leading the charge for adoption of online TV, it doesn’t appear that they’re yet ready to pick up that flag.

The net of all this is that  Nielsen ratings are probably much more accurate than some shows (yes I’m talking to you Dollhouse) would care to admit.  If the real online TV audience is as small as it appears to be, the argument that “real fans are watching online” becomes much less realistic.

It’s a flawless experience with a super easy way to find all of your favorite shows. And true to any good Facebook application, you can share all of it with your friends by posting videos and ratings to your live stream. And last but not least, you can also see what all of your friends are watching on Daily TV.  Check it out and let us know what you think.

From the fans perspective, this seems like good news. On the one hand, we have previously seen the users of Addicted to Scrubs heavily favor a new season. On the other, lowering the impact of a finale that was called “perfect” by many may not sit well with the faithful.

So is ABC making the right move? Rather than deciding for ourselves, we’ll let the fans have the last word:

Ampa - “If they do decide to continue Scrubs in some way I think it would have to be sort of a spin-off because yeah, JD was the focus for most of the show. At the same time all the characters around him developed into people we enjoy watching.”

U-Gene - “What is the point of the show if three of the main characters leave and one of them is what the show is based around?”

Joe - “Season 8 wasn’t all that great, but it was still nice to have. I would probably feel the same way about a spin off. Nothing will ever replace the earlier season of scrubs, but i would tune in to catch up with sacred heart. Also, I really liked the ending of the finale. If that is how it ends, it did the show justice.”

We also added some great new features to help get TVLoop into the new and improved Facebook stream on a regular basis.  For instance, when a user rates and episode or votes in a poll, they’ll be encouraged to publish those items to their stream.  Those types of features are great for viral growth while also offering some nice sponsorship opportunities for advertisers.

While I haven’t seen any specific dates on when the Disney content will be added to Hulu, I have to agree with TechCrunch that the company that should be most worried about this deal is Google/YouTube.  While Hulu is unlikely to ever catch YouTube because of all of the user-generated content YouTube streams, Hulu has much more monetization potential by carrying programming from three of the top four broadcasters.

Another big question that is unlikely to have an answer in the near future is whether or not CBS will now be feeling the heat to do a Hulu deal of it’s own.  The network has always maintained that it would always be willing to talk about content distribution, it really had no interest in joining the other networks on Hulu.  This strategy seemed to be further strengthened by the relaunch of TV.com a few months ago.  PaidContent theorizes that there could end up being some sort of arrangement where Hulu agrees to have it’s content streamed on TV.com if CBS adds it’s programming to Hulu.  That could be an interesting deal, but one that is unlikely to come to fruition at any time in the near future.

From a Watercooler perspective, our biggest question is how to treat the programming we currently get from ABC.  We’re one of the few third parties that are able to launch the ABC player directly from our communities, but the Hulu flash player is a much better user experience (sorry ABC).  ABC requires the download of the Move Networks player which can be a hassle for some users.  So from that perspective it would definitely be in our best interest to migrate to Hulu for 100% of ABC content.

So should JD, Turk and the gang come back for another season?  The almost 800,000 fans of the show across the TVLoop network think so.  After a quick poll, that yielded over 500 responses within minutes of sending the invitation to vote, it looks like a whopping 85% are definitely on board with the plans.  So among the die-hard Scrubs fans, ABC gets a solid thumbs up.

As I’ve reported previously, some of the most popular TVLoop communities are those for Gossip Girl, One Tree Hill, and other shows from the CW.   So when TheWB.com inquired about helping to promote their new web series Rockville CA, we jumped at the chance knowing that our users would eat this content up.

The core focus of the campaign was to build awareness of Rockville CA among the target demographic.  The web series is completely new and for the most part, unknown to most consumers.  To drive awareness, we wanted to go far beyond simple banner ads as we all know that’s not the right way to reach consumers in a social environment.  In fact, everyone should take a minute to read a recent article at Adotas by Watercooler CEO, Kevin Chou on that very subject.

Since engagement is a key path to awareness, we elected to include a few key tactics in the campaign:

• Roadblock - to get in front of returning users
• Sponsored trivia using video - to expose users to Rockville CA videos in the form of content (see screenshot below)

While the roadblock was moderately successful and no doubt increased general awareness of the web series, the sponsored video trivia questions - promoted across similar applications including Gossip Girl, Smallville, and Twilight - proved to be an invaluable tool for engaging users. During a 10 day campaign sponsored trivia yielded tens of thousands of unique trivia takers and trivia questions answered - exposing those a significant number of TVLoop users to Rockville CA, likely for the first time.

While I don’t have feedback directly from TheWB.com, we’re happy with these results given the quick turnaround time and the short run time of the campaign.  In addition to driving engagement within the app, we were also successful in taking a video that had only a few views and driving well over 7,000.  The net result is that our first foray into sponsored video trivia was very successful.  It’s a great way to promote engaging content to users, while also satisfying core objectives of the advertiser.  We’re looking forward to many more similar campaigns.