Give Me More Dolly Parton: A PBS Country Music Documentary Research Journey

of presenting in the quarantine virtual insights conference i'm maureen valentine and i am a quantitative specialist with accelerant research so i'm really excited for everybody to be here um unfortunate that we're still in quarantine but we're trying to make the most of it and share insights and communicate with each other the best we can in our kind of remote situation so thank you for everybody that's joining us today and once again just to kind of go over some ground rules we are at the mercy of tech today so please be respectful and patient with us sometimes you know we have a lot of people coming in and out and connecting and everything so please keep that in mind and take this opportunity as a a time to network and engage we have a lot of people in high up positions here which is really fortunate so let's use this to the the best of our ability in our time so today i want to present eliza jacobs and she is the director of consumer insights and analysis at pbs which is going to be telling about give me more dolly parton country music and documentary film a pbs love story and i'm personally very excited about this because i love dolly parton because i've just got my like imagination library books every month and they're age-appropriate and they're just the best and i just think dally is just the best person ever so i'm super excited about this and i will let you take it from here eliza great thank you um i just wanted to share my screens here ah there we go okay um let's see here is my screen showing or no it's showing it's not in the presenter mode though okay is it now yes it is okay great thank you um hey everyone thanks for uh joining me today i'm excited to be here here at home still but as a part of this uh conference and um share with you uh a very long research uh ex i guess experience you could call it they had in support of ken burns uh documentary filmmaker ken burns film country music which um premiered on pbs just over a year ago but i spent about a year or so of my life doing research and support of the film so i'm trying to you know maximize uh that experience by presenting uh sort of what the plan was what we did and what the outcomes were of of uh that experience just a little bit about me i'm originally from buffalo new york uh big bills fan which is really stressful at times but i'm still you know ever the optimist uh maybe one day we'll get back to the super bowl and win it i'm a big fan of snowstorms this is one of my favorite snowstorms from from growing up it's called the six-pack snowstorm we got something like um 30-ish inches of snow in like 24 hours or 36 hours something ridiculous and um our our mayor at the time jimmy griffin said um grab a six-pack stay at home watch some football um but now i live in alexandria virginia with my husband and our two kids and um you know they're not great at clearing snow here but that means we get a fair amount of snow days if we actually get legitimate snow um oops okay so uh i just wanted to for a moment say i hope everyone's doing okay it's been a really long seven and a half almost eight months um you know this was my original work space that i was confined to in a living room at a really small table um and it became too much so we moved actually this past weekend which is crazy i don't think i'm going to recover from a move for a long time but we didn't move just because of it but we clearly outgrew our space and it was time for us to find something new um here are our two kids that's our son leighton he's 10 he's in virtual fifth grade uh or he's in fifth grade but he's doing virtually um and then that's our four-year-old daughter beatrix and so all this is just to say i don't know about anyone else but i'm uh in a permanent state of exhaustion um and uh i don't know after a move i'm not sure it'll get better anytime anytime soon um but the move was worth it i like our new house so um and just you know a good mental health check and to to remember it's okay to not be okay here's two resources i found really spoke to me um and really made me feel better about sort of when i was feeling really tired or just stressed out that it's not this is a very foreign and alien experience for human beings who basically lost a lot of control of our lives and so um that surge capacity article was really really good it just talked about how humans are not wired to handle prolonged uh stressful experiences so that's just a little psa here but now let's move on to more interesting things and why we're here today so uh pbs uh hopefully everyone's heard of pbs public broadcasting service our our president and ceo paula kergers uh and she's said this a few times recently that she she says the two uh most important letters in our name are the p in the ass right public and service we are uh america's public broadcaster here to provide content to the american public we are a private nonprofit corporation founded in 1969. um october 4th we had our first broadcast just over 50 years ago it was a premiere of the french chef with julia child we are membership organization so uh we're made up of america's public tv stations which are non-commercial and educational licensees and we are a federated system of over 330 member stations in all 50 states and u.s territories i kind of think of it as a hub and spoke model so i work at the headquarters in arlington virginia and then we've got 300 plus stations sort of coming out and of of as the spokes okay so um this was actually pbs doesn't do it who will i saw this on a colleague's mug and i i thought oh this is a great slide slide title um another option would be without the the p we're just bs but that's not quite as uh i don't know it's not quite as positive um but one of the things about pbs um is that we're a true variety service we offer all different types of content we have a separate kids service um the only things we really don't do at sort of the national level are breaking news weather and sports and there are local many local stations i'm sure some of your local stations do uh serve as a sort of emergency weather notification service particularly in sort of very rural areas uh where uh you know like telco signal is not so great and then some stations do also broadcast local high school sports but at the national level we don't do that and then we are free non-commercial and have a signal reached to over 80 percent of americans and then there's this guy ken burns uh the main reason we're here we're here today um he's considered by many uh to be uh one of the greatest american documentarians he's a pretty confident guy so i think he may think of himself that way as well um you know these the titles here on the slide are just a snapshot of the many films over the past 35 or so years that he's directed produced or just been a part of the creative team um his films cover a really wide swath of topics some are focused on individuals like jackie robinson some are about sort of larger social move or cultural movements uh some are about you know wars uh and ultimately what he's i think what he's trying to do is is weave together the history of this country through film and he very intentionally he's very intentional about all of his films he takes a really long time to make them and he believes that you you have to have enough physical distance a distance in time to have a historical uh perspective so that's why um i'll talk about this a little bit later some of his films do sort of stop at like a weird point in history because he doesn't feel that he there's enough time to really have that historical perspective okay so uh in case you were worried about uh shameless self-promotion here ken has a lot in the pipeline for the next next seven years i mean i don't know how anyone can think seven years into the future i certainly am not even really thinking past um this week but um you know we've got a bunch of films presumably they'll all be on uh pbs uh at least sort of initially so to next year we have two um films uh on ernest hemingway and muhammad ali i think both of those are i believe three episodes each so these these films will range in length from two to five parts or episodes and usually each episode's about two hours um but he's got uh he's always got multiple projects in the hopper and uh obviously he's he's already planned out the next seven years of his professional life um and one of the things about ken you know is that i think we are lucky to have him at pbs there is a lot of brand equity uh associated with him there are amongst our you know sort of most loyal consumers people here ken burns they know yet pbs um but we do make a lot of exceptions for him that we don't make for other directors or producers we give him basically the run of a schedule for however long his film is um and that's sort of what dominates our schedule at that that time um you know we we just make more accommodations and adjustments than we they we normally would um what's interesting is that what kovitz sort of brought about is that that um we were able to rebroadcast some of his films so i think um uh national parks baseball and maybe the 10th inning and a couple others and and the reason we hadn't done that before or in a while is because we just didn't have the rights to him so he had essentially released re-released the rights to pbs for us to uh rebroadcast them in addition we've also been able to throw those films into a collection called the ken burns collection in pbs passport which is our member benefits it's a streaming member benefit where you have access to a huge library of older content um that basically if you if you become a member of your local pbs station as a sustainer which means sixty dollars a year you you can have access to that content uh we're not really allowed to call it a streaming service because of um for revenue purposes but that's kind of the equivalent to what it is but it's it's a um a member benefit um but one of the things and i think that this quote is really interesting from him where he basically acknowledges that he could go somewhere else and get more money and um you know and make his films but the fact is he's right he's not going to get 10 and a half years to make a film like the vietnam war which was in 2017 and he will lose a lot of editorial control i think he he is he is in charge you know what he says goes with his films he is deeply involved in every aspect of his film and i don't know that if you were to go somewhere else that he would have that the other thing is that i just learned i think this is really interesting that 70 of the budget for his films comes from external funding sources and he has to basically reinvent that funding wheel every time for every film which is crazy to me but yeah but he does it and he's a workhorse he goes on his little media road shows and he promotes his films and he does he he works hard um for his films but i will also just say he is one lens through which you know we're seeing history i think there are some people who have been critical and say that we need to give more room in our schedule to other less well-known uh producers or directors perhaps you know certainly more uh people of color i think that's been made even more apparent now and so you know i don't know that that's going to change but it is it is interesting to see sort of some pushback from uh i've read an article about recently that that we need to maybe not carve out such a a large amount of our schedule every couple years for him okay so on to today's topic country music uh as i said this film premiered last september um and uh it was it was different for pbs i think you know it's a very uh it's very specific it's it country music has um obviously it's a huge fan base um you know people have really strong preconceived notions about country music is one of the things i learned through the research uh and it can be really hard to change those opinions so um this was a challenge um for us for a lot of reasons and i'm just gonna walk through those challenges and then we'll sort of get into how we how we address those challenges through the research so um you know i'm sure many of you know this is the carter family the like founding family of country music in this this country you first episode of of uh of country music they're they're right there in the first few minutes of the film okay so the first thing is that this was the highlight of our uh 2018-19 uh prime time schedule so uh it premiered in the middle uh september 2019 that's like right at the end of the um the season our season um so you know it was a thing we kind of tried to build up to um throughout the last summer so this was an eight episode film sixteen and a half hours uh ken actually filmed 170 hours of footage did over 101 interviews so he took you know ten percent of that and created this film he donated the rest his entire library uh or archived to the country music hall of fame which i think is pretty cool um but this is a really long film and i think that you know documentaries are typically not running this long uh these days so uh we really had little control over this film ken says you know he basically delivers a director's cut to pbs and says has said publicly if people don't like my films they can direct the criticism to me you know i i am as i said involved in every you know step of the way um we do screen his films obviously we screen all of our content to see if we have to add in any advisories for language or violence which isn't usually an issue um but but we really didn't have the authority or will maybe to go back to him and say well we don't really like this in you know episode six can you change it he's not gonna do it his once thing once the the thing is done it's done um okay so the scheduling was tricky for this eight episodes uh is kind of an odd number it means you're you know with only seven days in a week you're definitely going to extend across two weeks partially and um ken has a very specific vision for how his films should be consumed we did some some people in my department did some modeling in terms of what would work best for pbs in our sort of our audience right to draw in the best audience what would be the best approach for marketing because they're the ones who have to promote this film and um basically where we landed is that uh and pbs is so unique i feel like we're one of the only organizations to do this they premiered on a sunday night september 15th so the first four episodes ran sunday to wednesday and then we said to people go away four days and then come back the following sunday and the following four episodes will be sunday monday tuesday wednesday that's insane you're sending your audience away for four days it makes no sense but we did it and actually it as we'll see later it did it worked out better than i expected the streaming was also a challenge so um ken's not really he wasn't really supportive of the idea of us releasing all eight episodes to be available for streaming on the night of that premiere of episode one he he really wants his films to be watched episodically in order he doesn't want people just going from episode one to four to seven um so we had this uh bizarro streaming window schedule as well which you'll see on the next next slide okay marketing so uh we are public broadcasting we don't have infinite uh budgets um so we really had to make the most of of the budget that we um that we had and um and we had to be strategic and make sure that our promotional assets worked for us and we were really maximizing those opportunities the other thing is um that i was just woefully uninformed on it was that just how difficult it is to secure music rights for promotional purposes so um there was a woman in our creative services department who had this crazy like google spreadsheet keeping track of what what music was cleared what sort of images were cleared to see what we could use and couldn't use some of the um promotional images and and spots that we put together they would just throw something together to test for pacing and and then they would have to change out the image in the music because we couldn't get cleared uh to use those artists or their music the uh estate of johnny cash is apparently very difficult to work with uh they you know and i understand they're protecting the the legacy of of the artist okay so here um just talking a little bit about the what the how we're trying to appeal to consumers so as i said ken sometimes stops at a weird point in history because he doesn't want to get too close to modern day and what i mean too close is he doesn't really want to come within 20 or 25 years of modern day so this film ended in 1996 and i believe sort of shania twain was the last uh modern country music star um who's who's uh featured so you know you know there's a lot of artists who've just uh come along since then uh who are incredibly popular and successful so um but they are not featured featured in this film so that's one sort of part of the challenge the other thing is that pbs's core audience right like our traditional viewers who still watch primarily through tv at a time the time of premiere you know uh are our average age is 66 years old now that is not old in real life but for tv a tv audience that's old i think we're one of the oldest uh networks in terms of the average age of our consumer around so the goal was really to hope that those the core would come because we do need them to come and watch our content even though the overarching goal is to try to bring new people into the fold and hope they'll stick around uh new meaning younger definitely more men um and then diverse across basically all all demos um because still our our that core audience member is still as i said older definitely more caucasian and definitely more more female so ultimately what we're trying to do is hope that people would come in give it a shot and then and then choose to stick around and watch the film in its entirety so this is a really an ugly slide but i want to talk about the scheduling for a moment and sort of why it was not like showing you that it was not simple and really not clear i actually uh when i was initially putting this presentation together like googled um pbs country music schedule clicked on the link and then it was taken to this and i discovered it was a pbs a page on a pbs website and i was kind of horrified because i thought oh this is like so difficult to understand but what you can see if you look at those first four episodes here and you look at those broadcast television broadcast dates and then you can see the streaming window right so this the streaming um the first four episodes were available when the the first tv episode premiered but then you can see this the window um is about three weeks long and that's a rights related issue it's it's so complicated that i can't even um i like i don't even fully understand it so then the net last four episodes sort of were lit premiere or were able to be streamed um once that episode five um premiered on sunday the 22nd so this is just another point to illustrate to you that communicating all of this to to tv consumers who don't want to have to work too hard to find content um was is difficult okay so we can talk a little bit here about this research journey that i went on that took 15 minutes of my life 15 minutes i wish 15 months uh so that's an unexpectedly long process i could not have envisioned the number of projects in research studies in support of this film that i would have done it just was not typical uh to do that much in support of ken's work um this was a different challenge than compared to the 2017's the vietnam war one of the things we do know um is that ken's films about war are popular and wars in general for as a host topic for historical documentary is is a popular topic they do well i think the other thing is is that particularly for vietnam um [Music] for americans you know i'm thinking about sort of my parents and my my in-laws and people who are the baby boom generation there's a shared lived experience right so they were in their teens or early 20s but they remember going what was going on in the united states at that time so it's easier to sort of i think in a way relate to the content because it was part of of who they were at a very formative time in their lives um when we were putting together the sort of testing the creative elements for the vietnam war one of the overarching questions was uh will our core audience namely women find the topic of war repugnant and not watch the film and i remember thinking well i think a lot of people find war in general repugnance i don't know that isolating it to to women is a concern but it ended up not being a big deal uh they did put together a couple of different um spots that they used in different places um so if we were buying you know a spot on a network where maybe the demos skewed more female they could use the spot that's kind of supposed to be more family focused again general generalities that i don't necessarily like uh there um but it ended up not being a concern um okay so i'll talk about sort of an early red flag um and uh what i view as a missed opportunity that could have helped us address um some of the the concerns um this red flag was really that early on i did a very simple sort of general interest survey um and i should say totally forgot this we have our own proprietary research panel we call our insights community we call it our viewer panel it's it's viewers like you um coined a long time ago uh you've probably seen you know thanks to viewers like you on your local pbs station when you know they talk about sort of people who supported pbs but um that community is is uh very loyal to the pbs brand they're sort of they're more like our core audience so we did a study with them there's about 9 500 people in our community and um the interest in the subject of country music even though it was a ken film was pretty muted and so there were concerns immediately that wow like ken's name being attached to a film is not going to work the way we thought it would and and i think it was um it challenged some very strong assumptions that people had it at pbs and then um you know there was as i said before little room for for error given the limited um marketing money that we had and when i say limited i don't mean like nothing but i'll give you some perspective that it was half the amount uh the budget for this film marketing for this film was half of what we had available to us just two years earlier for the vietnam war and that was not not huge by television network standards either okay so the goals uh understand points of appeal and intent to view right like so what were the sort of hooks we could use to draw people in and uh would they watch the film optimize our creative assets as i've said got to make sure that they are going to work wherever we sort of uh distribute them and and make sure it at least piques people's interest uh and gives them oh that looks kind of interesting right so as i said we want to bring our core audience in but also expand our audience and the sort of targets were country music fans with a younger sku younger meaning for pbs's under 55. okay so this crazy um [Music] this crazy timeline is uh my attempt at a visual visualization of everything that i did over this 15 month period basically all of these studies those i think about eight studies were most of them were done twice one with our own viewer panel uh insights community and then one then also with a general population sample to make sure that's balanced the census to really see where are the pockets of opportunity out there that we could target with our promotional assets and so you know there's that red flag um which was the general interest survey where interest was pretty muted amongst our core audience it was 30 below what uh that same group had the interest they had expressed in the vietnam war again i go back to vietnam totally different subject totally different experience for people but if we're sort of looking at just objectively comparing ken's films that was that was a concern for people okay then everything in november january march uh basically all of this was these other things were all some some form of uh video uh promotional video testing i tested so many short videos related to this film featuring different artists i you know i felt like i'd already seen a good portion of the film by the time the film premiered in september but at one point one of the studies i did actually had 10 short little like vignettes and each one was a different different artist talking about country music and sort of why they love it and uh what their music is about and so i end up splitting a sample and sending five to one group and five to another just because it's it's very difficult my opinion um was that it was difficult for some people even though it was different artists we were testing for respondents to kind of really differentiate between these videos because they all had the same kind of look and feel yeah different artists obviously uh you know roseanne cash and rhianne gibbons are not the same person dolly parton and uh marty stewart not the same not the same but when it kind of feels the same stylistically i think it became hard for people and it it can get tedious honestly i mean you know uh you can only watch watch so much um i do want to point out in june 2019 this uh video test with an outside vendor so despite all this work i had done up to that point um you know i uh uh basically our svp of of digital and marketing so my bus boss said uh you know i think uh we should do one more test with another company i know someone at this uh research firm in la and we should do it with them they'll target country music fans and let's just see test some videos with them and i said well you know i i'm pretty confident in the work that we've done already and that it's sort of told us what we need to tell us but he wanted to do it and so it was fine i just you know had to let that one go and i ended up do basically replicating that outside vendors test also in our viewer panel um just to see if uh directionally we would get similar results which was um i don't know maybe it was for me to prove a point but basically what what really what we were doing is we were just covering all of our bases to try to help this film succeed and frankly also in the event that it didn't do as well as we kind of thought you know mike because there was some that red flag just saying well we tried we tried everything and uh we did we did the best we could could um so then uh the wrap-up survey after the film that we did just that with our viewer panel we did not um do that with general population that was just kind of to tight you know tie a neat bow on the package and and sort of uh say that we went from you know the inception of the project and sort of or our marketing efforts to the conclusion of it okay so i have a little video here which hopefully will play and hopefully you'll hear the uh sound if not um it is on youtube so it's pretty short okay um so if you go on youtube you search country music uh your ken burns or pbs you can see like 45 different videos kind of a little bit a little bit similar to that but it's great because we have different artists in there and representing all the the different artists who are featured in the film um so this is uh sort of our print promotional efforts so um this is the poster or print ad that was used um in support of the film this is we did a bus rap ken did a bus tour through tennessee i think he here he is he ended up in in nashville which makes sense so that's where the country music hall of fame is um and uh and then we had a billboard in nashville too and i think um visually it's really i think was quite striking and uh really conveyed some of the themes of the the film really really well okay so what are the things that we learned first of all despite all this work or as a result of all this work we did uh find directionally similar similar results in in general both in our viewer panel studies and then the general population studies the scores were kind of were generally lower in the general population size because of course they're not as engaged with the pbs brand they're not our loyalists right i mean it's just kind of a straight balance a sense of sample but um this sort of imagery or or video spots that worked were similar were the same in both samples that worked well with the same that and so that was good to have the some clarity about which direction we should go um the print ad was really not effective in driving interest i don't think that's really a surprise it's a standalone image yeah it can be visually striking but um it doesn't fully convey to someone uh what the film is about you know and so um i you know i don't think our marketing people were really concerned by that but i i do think it brings into question some of the decisions about well you know is it even worth it to buy print ads in and see magazines uh anymore in support of sort of films or tv shows okay there are a couple promos that worked best and so we really tried to get a lot of mileage out of those one was a sort of more nostalgic uh feeling one was featuring dolly parton uh the inspiration for this uh presentation and one was more that one that you saw that was kind of multiple artists uh just hearing sort of about their love for country music and and um and so we we sort of really honed in on using those um okay so the highest interest and intent to view not a surprise in both samples or in any studies that we did it was country music listeners um i don't think that's a surprise at all but then um also uh we uh we found in the general population uh respondents who were younger so actually under 45 which is which is great because that's super young for us um male respondents and then also hispanic respondents and those uh those demos really uh mesh well with there was a country music association study that's found that sort of those are the the pockets of the population where country music fandom is rising uh really fast um and then there was you know as always a vocal minority who said and they're not going to watch it and i'll talk about them a bit uh in a moment so uh what we learned points of appeal the ken burns name and the impact of his previous film so as i said initially that association with ken burns people were just two were respondents were more focused on the fact that the genre or the subject matter didn't interest them and i think you know of course when you're asking about some someone something about read this blurb tell me what you think about it without seeing any sort of video content um you know they're going to not be supported as much or not be as positive towards it but the more we showed pete content the more clips we showed or per or little videos um the fact that it was ken you know appeal uh increased and i think um one of the things that that our most loyal consumers know is that and they trust ken burns they trust him to do a thorough because his films are long so they know it's thorough um overview or of of whatever his subject is and go into details and and and that it will be historically accurate okay fun facts and lifelong learners so uh the other thing we know about our about pbs consumers is they really love fun facts and they love to you know some uh smart to be honest with you so um we try to in some of these promotional efforts sprinkle in little facts that maybe people might not know like i remember in a verbatim comment uh one respondent said oh i didn't know that johnny cash or johnny cash um willie nelson wrote the song crazy that patsy cline sang like i mean i i didn't know that either actually but i learned that through this so just anything like that that gives little his snippets of history that people would know um those are really those are super popular with our consumers okay dolly parton uh you know ever a lot of people love dolly i love her too um so individual stars especially dolly parton hold held special appeal the number of comments in an open-ended question about dolly i mean it was just so so many she's a national treasure more dolly you know just do a whole film about dolly which we probably could have successfully what's interesting about her is and she's featured in the film is that when we we and ken approached her to help with promotional efforts she said no i'm not i i don't do that you know like in it this was not her project and she i sure gets how many you know requests a day um but she really she didn't want to help with the promotional efforts and so you know um i know our publicity people really wanted her to but you know she was like uh you know she's really busy this wasn't her project she agreed to be part of it which i think in the film which is really important but um you know just but other people stepped up so it was fine okay uh and emphasize the story appealing storyline so um you know ken even though his films are also very different he does weave similar narratives and themes throughout his films regardless of the topic and so you can see um the things that appeal in one film tend to also appeal to people in another film regardless of the topic so for example here the things that really popped were the origins of country music um the u.s cultural backdrop during the 20th century right what was happening that helped make this this music popular the personal stories of iconic musicians they people love that stuff to learn more about famous people right and then the evolution of country music how did it change over the 20th century okay so real quick this is just um when we're testing the creative we did some heat mapping which is really cool i mean these are not the deep breath is not uh super high in terms of a percentage but i think it is an interesting visual just to see the things that our viewer panelists versus the general population respondents sort of really honed in on so you can see with the viewer panels the ken burns name isn't super important um to them it's deep deeper red for the general population you know he's not a uh um necessarily a household name for everyone out there in the us so they focus more on the tagline a story of america one song at a time more on the sort of um imagery of the four the four artists and then also they focus a little bit more on the tune in or stream fall 2019 right so um you know and of course our consumers don't worry about that they figured they would know when it's on um but for people who aren't as in the know um that was important for them to know when they when they could watch it okay so also uh as i alluded to there was a vocal minority who said they they weren't going to watch it so here here are sort of some what the barriers to success were again this is a vocal minority it was like eight percent of respondents it was not a lot but number one thing i don't like country music they were just like people you know not gonna do it they have really strong uh preconceived notions those are really hard to change i think we all know when they're deeply embedded um and then as a result they weren't interested in learning more about country music i don't like it i don't wanna learn more okay those go hand in hand the other one that was interesting now keep in mind this was now uh going back in time but it's still you know it's an interesting point uh a few days out from uh election day but there were some comments about uh people tying country music to and i'm not getting political here i'm just stating fact uh you know more conservative politics a couple i remember some comments where the you know this genre of music is not representative of a diverse america it's not representing the united states i think country a lot of country music artists would probably uh disagree and i don't know if that's accurate or not but that is a perception thing and as we know perceptions really you have to work hard to change those um okay so just this missed opportunity um as i said i i think we missed a chance to after that initial interest survey uh where the red flags were raised about about uh lower interest i think we should have i mean i should have done some qualitative work because notice i did a ton of surveys there was no qualitative work there and i had made that recommendation people didn't want to do it um we could have done some qualitative work whether it was focus groups whether it was interviews whatever it was and really honed in on what are your initial sort of uh concerns about this topic what can we do to make it more you know appealing to you and we didn't do that even though i remember thinking are we going to do sort of focus groups because typically with ken's films we always do some sort of qualitative work in support of it and it just the interest wasn't there i think that would have helped us resolve some of these questions and maybe to help us avoid some of these million video tests um but we didn't do it it's a learning opportunity um but and it's also in the past so you know you gotta move on okay did we have an impact yes so we helped multi-platform marketing finalize different promotions as i said you know we learned what worked better and so they could focus their efforts on using two of them to really uh support the film uh we got a lot of good press out of this this is from uh rolling stone uh country music review ken burns epic essential look at an american art form we delivered a super steady audience across all eight episodes i could not believe how steady this audience is now steady means flat but that doesn't mean you know typically you with a premiere you're up here and then it's the audience goes not all the way down to the bottom but if there's a decrease in the audience size night after night um and especially because we really put our efforts in promoting to bring people to the mirror this was the steadiest audience i've seen in a really long time i don't even know if we could do it now because the media landscape has changed so much even in just a year but it was really um it was really amazing country music was actually ken ken's most watched film since our 2014 film the roosevelts the first five five episodes um of country music were our most watched telecasts of the whole season um it's crazy 23 new viewers that's very good for us typically we're significantly lower lower than that did they stick around no because we didn't do a good job of doing complimentary scheduling where you've got ken you know country music and then you want to put on other related content um but the good news is we brought in 23 new percent new viewers at least for this film okay i told you our average age on tv is uh 66 years old we brought we doubled our prime time average rating amongst uh younger demos and so people were really really happy with that um and just to wrap it all up you know the the in the wrap-up survey the key drivers of uh of sort of interest in the film were ken's films and an affinity for historical documentaries so in the end the things that we knew typically were the strongest drivers uh and can you know of interest in these films ended up being that being just that all right so let's wrap it up a couple key takeaways from my experience here so um you know my perspective is at least at pbs i it's not my job to tell people in other departments in marketing or programming what to do they they don't necessarily tell me what to do until i want to do them what to do but i do hope that when they're making decisions about programming about scheduling about marketing creative assets that they are making informed decisions and not kind of just throwing a dart into the wall of course there's some art to it there's some gut feelings to it but um by providing them with data at least they can ingest that and and it can be a part of the decision-making process if we've learned anything in 2020 uh you got to be flexible and not worry about what's not in your control that outside vendor test um as i alluded to i kind of was a little bit tweaked about that for a bit but then i realized you know hey it's fine i get it we've got to make sure that we're doing everything we can to help this film succeed and in the end it worked out because uh their results and and the results from the studies that i did sort of were directionally all similar and finally you know be confident your expertise um this was a great well long experience for me to present uh multiple waves of data to a lot of you know people who are or key decision makers at pbs would i have gotten that exposure um otherwise i'm not sure um but you know for me that was an important takeaway it gave me a lot more confidence to do sort of my daily job to make recommendations um presenting all that okay a key thing i think is now that i have all this hindsight would i do take all this approach again would we do all of this again honestly probably not i at the time it felt like overkill i think now i even i still think it's over kill um i don't think we need to test as many videos i i think um you know sometimes you have to do it was my job people were telling what to do but but i i think going forward um i would not recommend doing this much work in support of it because i just i don't think it's necessary i would also push harder for a qualitative aspect um you know or doing something with sort of showing people a stimuli a promo or the print out or whatever and doing a quick video response from them i think those are uh obviously the technology has gotten a lot better in in uh that area uh for our industry and i would really love to take advantage of doing that and something going with some project going forward and that's it i think we are now q a very nice thank you so much sure my pleasure presentation okay so we have two questions come in i don't know if you can see this or not the first is from brian he says how do you differentiate long format telecast in the covet era and have greater stickiness versus say amc disney plus etc wow that's a great question that is a big big challenge and it's a timely question because yesterday or in the last week i was just voluntold into a group uh a large group of like there's 31 of us um to sort of look into what does our content or really distribution strategy need to be for the next five years because this industry is just changing so fast and that um you know i don't i i don't know that there is the interest going forward and having eight episodes of a doc documentary i mean and that's not uh everything i've said today none of it's a dig it can intentionally i think he's a filmmaker he's an you know an artist and um but the industry overall is not that it's his style is not necessarily representative of what we're seeing things today so um yeah i think we're gonna have to change our approach i mean i i there's that's been acknowledged i mean even in the years since this film premiered it there's so much has changed right disney plus i i mean i'm great we're subscribers in my household no one can compete with them i mean they're just a behemoth like with all due respect yeah i mean there's literally nothing we can do we don't have the financial or people resources to do it um but i think it's a question of can we remind people that we are the home of as a documentary film you know we need to make more of an effort to really cut through all of the noise and clutter out there and re and make sure we are doing the best we can to promote our content everywhere so that means you know when someone sees something on their phone in an app like making sure that our um whatever it is our promotional assets stick out right that they just don't scroll by and that's something that um we're actually i'm working on a study now where our svp of digital marketing he said we need to make sure we are testing an image where it would show like a carousel essentially and would people click on it to to learn more because i don't i think sometimes we test things and i we have really tested a lot in isolation and that's not realistic that's not the consumer experience nice um from annie she says why was qualitative research rejected too expensive assumed it would duplicate the other findings why not valued you know uh i so i don't know because that was our marketing department's decision i think yeah is it is it more expensive than a survey in a one-off survey yes it is however look at the number of surveys i did if you took the money from all of those general population studies and did we put that money into groups we would have you know easily been able to do them so i think some of it was budget i think some of it is at the time um maybe some people were a little bit naive and like they were concerned about those those things that i brought up with the lower level of interest but they thought oh it's okay it'll be okay it can it'll be okay it kind of was it did work out okay but but um i again if this if i have to do something for one of his films again like the longer films i would definitely emphasize the need to do um some sort of qualitative work because we just weren't able to get at those deeper issues i mean i couldn't probe really at all like okay you don't like country music okay i mean i can't unless i'm having you're having a conversation with someone right like it's hard to get it the really the reasons why and then how we could change their minds right yeah well i watched the documentary personally and i really enjoyed it oh great yeah yeah no i mean i think you know that's good to hear it was great um you know a lot of people enjoyed it but we have to be in people's consideration set right and that's the that is the challenge um not the challenge a challenge yeah what projects are you working on now uh yeah so i've actually got something uh right now it is another sort of looking at which which promotional asset works better uh on a film or it's a series coming out in february from henry lewis gates called the black church it's basically looking at a history of the the black church um and it's interesting because uh our creative services team our department put together one it's it's a it's the print um ad and then the producer of the film put together something else and i honestly have never seen such starkly different uh images it's used that were being proposed to promote a film um yeah they're wild ours is sort of a stained glass uh window really bright and the other one is uh it's darker i don't really know how to describe it other than it's darker i think it kind of looks like a tornado is coming from it's like really it's very dark and so we're really you know our our marketing team said that one is not going to work but then you've got the producer of the film so so basically i'm doing some work to try to help resolve that situation um so we'll see we'll see we'll see what the data say yeah all right any other questions from anyone we did see some bills fans which is exciting oh yeah they're stressing me out this year every year but it also bill's family he went to university of buffalo so oh there you go i grew up near there yeah yeah we just moved pacifica actually from upstate so cool familiar with those winters um yeah i don't think we have any other questions so great good really nice talk really enjoyed it yeah thank you thanks for inviting me have a good day you too take care so everyone please stick around we have about eight minutes before the next talk so we'll go silent for a few minutes everybody get some coffee get a snack and we will see you soon you