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Case Study: Understanding MTV's Online User |
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INTRODUCTION
This case study explains how MTV UK used SySurvey to research its target audience in great depth.
THE CLIENT
MTV is a household name most of us are familiar with, providing satellite, cable and digital TV viewers with a wide range of music channels. MTV’s portfolio includes MTV, MTV Bass, MTV 2 and VH1. It also has a very strong presence online, not only with its key sites like MTV,
MTV UK and VH1, but also with its award-winning site, MTV 2.
THE CHALLENGE
MTV's target audience is one of the most clearly defined and some may credit it as one of the market leaders in "youth" targeting. With a heritage of over 20 years MTV has a very clear understanding of its primary TV-viewing target audience. When it came to the Internet the natural progression for MTV was to create a strong web-presence that reflected the brand identities associated with the MTV stations. To make the assumption that the MTV web user would inherit the same identity as the MTV TV viewer, however, would have been naive, and MTV needed to put in place a mechanism that would present them with a better understanding of their web users.
THE SOLUTION
Page impressions can only tell the web site marketer so much about his or her target audience, so MTV devised a comprehensive questionnaire that covered a number of important areas, including hobbies and interests, expenditure on personal goods (including music devices, clothes and going out). The questionnaire was then placed on the MTV web site, along with an incentivisation of CDs for a few lucky winners drawn out of a hat.
As web site users completed the survey MTV was able to produce a detailed profile of its online target audience. Rather than the usual page impressions and site usage figures normally drawn from the log files, MTV was able to drill down into data that produced more robust usage profiles. Putting different site users into different categories allowed MTV to examine lifestyle habits and correlate these back to the site usage patterns. For example, the average female 18 year old who prefers R&B to house music might spend £50 a month on CDs, where as the male equivalent might prefer to spend £50 a month on DVDs. This kind of information allows MTV to better target these individual groups of users.
MTV’s surveys normally run over a 7 day period and achieve their targeted 1,000 responses within this time. MTV continues to use SySurvey for a number of projects across its portfolio of brands.
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