K atie c ouric
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| Katie Couric Case Study
Katie Couric once came to me with a problem. At the time, her very successful career had been built on a TV-first distribution model. She had broken the barrier by becoming the first woman to solo host the evening news and had twenty-plus years of television experience on prominent shows like The Today Show , NBC Nightly News , CBS Evening News , and ABC News, which made her one of the most important journalists in the United States. Katie was reaching millions of people every day, and her fans were trained to tune in at the exact same time to consume her content. They knew that every morning they could see Katie as they prepared for their own day. Katie was part of their routine. Then, in 2013, Katie made a drastic change by forming a partnership with Yahoo! Although Katie was a digital pioneer and had embraced social media from the time she worked at The Today Show, she still found herself thrust into a digital-first strategy, which completely changed the habitual relationship with her fans. Because of this, fans were constantly telling her that they were having trouble finding her content. There was no longer a specific time her content could be consumed, and her fans were struggling to find and establish a relationship with Katie. In our very first meeting, Katie asked me what could be done to solve this issue. She needed a quick solution. I asked her when her next interview was, to which she responded, “Two hours from now.” I replied, “Perfect! Plenty of time to come up with a new strategy.” She was going to be interviewing actress Elizabeth Banks. I took a few minutes and explained that we needed to identify topics that would evoke a strong emotional response in specific audiences and that would result in them sharing her content with their peers at a high velocity. Elizabeth Banks is an actress in the Hunger Games and Pitch Perfect series and is also an outspoken feminist leader, so these were the specific topics we structured the interview around. We crafted questions that had the best chance of evoking a strong emotional response from fans interested in those topics. From there, we cut multiple thirty- to ninety-second clips from each of these interview segments and created fifty to one hundred variations of each clip. Then we A/B tested them against each other on Facebook to see which variation and audience was sharing the clip with their peers at the highest velocity. We created specific content around Hunger Games that we pushed to Hunger Games fans. We also created specific content for Pitch Perfect fans and for feminist supporters. Doing this made non-Katie Couric fans interested enough that they were willing to share Katie’s brand. Then, once we had that level of shareability, we were able to say, “Hey, listen, if you like this clip of Elizabeth Banks talking about Hunger Games , why don’t you come over here to Yahoo! to watch the entire interview?” The strategy was to use die-hard fans around specific topical matters, celebrities, and news stories to share the content for Katie to not only reach Katie’s core fan base, but also to expose new audiences to her content. Breaking it down that way generated mass exposure for Katie and for the Yahoo! brand. Over the course of sixteen months, this formula was used for all Katie’s interviews. It generated over 150 million views, increased social shares by 200 percent, and saved Yahoo! tens of millions of dollars in traffic acquisition costs. Her typical TV interview reached a few hundred thousand viewers, and with this new strategy we were now averaging well over a million views per interview. Our top interview was with Brandon Stanton, the founder of the photoblog Humans of New York. This interview alone generated more than thirty million views and was shared over 300,000 times. Additional successful interviews featured prominent celebrities and public figures such as DJ Khaled, Joe Biden, Gal Gadot, Bryan Cranston, Deepak Chopra, Chance the Rapper, Edward Snowden, Skrillex, and Jessica Chastain. We sent millions of people every month to Yahoo! to watch Katie’s interviews. People were coming up to Katie on the street and telling her they were seeing her content again. Why did this process work? Over the course of sixteen months, we ran more than sixty thousand content variations across two hundred interview segments. I regularly told Katie not to fall in love with any specific segment. Instead, if an interview didn’t perform, we looked at the data, identified why it didn’t work, and improved it for the next one. With this agile messaging approach, we learned very quickly what was working and not working in regard to syndicating Katie’s content and brand at the highest level. With each interview we were learning and building Katie’s content and messaging strategy. We got to a place where we could identify exactly whom to interview, what topics and themes to cover, and even specific questions to ask. Ultimately, our content strategy allowed us to quickly adapt Katie’s content from the habitual TV-first consumption behavior to a digital-first consumption behavior, all by figuring out which messages mattered. Now it’s your turn. Take that information and apply it to the next piece of content you create. Find the ways to link your messages with what’s |