Awards show season is upon us, and from the red carpet to the after party, viewers will be looking for exclusive access to engage and interact with celebrities from home.
In this guide, we’ll walk you through tactics and best practices to capitalize on this trend and how to create the most impactful and engaging awards show programming possible using proven strategies.
Award Show Interactive Segments
One of the most effective ways to engage an audience is to provide an opportunity for direct interaction. Make viewers a part of the show and let them drive the conversation on-air by sending in questions or comments to the hosts and celebrities.
During the 2020 Oscars All Access Red Carpet Live show, we saw a perfect example of this as Scarlett Johansson answered a question from Twitter live on air. These payoff moments reward viewers for participating and often spark fascinating conversations that otherwise may not have happened.
In a reimagined red carpet special ahead of the 2020 Billboard Latin Music Awards, Telemundo brought Latin music’s most engaging fans into the action by featuring their #Billboards2020 social posts within Social Mosaics honoring their favorite artists. The artists, in turn, responded by thanking fans for contributing, making the moment even more special for viewers who participated.
The 2020 Billboard Latin Music Awards saw double-digit growth across digital and social platforms with +24% higher social engagement and +22% more streams versus 2019. Evident in the success of the award show, these kinds of interactive tactics create a connection between viewers and the programming, which leads to meaningful engagement across digital and linear channels.
All About Access
Viewers crave access across just about every industry. They want to see behind-the-scenes action; locker room footage; celebrities or athletes getting ready for the main event. They want to hear directly from their favorite artists and get a glimpse into their lives.
Social media is a gold mine for producers to provide that glimpse and create moments that give the viewer at home a different view. If they do their homework and collect content from celebrities ahead of time, it can ultimately lead to a special payoff moment during an interview later in the award show. Perhaps there’s a funny picture of them and their pets or a reaction video when they found out they were nominated.
Bringing this type of content onto air with the click of a button using Tagboard Producer humanizes celebrities and adds a personal touch to any interview just as it did at the Oscars when E! producers quickly queued up a post of Richard E. Grant cooking breakfast for Melissa McCarthy when she referenced it during an interview.
Engaging Visual Storytelling
Awards shows are chock-full of storylines, and in order to best tell those stories, producers need engaging visual elements to support them. These visual elements should add context that helps build the narrative and provide a full picture.
Making use of the Tagboard Interactive suite to poll the audience, track trending topics, and visualize where conversations are taking place, you can do just that. Back on the Oscars All Access: Red Carpet Live show, producers quickly pulled together a graphic of the most talked-about celebrities to support the top storylines on the red carpet.
When it comes time for the after party, this type of visual support has a big role to play. In 2021 everything becomes a meme, and it’s hard to imagine an award show that doesn’t have some meme-able moments like this one from the most recent Golden Globes coverage on E!.
Find that winning moment or speech and then transition into the social reaction to show viewers how a story evolved and took off on social. Adding in additional context like a heat map of where the conversation took place helps round out the story even more.
Looking ahead to the 2021 Grammy Awards, we expect to see moments like these unfold across every connected social, digital, and linear channel as media and entertainment companies continue to evolve their coverage to be more engaging with more exclusive access than ever.
For a live example of all of these tactics in action, be sure to catch coverage on E!, who will be producing three interactive shows including Countdown to the Red Carpet, Live from the Red Carpet, and the After Party.