The 2009 Jay Chiat Awards for Strategic Excellence Winners

Media Communications—Silver:
Fallon, Minneapolis
"How Battlestar Galactica Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the DVR"

As SCI FI Channel's Battlestar Galactica entered its 4th and final season, the buzz and critical acclaim for the show were louder than ever. But despite its high cultural profile, audience ratings were down 31%—and in the TV business, when your audience is down, so are your profits.

The business challenge was to understand how this paradox came to be, and then figure out how communications could help solve it. When we dug into the numbers, we discovered that when time-shifted DVR viewing was accounted for, Battlestar's audience had in fact decreased by only 7%, not 31%. But even after we found those "missing" viewers, we still had to break them from their DVR habit. From a business perspective, if those 24% of viewers aren't watching the show live, or within three days on their DVRs, SCI FI Channel doesn't make any money selling them to advertisers. This became the basis for our communications strategy: to Incentivize Live Viewing. We weren't going to raise awareness of what to watch; rather, we were going to change behavior about when and how to watch. Every tactic would use communications to add value to the live viewing experience.

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