Using Seasonal Holidays and Events to Engage Your Users
Halloween is upon us! The spooky season, as some might call it. And of course, a few more coming up shortly after that you might be familiar with or celebrate: Thanksgiving, “Sinterklaas”, Christmas or Hanukkah. All festive-type holidays that are celebrated together with friends and family. So why not use those festive periods in our OTT apps too? Your users will love it!
Your app is an experience and showcases your brand
If you think of Netflix, what do you actually think of? The red, familiar color of the logo. The well-known sound of the Netflix intro. Netflix is a brand, it offers an experience. It’s not just a place where people to watch content, easily replaced with any other OTT service. Sure, watching content is the main focus, but it goes beyond that. Netflix offers an experience.
Something I hope, and maybe kind of expect, is that you strive for the same: offering a brand experience. And what better way to do that than to play into the seasonality of the world we find ourselves in? Something you see in a lot of other areas of the free market as well. Looking at a lot of shops, they bet hard on things like Black Friday/Cyber Monday and Christmas. Highlighting deals, turning their brands all Christmassy, all with the goal of making people want to visit the website (and of course do some shopping).
We see the same applied in another big side of entertainment: gaming. I was using Discord just yesterday, the biggest communication tool used in the gaming industry. Suddenly, starting a call with someone has Discord play a spooky phone-ringing sound. It is Halloween soon after all! And many games themselves have followed suit, offering Halloween-themed experiences, all in order to keep users engaged.
It clearly works for other industries, so how do we apply the same in OTT?
Seasonal content highlighting
The most obvious, and likely also the lowest hanging fruit, is all about the content you’re showcasing in your applications. Looking at the festivities in front of us, Halloween, it’s clear what type of content you can look at highlighting, right? Halloween is all about scary, spooky, dark and gloomy. So that’s exactly what you highlight inside your application. The first swimlane or header might be your most important content that’s been released just this week, and the second might be a place for users to continue watching. Why not throw in some Halloween-type movies in there? Play into the season.
When Christmas comes around, the same of course applies — it’s not just Halloween. What is the goal though, of doing all this? It’s actually rather simple. You’re creating an association between your OTT offering and the seasons. Your users will remember their last Halloween or Christmas and think: “where did I watch that Christmas movie last year again?”. And before you know it, they are back in your app to watch the same, or possibly a different, Christmas movie once again. It’s a very easy trick to ensure your users remember you.
A dedicated page
Still lowing hanging fruit, but maybe a bit more effort if your application isn’t as dynamic out of the box, is a dedicated page for a specific season, holiday or even an event. Of course, all of this depends a bit on the type of content you have and which season, holiday or event is currently happening. This of course really only works if you have enough content to fill a dedicated page with.
Taking a look at where we are now, this could work particularly well if you for example have a lot of content that covers the Presidential elections in the USA. A menu option with an appropriate title and icon, which when clicked takes you to a dedicated page for the elections, is a great way to keeping your users coming back for more and more. Because they will remember that they can stay up to date with how the elections are going. The content is there, front and center, and plays in very well to the current situation and state of affairs.
Gimmicky: cool interface tricks
Okay, admitting it, this isn’t really needed, but it for sure is cool. In fact, it might even become a talking point at the water cooler. In a similar fashion as Discord, what I explained earlier about the spooky phone-ringing sound, you can do the same to your user interface. While you might have a typical splash screen before the application opens, you could also make a temporary Halloween-themed splash screen. And there are many more examples of applying seasonality-themed user interfaces. You could use a pumpkin as the progress-bar indicator in your video player. What about a friendly ghost that is hiding behind some swimlanes on your homepage? The only limiting factor here is your (designers’) imagination, and maybe the development capacity ;).
It’s almost Halloween
What are you waiting for?! Okay, for real though, I do hope this has inspired you to take your OTT offering to the next level for the upcoming holiday period. Halloween might come a bit too soon for you to apply the above changes, although some small things might be possible already. Especially a dedicated swimlane is something that’s totally achievable in most cases, so I’d really recommend taking that step! Your users will definitely appreciate and make use of it.
Up for doing some more brainstorming on how your OTT application could benefit from some seasonal changes? You can always find me on LinkedIn, or drop me an email. For now though, wishing you a happy spooky season!
