For more than 70 years, the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS) and its sister academies have presented the iconic Emmy® Awards recognizing excellence in television programming. Awarding accolades for every genre of television as well as achievements in television technology and engineering, NATAS has always adapted to the changing tides of television content and viewership. (In fact, NATAS was the first of the academies to award an Emmy for digital programming, in 2006. NBD.) But NATAS realized their strategy needed to evolve in order to grow awareness, membership, and remain relevant to today’s viewers.
Many of our events became intended for industry peers, not an at-home audience. As we grew, we wanted to make them available to fans, not just the community in the room. There was an addressable, untapped audience that — just because the auditorium wasn’t big enough — we weren’t reaching.”
Evolving the Emmys®
The Emmys® have long been defined by glitzy, annual awards programs, but they’re more than their red carpet roll-outs. “When many people think of the Emmy Awards, the default has been to think of our sister academy’s primetime ceremony, That is what people are most used to watching on television,” says Adam Sharp, President and CEO of NATAS. “For most of our history, if you didn’t have the ceremony on TV, there really was no way of making it available to the fans.”
NATAS and its 19 regional chapters produce more than 25 different award ceremonies each year. Yet many of these ceremonies become inherently industry-exclusive events solely because of their limited broadcast reach. Adam and his team saw the need for a more sophisticated streaming experience to reach a new audience.
We are the Emmy Awards,” he says. “You should be able to watch the Emmy Awards on a TV — there’s a narrative importance to that.” Committed to finding an OTT solution that met their complex programming needs, the Emmys landed on Vimeo as an exclusive partner. “We already had a plan to launch with Vimeo, but I don’t think we knew until COVID hit exactly what a big part of our business it would become,” says Adam.
Connecting with new viewers through OTT
When NATAS streamed its 2020 Emmy ceremonies across mobile and TV apps, its community of professional members was suddenly larger and more connected than ever before. Events once limited to a few thousand suddenly grew to over 15,000. “Across all of our verticals, these events would have had in-person attendance of no more than 4,500 people. Our registered OTT viewers were over 3X that,” he says.
With tripled growth in audience reach, every user who registered on the “Watch the Emmys” platform offered helpful insights into who exactly was behind their growing audience. “While we’re still running the numbers, it’s already very clear that from just one year of streaming via OTT, we’ve garnered thousands of net new leads for potential new members,” says Adam. Now, NATAS has the power to utilize its OTT platform as a tool to reach and engage a previously untapped community of television professionals, fans, and prospective Academy members.
“For a trade association like ours that’s based on membership, professional development, and networking, having that unknown individual become known is the whole ball game,” Adam says, noting that nearly two-thirds of OTT Emmy viewers opt-in for NATAS email communications. “This is a committed and diverse audience that wants to interact live and regularly.”
We entered this partnership expecting OTT to be a new line of business with separate goals.We wound up finding it really woven into everything that we do — giving The Emmys a multiplatform growth opportunity unmatched in the awards space.”
Reaching every kind of viewer
With Vimeo OTT, NATAS is finally able to bring their non-telecast ceremonies to a consumer audience. That kind of power over distribution is giving them the wings to pursue the consumer outreach they were looking for. The Emmys have already announced that they will remain virtual for 2021. And they have big plans to build on their already successful content strategy. “Long-term, we want to explore monetizing some of the content,” says Adam. “The great thing is that we are able to pursue both free and monetized strategies at once. Vimeo’s analytics help us understand those dynamics so we can strategize appropriately.” As NATAS moves forward, OTT will remain a part of its strategy across the board. “We entered this partnership expecting OTT to be a new line of business with separate goals,” he says. “We wound up finding it really woven into everything that we do — giving The Emmys a multi-platform growth opportunity unmatched in the awards space.”
