Product

New Feature: How Swisscom TV Engages its Audience with Quizzes and Polls

Text: Martin Sauter, February 28, 2020

In the media business, everybody is talking about engagement. Being able to engage an audience is crucial for success in many ways. This is why we are bringing a simple but powerful engagement mechanism to Livingdocs: quizzes and polls.

During this year's Academy Awards ceremony, Swisscom published a series of quizzes on Swisscom TV. While waiting for the famous phrase «And the Oscar goes to…», the audience was able to test their knowledge about the Academy Awards by answering multiple choice questions on their TV screen.

This was the premiere of our new quizzes & polls module that was recently rolled out for Swisscom TV. And it was a successful premiere – considering that it had to compete against some of the most famous actors on the planet.

With quizzes and polls we enable TV viewers to interact with TV content via remote control.

— Cyrill Treptow, Head of Portal at Swisscom

The quizzes & polls module in Livingdocs allows editors to create sets of multiple choice questions and publish them through the «Interaction Box» component. Answers can be either texts or images, allowing questions like «Who of the following directors has never won an Oscar so far?» The styling of these quizzes can be defined on a per-platform basis, so editors don't have to care about the design, but only about the content.

«So what's the difference between quizzes and polls?», you might ask. A quiz typically consists of several questions in a sequence. Of course only one of the proposed answers is correct, and the user will get instant feedback whether he was right or wrong. At the end of the quiz he also gets an overall result to see how well he has performed.

A poll on the other hand asks only one question. And of course there is no right or wrong in a poll: Here we are simply asking for opinions and preferences of the audience. For example: «What is your favorite movie from the Oscar nominations 2020?» Once you have answered the question, you are allowed to see the overall result of all participants.

As mentioned before, the quizzes & polls module has recently been rolled out for Swisscom TV, and it will be soon rolled out for Bluewin as well. These two pilot projects will help us to further improve and extend this module. Our goal is to implement quizzes and polls for other clients as well and hopefully bring it to the Livingdocs service for everybody to test.