Behind The Penguin Cam - What Discovery Learned From This Season's Viral Sensation

Created on Friday, 16 March 2012

Written by Rick Ellis

Building a viral hit that also promotes a television show isn't an easy task. It's difficult to predict just which idea will resonate with the audience and typically the more the idea seems like a bid for viral success, the more it's resisted by the audience.

One example of an idea that has succeeded beyond the hopes of its creators is Discovery's Penguin Cam.

Created to promote the network's upcoming series "Frozen Planet," Discovery teamed up with Sea World to put a live web cam in SeaWorld San Diego’s Penguin Encounter attraction. The result was an online obsession that has gotten more than 25 million pageviews. The success also inspired the addition of a second live web cam, which focuses on the penguins underwater lives.

The penguin cam has also made its way to the TV side of the marketing, with Discovery airing a special comprised of live web cam footage in the days leading up to the show's premiere.

Miguel Monteverde, Discovery's VP of Digital Media recently spoke to me about the genesis of the penguin web and the impact it's had on the promotional efforts of the network.

Q: Can you talk a bit how this all came together? Taking a TV show and cross-promoting it with a web cam is sort of an old-school idea.

Miguel Monteverde: It really is. I've been in this digital/Internet space since 1995 and it does take me back a few years. Two years ago, for Shark Week, we decided on a whim, let's find someone to partner with and put a webcam in a shark tank somewhere. So we partnered with the Georgia Aquarium. We got a great high-def camera we could swivel 360 degrees and we had a nice little audience. Then we did it last year again and had a good-sized little audience and good feedback. We did some lunchtime feedings with the Georgia Aquarium and it did fine. But it wasn't the national obsession that the Penguin Cam has become.

So when it came time to plan what we wanted to do with "Frozen Planet," someone on the team floated the idea that since we already had the camera and we had the practice doing it, why not do a penguin cam?

We thought that it might do a bit better than the shark cam because penguins are cuter. And at the zoo or Sea World people seem to linger a bit longer around the penguin experience. We had a feeling that it would do better than the shark cam. But it we had no idea that it would blow up to be what's it's become. And it really is old school and it's made me think that maybe I should dust off all those old ideas, things we tried twelve, thirteen years ago that were maybe ahead of their time.

Q: As you mentioned, penguins are cute and that's no doubt one of the reasons that this has been so popular. But have gotten a sense of why this particular idea resonated so strongly with people?

Miguel Monteverde: I think it's a couple of things. Obviously, there's a lot of bad news in the world. And penguins are a nice alternative to being stressed about the economy or any one of the other things that you wake up to on the front page of the newspaper every morning. I think we've provided a good news story and that's because we just have those cute things penguins do.

And I have a couple of little kids and the other thing about it is something you can do with the whole family. So at night when I get home we pull up the penguin cam on the computer and go full-screen and we just watch that while we're having dinner and make little jokes and comments about what the penguins are doing.

Q: One of the things I've found fascinating about this idea is that you've been able to keep people's interest over a couple of week period. A lot of these viral hits peak quickly, but you've rolled out a second cam this week and it seems to be as popular of an idea now as it was the first day.

Miguel Monteverde: Yeah, I think it seems to be continuing to build, actually. And I don't know exactly why that's the case although with the show premiering this week there's been a lot of press over the past couple of days about it. So people are Googling the show and perhaps finding the penguin cam.

The addition of a second camera that's underwater has also helped continue the interest and it's brought a whole new level to the experience. Penguins, after all, are animals who live both above and below the water and this second cam sort of completes the experience.

Q: Given the success of penguin cam, have you thought about what comes next? One of the interesting takeaways for me is that this shows that not everything has to be an iPad app to make a splash in the press and with the audience.

Miguel Monteverde: Sure, I think there are a couple of things we learned from this. I think we've agreed that the penguins were a natural focus for the marketing and the focus of our promotional efforts around "Frozen Planet." So there was the penguin cam and the penguin game. There was a video we put out late fall, the criminal penguin clip, that was kind of a viral sensation. The marketing team really focused on that.

So there's a recognition here that, hey, penguins are really popular. You can really create some neat media around this very special animal. I'm not suggesting that we're necessarily going to do a lot of penguin programming online going forward. But it has made me think if there are some things that we can do with penguins going forward. For instance, do we want to keep the penguin cam going in some fashion?

Miguel Monteverde: The other part of this is getting back to your original question, which really lasered in on the fact that this is an old school kind of idea. And for those of us who have been in this space for 10 or 15 years, you start thinking about some of the old ideas that still have value today. Sometimes the simple, elegant ideas are the ones that resonate the most with audiences.

Click Here to visit the Penguin Cam.

"Frozen Planet" premieres Sunday, March 18 at 8:00 pm ET on Discovery.

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