Archive for the ‘Television’ Category

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Broadcasters, legislators say ‘turn that down’

Monday, December 14th, 2009

Spurred by legislation making its way through Congress, broadcasters are working to modulate the volume of television commercials, which too often are much louder than the programs they interrupt, the San Jose Mercury News said Sunday.

Rep. Anna Eshoo, a Democrat from Palo Alto, has introduced  a bill, which could come to the House floor for a vote as soon as this week, that would force broadcasters to modulate the volume of ads, the newspaper said. Last week, Democrats Sheldon Whitehouse  of Rhode Island and Chuck Schumer of New York introduced companion legislation in the Senate.

The Advanced Television Systems Committee, a body that sets technical standards for digital television, has devised a set of guidelines, and Eshoo recently amended her bill to effectively make them law and direct the FCC to enforce them.


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‘Webisodes’ resurrect single-sponsor model

Tuesday, November 24th, 2009

Web-based “television” series, “also known as ‘webisodes’ … are being created specifically for advertisers, borrowing a strategy from the early days of radio and television when shows like ‘The Kraft Music Hall,’ ‘The Bell Telephone Hour,’ ‘Lux Radio Theater’ and ‘Schlitz Playhouse of Stars’ entertained Americans while selling cheese, phone service, soap and beer,” The New York Times says.

“Among the major brands proclaiming ‘brought to you by …’ online are Maybelline cosmetics, which is sponsoring [Candace] Bushnell’s Web series, ‘The Broadroom,’ available at maybelline.com/thebroadroom, and ConAgra Foods, which is sponsoring a daily show, ‘What’s So Funny?,’ on yahoo.com, peddling products like Healthy Choice and Marie Callendar’s.”

“’The market place is shifting and brands have to think of themselves as media companies,’ said David Freeman, general manager at Matter in Los Angeles, a Clorox agency that is part of the Edelman Sports and Entertainment Marketing unit of Edelman.” Clorox’s Hidden Valley Ranch salad dressings sponsors “Garden Party” with Jennie Garth, a production of  NBC Universal Digital Studio, The Times says.

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TiVo closes fast-forwarding loophole

Friday, November 20th, 2009

During NFL games this season, TiVo will show advertising  even when viewers fast forward, rewind, pause or delete certain content, Advertising Age reports.

“MillerCoors describes the deal [for additional Coors Light ads] as a complement to its long-running status as the official beer of the NFL, a platform from which it bombards football fans with those fake press-conference ads starring former NFL coaches, rather than as insurance in case those ads get skipped.”

The deal covers every NFL game through the Super Bowl.

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Online TV stakes out pay/commercial model

Thursday, October 29th, 2009

Don’ t look for Time Warner’s TV Everywhere, “an attempt to make broadcast and cable programming available online, on-demand and free with a cable subscription,” to be a free ride once the cable bill is paid. AdAge takes a look at the venture based on panel discussions at the Cable & Telecommunications Association for Marketing Summit in Denver.

The advertising model calls for a full load of commercials.  “Jack Wakshlag, chief research officer at Turner Broadcasting, said a typical on-air episode of ‘The Closer’ runs 18 ads, which is why it makes little to no revenue sense for the network to run the same episode online with a third of the same commercials against it. ‘If I can get 4.5 times my TV CPM online (the cost to advertisers to reach 1,000 viewers), I’d be happy and wouldn’t need to do anything,’ he said. ‘But nobody’s getting four times TV CPMs online. Nobody at Hulu’s getting twice the TV CPMs. If people who already watch the show see it with a full commercial load, it’s still a chance to catch up on shows they miss.’

Over at Hulu, the ad-supported online-television site jointly owned by NBC Universal, News Corp. and Walt Disney, CEO Jason Kilar was cited widely last week for implying that a paid model was in the works. “We are capitalists. That’s why we’re Hulu.com and not Hulu.org. We’re very proud of the path we’re on now in terms of monetizing content. With our business model … the revenue needed to support that is anything but free.”

“Comcast and Time Warner Cable have both launched early trials of TV Everywhere,” AdAge says, “including a summer test in 15,000 Comcast households that included 17 cable networks. It’s been estimated that 30 million to 40 million cable households will be ready for authentication by summer 2010.”

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Political ads to offer little for newspapers

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009

Political advertising in 2010 is projected in a Wells Fargo report to increase by 11 percent over 2008, with TV and direct mail getting nearly nine out of every 10 dollars spent, according to Editor & Publisher.

Next year brings us the election of 37 governors, 38 senators, every member of the House of Representatives, and issue advertising (which could approach $1 billion) on hot-button issues such as health care.

“Broadcast TV will reap the lion’s share at $2.2 billion or 67 percent of the total, with $2 billion going to local TV, $150 million to cable and $50 million to network TV,” E&P says. “Direct mail will get $650 million or 20 percent of the ad spend, followed by radio at $250 million or 8 percent, and newspaper at $95 million or 3 percent. Outdoor and the Internet are forecast to reach $55 million and $50 million, respectively.”

At least one newspaper publisher has attributed part of its 3Q ad revenue decline to “the absence of Olympic [that's TV advertising] and political ads that fattened results a year ago.”

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Media group here to help, not fight

Thursday, September 10th, 2009

A consortium of media companies that last month was seen as a rival to the Neilsen TV ratings group said today it is no such thing.

“The group, dubbed the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement, or CIMM, cast itself as an effort to support third-party research into how audiences are consuming media across technology platforms and find new and more effective ways to measure audiences for advertisers in the digital age,” says Dow Jones report. Alan Wurtzel, president of research with NBC Universal, one of 14 firms in the group, spoke to reporters in a conference call.

TV networks and advertisers have said for years that Neilsen does not measure aucdiences accurately. With the spread of TV to online and mobile outlets, the lack of confidence has grown.

Any ideas new group comes up with, it says, will be transparent and made public.

The Los Angeles Times calls the news conference confusing, and points out that, “Missing from the list of industries involved is new media (no Google, no Yahoo), which is interesting because one of the things this organization stressed is that it wants to find a better way to measure media consumption online and on mobile devices.”

Firms involved in the group are Time Warner Inc., The Walt Disney Co., Viacom Inc., CBS Corp., NBC Universal, News Corp. (owner of the Dow Jones newswire and The Wall Street Journal), Interpublic Group of Co.s, Omnicom Group Inc., WPP, AT&T Corp., Unilever and Procter & Gamble Co.

Neilsen, the coalition says, is welcome to make a proposal for joining them.

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Advertising declines charted

Thursday, September 10th, 2009

The Business Insider earlier this week, with its Chart of the Day, showed how brutal the first six months of 2009 have been for advertising.

Compared to the same period a year ago, U.S. ad spending declined 15.4 percent during the first half of the year, according to Neilsen figures.

The bar chart shows a decline of about 13 percent at local newspapers and about 23 percent at national newspapers.

Of 11 sectors, all are down except cable TV, which grew 1.5 percent year-over-year. Internet advertising was down 1 percent, the best performance among the rest. Business-to-business magazines fared worst, falling by more than 30 percent.

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Flickering light ahead for local TV

Wednesday, August 19th, 2009

Revenue for television stations, most of which is from advertising, will grow 5.2 percent to $18.5 billion in 2010, thanks in part to political advertising and the Olympics, says the L.A. Times’ Company Town blog, quoting industry research firm SNL Kagan. Local TV stations are also collecting more money from cable re-broadcast fees.

But in the long run, the Times says, they’ll need to counter falling revenue as programs and viewers move online by developing their own programs and by exploiting digital-spectrum channels.

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New group to challenge Nielsen

Friday, August 14th, 2009

Some of the nation’s biggest advertisers, media agencies, and broadcast and cable TV networks are joining to compete against the Nielsen ratings service, Financial Times reports. Nielsen Media Research controls the measurement of U.S. TV audiences through the polling of some 18,000 homes and, based on those measurements, influences billions of dollars of advertising revenue.

The group  includes networks owned by NBC Universal, Time Warner, News Corp, Viacom, CBS, Discovery and Disney, advertisers Procter & Gamble, AT&T and Unilever, and media agencies such as Group M and the Starcom MediaVest Group.

“The involvement of such big names highlights how urgently advertisers feel the need for better information to justify their returns on investments from ads that run across multiple media platforms,” Financial Times says.

The consortium appears to be focused on getting single-source data that measures cross-platform TV and digital viewing, says TV Week. It is expected to be up and running next month and commissioning data by the fourth quarter.

Would-be competitors to Nielsen in the 1980s and 1990s ultimately failed because they didn’t get enough financial support from the media community, TV Week says.

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WRAL drops N&O from show

Friday, August 14th, 2009

Raleigh TV Station WRAL has kicked The News & Observer and its executive editor, John Drescher, off of its “Headline Saturday” public affairs show, Drescher reports in The Editor’s Blog on the N&O site.

“This week, Steve Hammel, WRAL’s general manager, called to say he was changing the format of the show. (WRAL anchor  David) Crabtree will host alone and the show won’t be affiliated with The N&O, although N&O reporters could be invited to appear from time to time,” Drescher writes. The move is to speed the pace of the show; since Drescher and other N&O staffers who appear are not paid, it’s not about cost, he adds.

The 30-minute show has been on the air since 2002, originally on Sunday and hosted by Crabtree and Melanie Sill, then The N&O’s executive editor. Drescher took over in 2007.

Drescher got a two-week notice – his last show will air August 22.

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