December 4, 2007
- Top Story: Comcast’s New Screen Play
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Great Ideas
- Maximizing Avail Allocation
- Getting Political with Hiring
- Promoting the Premieres
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Briefing Room
- CAB’s Cunningham on Cable’s Political Clout
- Cable Network CPM Gains Outpace Broadcasters
- Spike TV Aims to Assuage Advertisers over Ultimate Fighting
- Media Firm Carat to Use New Viewing Data from TiVo
- Fox News Wins Cable-News Ratings Crown in November
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- People
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The ad-sales division of Comcast released a study last week aimed at convincing advertisers that there’s valuable real estate associated with on-screen interactive program guides that are present in more than one-third of Comcast Cable Communications households and could present an important new source of ad-sales inventory for Comcast and other operators.
“IPGs have come of age as an ad medium. They now have the substantiation and support points to show that they’ve become portals to television and a true point-of-purchase positioning for advertisers,” said Hank Oster, senior vice president and general manager of Comcast Spotlight, in a press release.
Comcast and IPG provider Gemstar-TV Guide International hope to build advertiser interest in IPGs with help from a new study by Lieberman Research Worldwide that found that one-half of users of Gemstar-TV Guide’s IPG reported noticing ads on the IPG at least once a week. Comcast Spotlight said that finding and others suggested that there’s a relatively high level of engagement associated with the nascent advertising medium. “A high percentage of consumers notice and take action on IPG ads,” Oster said. (The Lieberman survey queried about 1,600 U.S. adults by phone in June and July.)
Still, the Comcast Spotlight-Gemstar study offered little detail on how many viewers actually tune in to IPGs, or for how long. IPGs do have significant household reach, however, with most of the nation’s more than 35 million digital-cable households having access to an on-screen IPG. Among other survey findings: One-half of i-Guide users noticing IPG advertisements said they have clicked on an ad, with about one-fifth clicking on ads at least once per week.
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Counting every avail, hiring politically correct execs, previewing premieres
Leave no spot behind: Even as it pursues new-media ventures including on-demand advertising and ad-supported Web sites, Cox Media hopes to get more value from a more traditional asset: the 30-second avail. One way is to track every detail Cox Media can surrounding how its local-advertising slots are used, including sellout levels, average prices and how many avails are allocated to promotions both for parent Cox Communications and for network cross-channel promotions. Cox Media figures that stringent management of each advertising slot it commands can help to elevate revenues in a highly competitive market, and one in which higher sellout levels make inventory that much more valuable. “When I started as a local sales manager in 1996 and one of my
AEs [account executives] made a mistake, we could always fix it. We always had the inventory to take care of a problem,” says Sharon Frazier, vice president of media sales and marketing. “Now we are allocating inventory for ourselves on a very select basis.”
Get politically connected: One reason for cable’s rising share of political-advertising budgets: the right people in the right places. National Cable Communications senior vice president Andrew Capone said moves that several MSOs have made to hire national political-ad specialists are paying off in more attention from major political-ad agencies and improved campaign coordination between NCC and cable companies. Among MSOs that have hired political advertising specialists are Comcast and Time Warner Cable. Capone said the posts deliver improved focus on an increasingly important category, adding, “Even at the MSO level now, we have people whose job is purely to interact with us on the Hill and at political ad agencies. They’re
valuable jobs.”
Promote premieres: Time Warner Cable Media Sales made it easier for advertisers to identify high-profile original programming by adding to its advertiser Web site a database-search feature that produces lists of program premieres with a few computer mouse clicks. The “Program Finder” feature mines a database of upcoming cable-network programming to yield shows and movies that are making their debut, which often delivers higher-than-average audience levels.
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Bringing New Life to Remnant Inventory
Lance Funston
President
TelAmerica Media
Funston learned about the intricacies of local cable advertising from an unlikely vantage point: the toy business. As he explored TV-advertising options for a consumer-products company more than 15 years ago, he began to think about ways to organize unsold local-cable-ad availabilities into a sort of national collective that would offer a low-cost alternative for national network-TV advertisers. Now, 14 years later, Funston’s TelAmerica places close to 90,000 commercials across 150 U.S. cable systems in a year.
Q: Early next year, you’re flipping the switch on a new way of distributing commercials -- digitally over the Internet instead of via overnight tape delivery. Why?
A: We’re sending out in the course of a month 450 deliveries and (handling) 7,500 spot destinations. The industry is still for the most part dominated by bicycling. And I think this move will have a material impact on that. We are expecting better quality and more consistency in quality.
Q: What’s the economic benefit from your standpoint?
A: The cost benefit for us is not material. We had sort of hoped that there would be significant cost benefits, but the only reason there’s one here is because one of our MSO partners is providing their digital platform on a very attractive basis. Anybody who’s doing satellite-downloaded creative or Internet-downloaded is smart enough to look at the cost of a FedEx package and the cost of a dub and take advantage of that math. But at the end of the day, the last consideration is an economic consideration.
Q: How are inventory conditions among your affiliates affecting your ability to clear commercials?
A: I don’t think there’s any doubt that the top 10 or top 12 networks that generate 60%-70% of the cable industry’s local ad revenue are getting tighter. And that’s a product of not just us facing an election year coming up -- it’s also I think a function of a much more sophisticated approach in the cable industry at using its strengths to compete with its typical competitor, spot broadcast. So any rumor you hear about inventory tightening up in the tier-one networks is valid, and we experience it every day.
Q: So how is there still room for what you do?
A: The proliferation of networks from, let’s say, an average of 20 insertable networks six years ago now to an average of 60 insertable networks leaves the industry with an impossible 70,000-90,000 commercial breaks per month. So what we try to do is make sure that when we send out our standby advertiser reels, we try to make sure they have national advertisers with demographic objectives that are willing to go after those demos on the second-, third- and fourth-tier networks, because that’s where the bulk of the unsold inventory exists in today’s market.
Q: How have you adapted to advertiser demands for rigorous posting and assurance of clearance?
A: It’s been a long journey. After 14 years, we can distribute and traffic electronically to the entire industry and can receive electronic affidavits and post them against quarter-hour Nielsen Media Research ratings. That basically takes this massive volume of individual commercial units, and converts it into a currency that network buyers can understand.
Q: How has that replying to that demand affected your business plan?
A: In the early days, when we did not have the benefit of electronic affidavits, the volume of paper and the amount of effort it took to try and measure audience delivery was so crude that we had to have a very aggressive selling effort and a lot of very understanding network buyers, in order to sell anything. As time has gone forward, we have been able to create a seamless product … there’s absolutely no difference from an audience-measuring standpoint between a television-network delivery and a TelAmerica media delivery. You’re getting it posted in both instances against an NTI quarter-hour rating and, in addition, by MSA.
Q: How much do you pay your affiliates?
A: MSOs get paid per spot that they run, which is a function of the CPM [cost per thousand homes] that the advertiser has provided us, and apply it to an audience rating forecast.
Q: You’re working with a Los Altos, Calif.-based company, Radiance Technologies, to move files around digitally. Why Radiance?
A: (From vice president of engineering Andy Brown): The main thing is that it provides us with a specific solution that allows for these files, which can be very large, to quickly be downloaded to a desktop -- say, an encoding person’s desktop -- and then to process them through their work-flow system and pitch them out to their file servers in the system. Radiance basically has a patented technology that allows them to do that quickly.
--Interviewed by Stewart Schley
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Cable’s Rising Political Profile Paying off, Says Cunningham
(Excerpted from an article in the Dec. 3 issue of Broadcasting & Cable)
Cabletelevision Advertising Bureau president Sean Cunningham says the industry is winning over key decision-makers in political advertising.
For More…Cable Network CPMs Rose Faster than Those of Broadcast Rivals
(Excerpted from an article in the Nov. 26 issue of Multichannel News)
Cable entertainment networks scored higher cost-per-thousand gains than their broadcast counterparts during the 2007-08 upfront, according to industry analyst Jack Myers.
For More…Spike TV Aims to Make Ultimate Fighting Advertiser-Approved
(Excerpted from an article in the Dec. 3 issue of Broadcasting & Cable)
A special ad-sales team is devoted to overcoming wariness among major advertisers as ratings for the controversial slugfest-sport continue to rise.
For More…Media Shop Carat to Use TiVo-Supplied Audience Data
(Excerpted from a Nov. 29 article on Multichannel.com)
On the heels of a deal with NBC Universal, TiVo signed up media-buying agency Carat for a comprehensive audience-research agreement. Carat will use TiVo’s research services to help its clients better understand the impact of digital-video recorders on viewing behavior, and especially fast-forwarding of commercials.
For More…November Cable News Supremacy Belongs to Fox News
(Excerpted from a Nov. 28 article on Multichannel.com)
Fox News Channel dominated the all-news-network ratings battle in November, while rival CNN saw the biggest ratings decrease in the all-news category. Fox News averaged a 0.7 total-day rating in November, according to Nielsen Media Research numbers, flat with the same period in 2006. CNN averaged a 0.4 rating, down 20%. MSNBC (0.3 total-day rating), CNBC (0.2) and CNN Headline News (0.2) were all flat compared with this time last year.
For More…
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The Wall Street Journal reports on a Cox Media campaign for realtor RE/MAX that used an ad-targeting platform provided by Navic Networks.
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MarketWatch describes NBC’s plan to use second-by-second commercial-ratings data supplied by TiVo, which is quietly emerging as a potential rival to Nielsen Media Research.
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Silicon Alley Insider points out challenges awaiting Google as it seeks to gain a bigger presence in TV advertising. Among them, says writer Michael Learmonth: “Google would have to prove that it can do what cable/satellite either can't or won't: Efficiently crunch the vast clickstream emitted from the nation's remotes and directly target advertising on a one-to-one basis.”
For More…
TechCrunch writer Erick Shonfeld offers more thoughts on Google’s TV-advertising foray, noting that “Deep in the Googleplex, there is an engineering team thinking about how to extend Google’s reach into your TV.”
For More…
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Time Warner Cable promoted Joan Gillman to executive vice president and president of media sales. Gillman had previously served as senior VP and president of media sales. .
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EDITOR:
PJ Bednarski
646-746-6965
cablenewsletters@reedbusiness.com
WRITER/CONTRIBUTING EDITOR:
Stewart Schley
303-721-1599
cablenewsletters@reedbusiness.com
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RB Interactive
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