TOP STORY
- Cable Ops Feel Auto’s Pain
Cable operators have long counted on car dealers to make up the bulk of their local ad sales, but this year that workhorse segment has taken a big hit. more » » »
GREAT IDEAS
- Great Idea: Boosting Morale
The holidays are the holidays, and despite the downturn in economic fortunes and a clamp on spending, managers need to pay attention to their employees and sales staff need to pay homage to their clients. more » » »
BRIEFING ROOM
- Cable Ad Sales Rise in First Three Quarters But Bad News Looms
Ad expenditures on cable TV were up 3.7% for the first three quarters this year compared to sales in the same period of 2007, according to TNS Media Intelligence. The research firm attributed the growth to cable's "limited exposure" to the 100-day strike by the Writer's Guild of America that extended into the first quarter this year, plus successful summer programming. Network TV spending was up for the nine-month period, too, buoyed by spending around the Summer Olympics. The latter turned a six-month loss into a nine-month gain, with year-to-date expenditures up 3%, the firm said. more » » »
- TiVo Pitches Pause Promos
TiVo has signed on two sponsors for its “Pause Menu” ads: Mercedes-Benz USA, which will promote its GLK sports-utility vehicle in early 2009 by targeting football viewers, and 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, which plans to promote the DVD release of Dr Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who. Promotions on the Pause Menu will be displayed as a single line of text. Another line will link the viewer directly to TiVo’s Universal Swivel Search, allowing users with broadband-connected DVRs to find related shows and other information. The new feature is available to TiVo Series2 subscribers. TiVo said its research and found that linking the Pause Menu to the Swivel Search feature gets “very positive viewer reaction.” Pause Menu ads can be displayed on the pause screen
of a live or time-shifted program, and TiVo will offer options to target genres or keywords within a program description. more » » »
- Canoe's David Verklin Navigates Tough Waters
As CEO of Canoe Ventures, David Verklin is on a crusade to reinvigorate the television platform and stop the drain of ad dollars to the major Internet players. Verklin, still in his first 100 days on the job, spoke with Broadcasting & Cable about his goals and the challening of holding together a consortium involving the big six cable operators and how he's navigating the thorny issue of privacy. The genesis of Canoe, he said, was a vision to see if “we could use the two-way digital infrastructure of cable to bring advanced advertising capabilities to TV. You already can use video-on-demand and have interactivity; we could take it to the next level. [Comcast COO] Steve Burke gets a lot of credit. He called the top six MSOs to think about joining forces to turn the TV set into a
platform. Our name came from a line he used about getting into a boat, a canoe, together.” more » » »
- Vendors Team To Target Interactive Ads
Visible World and Ensequence are set to announce a solution that provides the ability to deliver interactive TV ad content to targeted viewing audience. The system uses CableLabs’ Enhanced TV Binary Interchange Format standard to embed content into an MPEG-2 stream, then relies on an EBIF client in the set-top to display the content targeted to that particular viewer. The solution combines Ensequence’s interactive television platform with Visible World’s IntelliSpot Connect network that lets advertisers target ads by household, geography or content. Measurement is provided by the IntelliSpot Insight reporting system. more
» » »
- Cable's New VOD Politics Channel
Comcast, Bright House Networks, Cablevision Systems, Charter Communications, Cox Communications, Time Warner Cable and Insight Communications have come together to launch an on-demand politics channel in a bid to tap the euphoria surrounding the inauguration of the first African-American president — and they aim to start Jan. 20, the day President-elect Barack Obama is sworn into office. The service is aimed at viewers eager for political information on the national and local fronts. For the operators, it's a chance to prolong the flow of political dollars to local cable in what is expected to be an active year for issue advertising. TNS Media Intelligence estimates that local cable, print and radio took in between $200 million and $400 million during the election cycle. The
politics channel is an evolution of the one-year-old service Elections '08, which was shuttered after the general election ended in November. Comcast's sales division is already in talks with the Democratic National Committee about providing politically oriented branded content. more » » »
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AD BYTES
- Hallmark Channel has been busy revamping its advertising operations cutting deals with Google and Nielsen. Advertisers will now be able to use Google TV Ads platform to place ads on Hallmark Channel and Hallmark Movie Channel as part of a deal announced between Hallmark Channel and Google on Dec. 3. “Partnering with Google is a milestone for Hallmark Channel’s continued advertising success,” Bill Abbott, Hallmark Channel’s executive vice president of ad sales, said in a prepared statement. “The Google TV Ads platform will allow more advertisers to access the network’s acclaimed roster of family-friendly programming — entertainment that audiences cherish during the holidays.” Google promises greater accountability and relevancy for
advertisers using its TV Ads platform that features an auction-based pricing system and provides digital reporting within 24 hours. Hallmark Channel joins NBC Universal’s family of cable networks, Bloomberg TV and Dish Network as Google TV Ads partners. “Hallmark Channel’s strong family-friendly brand and programming attracts an important viewer demographic that Google TV Ads’ advertisers can now access,” said John Saroff, manager of strategic partner development for Google TV Ads, said in prepared statement. “Combined with our platform’s measurement technology, this collaboration signifies an important step towards making television advertising more accountable for advertisers and more relevant for viewers.” Hallmark also became the first
cable network to license The Nielsen Connections Brand Target Audience products. The products are designed to help Hallmark the impact of its programming against advertiser’s marketing targets, which will help media buyers and planners better target their client’s spending, according to Abbott. Hallmark Channel is also the first Nielsen client to include magazines and retail in its cross-platform measurement. “The Nielsen data will allow us to instantly show clients who is buying their products and watching Hallmark Channel. By providing advertisers with this targeted information, we help them realize the full economic value of their buying decisions and help them move beyond the traditional dependence on age/sex demos,” Abbott said in a prepared statement.
“Being able to more effectively reach their core customer base in this way is essential for advertisers and for the future growth of the media industry as a whole – especially during these challenging economic times.” Nielsen’s deal with Hallmark will focus on three cross-platform reach, the spending power of homes using Homescan data and advertiser centric single-source ratings and metrics.
- Under a deal cut earlier this month with The Nielsen Co., National Geographic Channel will be the first network to access new insights and analyses on commercial performance through Nielsen’s DigitalPlus service. NGC will gain access to granular data from more than 330,000 set top boxes within Charter Communications’ Los Angeles cable system. This set top box information will complement traditional People Meter ratings data from Nielsen’s samples and will allow National Geographic Channel to develop new analyses in a number of important areas, including: second-by second pod ratings, commercial creative retention and standard vs. high definition measurements. “We’re committed to using both syndicated and proprietary research to get a richer understanding
of what resonates with our viewers to help focus our marketing and programming efforts,” said Brad Dancer, NGC’s senior vice president and digital media, in a prepared statement. “Nielsen DigitalPlus gives us unique advantages in reaching our targeted audiences because it offers a direct link between set top boxes in subscriber homes and set top boxes in its People Meter panels, enabling Nielsen to provide context for the raw STB data and integrate it with a wealth of other datasets.” Nielsen launched DigitalPlus in 2007 to measure consumer viewing habits from all emerging digital devices. Digital set top box data offers opportunities to supplement traditional panel based measurement with more granular detail of program and commercial performance. The added
granularity enables researchers to look at second-by-second tuning behavior among a variety of new metrics.
- Cox Enterprises Inc. is merging its TV, newspapers and radio sales operations into one organization to be called Cox Media Group Inc., effective January 2009. The subsidiary will be headquartered in Atlanta and Cox veteran Sandy Schwartz will serve as president. The company is not including its cable ad sales in the new division. Cox Media Group will include 17 daily and 26 non-daily newspaper publications, 15 television broadcast stations, 86 radio stations, more than a hundred digital services associated with these businesses. Following the formation of Cox Media Group, Cox Radio will continue to trade publicly on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol CXR. All of Cox’s media properties are managed and run locally with employees who live in the communities they serve.
PEOPLE
Bruce Dennler, most recently president of The Nielsen Co.’s Nielsen Entertainment division, has joined Canoe Ventures as senior vice president and chief relationship officer for agency relations.
John Collins has joined Canoe Ventures as senior vice president of product development. He had been group vice president of advanced advertising technologies for Time Warner Cable.
Mark Mitchell has been named senior vice president and chief relationship officer for network operations for Canoe Ventures. He was most recently head of sales for in-store TV network Premier Retail Networks.
Jeff Collins was promoted to vice president at CNN Advertising Sales. He had been sales manager.
Dawn Lee Williamson joins CNN’s ad-sales unit as vice president. She had been a vice president at Cartoon Network Advertising Sales.
David McGuire has joined Comcast Spotlight as director, advanced media, Michigan markets. He joins Spotlight from the Detroit Media Partnership, where he was director, retail digital advertising.
James Speller Jr. has been hired by Cox Media in Hampton Roads, Va., as a local account executive. He comes from HH&B Insurance in Virginia Beach, where he was a property and casualty insurance agent.
Jeremy Hester has been promoted to local account executive at the Cox Media Hampton Roads, Va., LNC5 local news channel. He had been a sales assistant. |
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