Category: Media

Digital Media and Advertising

Cable well positioned for TV Ad Market

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Broadcast-television ratings have dropped sharply this season. That, combined with the weak economy and competition from digital media, indicate a bad season for the spring TV ad-sales market, ad buyers and analysts say.

Some of them are predicting that the broadcast networks’ take will be steady to slightly lower in this years upfront,  in which TV executives pitch their new shows for the coming season.

More TV ad dollars are expected to move to cable channels, a shift that has accelerated in the past couple of years. But both broadcast and cable television are facing more intense competition from online media, including Web video outlets.

The ratings declines have some marketers rethinking their ad-buying strategies, ad buyers said. Some are expected to shift money to cable channels, they said. While ratings have declined at some cable channels, ad prices on cable tend to be lower than on broadcast TV, according to ad buyers.

In some cases, the Web could take a share of those dollars. “Advertisers have seen a significant shortage of ratings, and some are willing to take some money and move it online,” said John Muszynski, chief investment officer at ad company Publicis Groupe

Publicis’s ZenithOptimedia expects TV advertising to grow just 2.8% this year to $63.9 billion. Zenith expects outlays on network-TV ads to decline 2% and spending on cable to increase 7%

Full Story at WSJ.com

Cord Cutters grow to 5 Million

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Zero TV homes now account for 5% of all TV homes — around 5 million in 2013. Nielsen says these homes have more than doubled from the 2 million in 2007.

Up to 75% of these homes still have TV sets that no longer receive TV programming via traditional means. Sixty-seven percent of Zero TV homes get their content on other devices such as a computer, smartphone or tablet — 37% on computer; 16% on TV Internet; 8% on smartphones, and 6% on tablets.

These homes tend to be young, with more than half under 35 versus the 32% of these young viewers that Nielsen considers TV homes. Some 25% of Zero TV homes are between 25 and 34. More than 85% are “Non Hispanic” versus the 88% “Non Hispanic” traditional TV homes. Over 80% of Zero TVers have no kids in the home, and 60% do not live alone.

Why have these homes unplugged from traditional TV? Nielsen says 36% have done this because of cost, and 31% because of lack of interest. Only 18% consider signing up with a TV subscription service.

Multi-Screen consumption making TV harder to measure

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 Every Tuesday, the Nielsen company publishes a popularity ranking of broadcast television programs that has served as the industry’s report card dating back to when most people had only three networks to choose from.

And every week, that list gets less and less meaningful.

With DVRs, video on demand, game consoles and streaming services, tablets and smartphones, the way people watch televisionis changing and the industry is struggling to keep on top of it all. Even the idea of “watching television” is in flux. Are you “watching TV” when you stream an episode of “Downton Abbey” on a tablet?

Nielsen, which has long had a virtual monopoly on the audience statistics that drive a multi-billion dollar industry, last week took an important step toward accounting for some of the changes. Starting in September, Nielsen will begin measuring viewership through broadband devices like game consoles for the first time. Right now those numbers go uncounted.

“The ratings are a very one-dimensional look at what is happening,” said Alan Wurtzel, top research executive at NBC Universal, “and we now live in a very multi-dimensional world.”

Nielsen’s weekly rankings count people who watch a broadcast TV show live or on their DVRs that same day through midnight on the West Coast. To be sure, this is still how most people watch television. CBS didn’t need anything other than live numbers to know that its new reality show “The Job” was a flop, and canceled it a week ago after two episodes.

Through separate, less publicized rankings, Nielsen can also track how many people see a program on a time-shifted basis. One ranking, which measures live viewership plus those who watch on DVR or video on demand within three days of the original airing, is what the industry uses to set advertising rates. Other rankings measure those who watch within a week, or even within a month.

Those numbers can present a much different picture of a program’s popularity.

During the last week of January, for example, ABC’s “Modern Family” ranked No. 12 for the week with 10.8 million viewers if you count just the people who watched on Wednesday, Jan. 23. But within seven days, 15.9 million people had seen the episode, enough to make it the third most popular show of the week behind two “American Idol” episodes. Fox’s “The Following” finished a modest 15th place initially, but its audience jumped by 45 percent over the next week, enough to lift the show to fourth place.

Meanwhile, almost all of the “60 Minutes” viewing is done live. The CBS newsmagazine dropped from seventh place in the initial rankings to 15th after a week.

The time-shifted viewing can change a network’s perception of a show. NBC would have likely canceled “The Office” years ago without this additional audience. “The idea of how many people are watching a program and caring about the show becomes increasingly important, and it is not reflected in the Tuesday report,” Wurtzel said.

In a world where people demand information faster and faster, television executives are no different. They want ratings NOW. The problem is, all of the changes in content consumption demand patience. Nielsen’s report on how many people watch a show within seven days isn’t released until three weeks after a show first airs.

“We have to basically train the entire industry to no longer look at the fastest information, which is preliminary and not necessarily reflective of what the reality is,” Poltrack said.

Nielsen says it regularly discusses how it releases ratings with all of its clients and there’s been no consensus on change. Most people watch their favorite shows as quickly as they can, said Pat McDonough, Nielsen senior vice president of insights and analysis.

Each week the average American spends 32 hours and 15 minutes watching live television, according to a Nielsen study issued last month. More than 12 hours is spent either watching time-shifted TV or DVDs, playing on game consoles, surfing the Internet or watching video on computer or mobile devices, the study said.

“The one thing most people don’t think about is a lot of the additional viewing is rolling out slowly over time and right now, live plus same day viewing is the best way to measure,” she said. “It may not be that way five years from now.”

Networks dispute the notion that things are changing slowly, although they are happy that Nielsen will soon be able to estimate how much television is being watched on broadband. There’s a limit to the information, though: Nielsen can’t yet tell specifically what programs people are watching this way.

Later this year, Nielsen hopes to roll out a pilot program to identify what people are watching on iPads. It’s unclear when this technology will be available for other tablet brands or for smartphones.

The company measures some online video streaming and includes it within its time-shifted reports. However, this picture is partial, too. Nielsen can measure streamed programs only if they have the same commercials shown on TV, and not every website does this.

Netflix’s release of an entire 13-episode season of the well-reviewed series “House of Cards” on Feb. 1 was a television landmark, evidence that a lot more “television” content is coming from non-traditional sources. Nielsen has no idea how many people have seen “House of Cards,” though. Netflix knows. But it won’t tell.

People are increasingly spending time catching up on series they’ve caught on to midstream, the phenomenon known as binge viewing. No one really knows who is spending an evening watching three episodes from the first season of “Homeland” instead of live TV. Nielsen has an oblique way to illustrate that binge viewing is a reality: When AMC’s “The Walking Dead” returned from a hiatus on Feb. 10, the 12.3 million people who watched that night was a series record and evidence that it had attracted new fans during a pause in original episodes.

That episode of “The Walking Dead” was the ninth most-watched television show in prime time that week, but it would have taken some investigation to know that. Nielsen ranks broadcast and cable shows separately even though that distinction means little to a younger generation of viewers. TV is TV.

There’s a similar dynamic with PBS. The public broadcasting system generally doesn’t pay Nielsen to have its programs rated, although it will on special occasions. The 8.2 million people who watched the third-season finale of “Downton Abbey” on Feb. 17 was more than anything seen on ABC, Fox or NBC that night. No one would have known that unless they’d seen a report generated by a PBS press release.

The numbers-crunchers within the industry know all of this.

Nielsen’s Tuesday rankings — and the achievement of getting into the week’s Top Ten — used to mean the world. Now it’s a small part of television’s picture.

DAVID BAUDER

Multi-screen marketing requires a new marketing approach

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Now more than ever, consumers want content at their fingertips and they can obtain it across multiple screen platforms whether it’s by a television, computer, tablet or mobile phone.

The use of non-screen media has declined by 22% since 2008 while television, computer internet and mobile have increased by one hour and twenty minutes during the same time frame.

Consumers have also become more efficient in multitasking since they can retrieve information various ways. About 40% of consumers use their smart phones or tablets while watching TV.

Video advertisers in the past had only one screen to target: the television. However, the rise of computers and mobile devices has boosted video viewing consumption across devices.

Yet, while the TV is no longer the sole video option for consumers, no single alternative has replaced television as the clear top choice for media consumption. According to a new report from ad network YuMe, 49 percent of all media consumption still comes from a television, 16 percent from the internet.

In addition, the report found that the average American owns close to four devices, and total figures show that there are more than 37 million tablets, more than 86 million PCs and close to 287 million TV sets owned in the United States.

So while the television is still the dominant media consumption option for many Americans, the proliferation of internet-enabled devices has cut into TV’s lead. As a result, consumers see video ads more than ever, which can make one spot appearing on only a TV or a computer less effective. YuMe’s report found that TV ads were only recalled about 27 percent of the time. In comparison internet video ads were remembered 43 percent of the time and mobile video ads had a 35 percent recall rate.

While the proliferation of smartphones, tablets and PCs may seem like it would hurt brands, but the key, is to think outside of traditional siloed efforts and focus on a new approach that reaches consumers across screens.

While TV is still the dominant platform for video, we are rapidly moving from a 100m+ household TV market to a billion+ screen based market. Now is the time for marketers to start thinking differently.

How the Harlem Shake became a global phenomenon

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The Harlem Shake is a nearly perfect internet meme because it almost perfectly erases its origins. If every imitation of “Gangnam Style” inevitably leads you back to the deceptively subtle, near-perfect original, the Harlem Shake does the opposite. Every imitation leads you to another imitation, the lower its fidelity the better.

The videos themselves are quite literally viral. A YouTube search for “Harlem Shake” turns up 60,000, with 45,000 uploaded within the last week. One person starts out with symptoms — dancing, a motorcycle helmet, etc. — and within moments, someone else is infected. A few minutes after that, everyone who saw the video has the same idea, and the meme spreads further, a domino effect of cascading bass drops. Like the punchline of a joke, the archetypes propping up a folktale, or even its decades-old namesake dance, the Harlem Shake circulates without an author, needing no authority but its own deliberately stupid sense of fun.

THE HARLEM SHAKE CIRCULATES WITHOUT AN AUTHOR, NEEDING NO AUTHORITY BUT ITS OWN DELIBERATELY STUPID SENSE OF FUN

Of course, this is a lie. Nothing moves without a mover, there are no chickens without eggs. Likewise, there is no breakthrough meme that doesn’t get its velocity from something that’s making it go. And so it is here: a nine-month old, three-minute song called “Harlem Shake,” by a nearly-unknown artist named Baauer, whose freshly-scattered thirty-second fragments of awkward dancing have peppered the video memescape since video blogger / comedian Filthy Frank established the template in a 34-second February 2nd video called “Do the Harlem Shake” that’s already gathered 10 million YouTube views.

It’s Filthy Frank and his dancing posse that everyone’s been imitating and on February 14th, “Harlem Shake” first broke through to number one on iTunes’ best seller list. At the time of this writing, the iTunes charts put “Harlem Shake” at number one overall, in the US, Australia, Belgium, Canada, and Luxembourg, and in the top five in most of the rest of Europe. It’s also crossing over from digital: “Harlem Shake” debuted at number 3 on the BBC’s radio charts on February 17th. In an interview with Billboard, a representative of Baauer’s label, Diplo’s Mad Decent records, describes the song as “the biggest thing we’ve released on Mad Decent as a label, and it’s happened within six days.” Baauer also sold out a February 15th show at New York’s Webster Hall, based almost entirely on the song’s popularity.

Even all those YouTube views, scattered across the dozens or hundreds of fan-made videos, add up. Baauer and Mad Decent have generally been happy to let a hundred flowers bloom, permitting over 4,000 videos to use an excerpt of the song but quietly adding each of them to YouTube’s Content ID database, asserting copyright over the fan videos and claiming a healthy chunk of the ad revenue for each of them. All this happens more or less automatically through Mad Decent’s partner INDmusic, There’s no pressing need to herd fans to a Facebook page or rig the YouTube search to drive “Harlem Shake” queries to an “original”: all of the videos can make the artist and his label a little bit of money. Hence the proliferation of the “Harlem Shake.”

After all, these Harlem Shake videos are just the last link in a chain of gently borrowed content. Before Filthy Frank, it was just a song, and not a terribly lucrative one. Before that, it was just a sample, a young Jayson Musson saying, “do the Harlem Shake” on 2001’s “Miller Time,” a track an even-younger Baauer probably mixed as a Philly-area DJ. Before that, the Shake was just a dance of uncertain provenance, something anyone could reference. But each step meant borrowing from something that already existed. Nobody involved was ever terribly keen on asking for permission. Why would they be? For the most part, neither the borrowers or the lenders even noticed what was happening.

But that open spirit has a limit, and embracing most of the song’s copies doesn’t mean it’s a free-for-all. When hip-hop artist and Harlem native Azealia Banks tried to upload her own remix of the track, Baauer had SoundCloud take it down. When she asked why, his response was simple enough: “It’s not your song.”

As long as it’s Baauer’s song, he’ll decide who can remix, and who else can appear on it. There’s real money and real control at stake here. This means the Shake gets to be open culture and it gets to be big business. But for most people the business, just like the original dance, just fades away.

The Verge

New Report highlights online video growth

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FreeWheel has released a new report that highlights video viewership trends in 2012, based on aggregated data from the company’s entertainment clients, including FOX, ESPN, VEVO, and AOL, among others. The company says its findings are derived from more than 13.5 billion video ad views. Among the major findings:

Web video ads are becoming more like TV spots: In 2012, the standard 30-second TV spot became the most used format on the web (42% of all digital video ads). This is at the expense of 15-second spots, which now account for 34% of video ads.

Ad volume continues to grow: Q4 video ad volume rose 47% year-over-year, fueled largely by holiday spending and increased ad loads. In fact, web videos of 20+ minutes now have 9.4 video ads per video view, which FreeWheel says is the most since it began reporting this data in 2010, and up from 6.9 per video view during Q4 2011. Q4 pre-roll volume increased 45% year-over-year and Q4 mid-roll volume jumped up 60%.

Video ad completion rates are at an all-time high: 93% for long-form content (20+ minutes); 81% for mid-form content (5-20 minutes); and 68% for short-form content (less than 5 minutes).

Video viewing on non-PC/Macs is growing, and iOS is leading the charge: In Q4 2011, viewing on devices like smartphones, tablets, and gaming consoles accounted for 2% of total video viewing volume. By Q4 2012, that number is up to 12%. More than 1.8 billion video views occurred on these devices in Q4 2012. Apple devices continue to dominate, with iOS devices accounting for 60% of non-PC/Mac video viewing. Android devices represent 32% of such video viewing.

Super Bowl XLVII is the Most Social Super Bowl Ever

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Super Bowl XLVII is the Most Social TV Telecast Ever

This year’s Super Bowl XLVII has garnered the most social activity in Social TV history. See all the data and details in Trendrr’s infographic below!

What a $4 Mil. Super Bowl Ad Could Buy in Digital

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TV ads during the Super Bowl are expensive: $4 million for 30 seconds of media, to be precise, and that’s before paying for things like production costs, agency fees and celebrity endorsements. They do, however, allow advertisers to reach over 100 million viewers at a single time — and be part of the cultural zeitgeist.

The digital industry regularly complains it doesn’t see the level of big-brand ad investment TV does, so I thought it’d be interesting to figure out how far $4 million would go in the world of digital advertising. Here’s what it’d buy, in theory at least:
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A portal roadblock every day for at least a week
AOL, Yahoo and other major publishers sell day-long homepage takeovers for around $500,000, media buyers report. That means $4 million could ensure your ads are plastered all over a major homepage non-stop for at least a week.
$4 million / $500,000 = 8 days

Over 100 million video impressions on Hulu
According to media buyers, Hulu currently sells its video ad inventory at around a $30 CPM. Therefore:
$4 million / $30 CPM = 130 million impressions

YouTube homepage takeover
An eight-day YouTube homepage ad
Instead of a Super Bowl ad you could buy out YouTube’s homepage ad units for at least 10 days, based on a price tag of up to $500,000 a day.
$4 million / $500,000 = 8 days

50 million Forbes.com first-page interstitials
Media buyers say Forbes charges around an $80 CPM for its welcome interstitial ads. At that price you could buy around 50 million impressions, but even if every impression hit a unique user, that’d still only be half the potential audience for a Super Bowl ad.
$4 million / $80 CPM = 50 million impressions

Twitter’s Promoted Trending Topic every day for a month
Promoted trending topics on the social network currently sell for up to $120,000 a day. Based on that figure, $4 million would afford you the paid placement every day for at least a month.
$4 million / $120,000 = 33 days

Over 100 million video network impressions
A typical video ad network buy is charged in the region of $10 CPM. On that basis, $4 million could buy around 400 million impressions.
$4 million / $10 CPM = 400 million impressions

Source: digiday

Akamai’s plan to fix Social TV

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Akamai, the Web optimization company whose servers deliver up to 30 percent of Web traffic, is setting its sights on creating a TV technology that can detect what a person is watching and stream secondary content to a smartphone or tablet in near real-time.

The aim, the company says, is to take today’s fast-growing but chaotic landscape of TV “companion” apps – such as ones delivering athlete stats to people watching the Olympics, or crime-fighting details to CSI junkies—and make it easier to create and see such additional content.

Nielsen, the measurement firm, recently reported that 40 percent of U.S. television watchers are now in the daily habit of using their smartphone or tablet in front of the TV. Many networks and shows have tried to reach such people with apps providing auxiliary content—often to encourage viewers to watch the show live and thus please advertisers.

At the same time, aggregators such as Shazam and Zeebox are cutting deals to deliver this so-called second-screen content. Shazam makes audio “fingerprints” of 160 channels of U.S. TV programs and delivers various bundles of content to people who open the app and record three seconds of whatever they are watching. “Consumers don’t want an app on the phone for every show they like—not everybody is that motivated,” says David Jones, marketing vice president for Shazam, which is based in Menlo Park, California.

But these technologies have only scratched the surface of what’s possible. People who use smartphones and tablets while watching TV are often checking e-mail or Facebook, and show-specific apps mainly serve the most devoted fans. Only half of Shazam’s 85 million users tune into TV-related content weekly or more often.

What Akamai sees is a chance to bring some order to this chaos and make everything run a bit faster—and through the Web, not a collection of apps. Indeed, Shazam takes one to four seconds to detect which show someone is watching, and it lacks something to offer for many local channels.

The Akamai proof of concept—shown for the first time to MIT Technology Review last week—consists of a few parts. The first is a piece of software that would reside on whatever device you use, whether it’s a television set fed by a cable or satellite service, a set-top box delivering content over the Internet, or even a DVR playing a recorded show. A one-time authentication process links your tablet or smartphone to the device.

Real-time information on what show you’re watching—even as you change the channel—gets sent to Akamai’s servers. Relevant secondary information then gets streamed directly back to your smartphone or tablet in near real-time.

Kris Alexander, an Akamai strategist, demonstrated the technology while showing a scene from Mission Impossible II, in which Tom Cruise’s character was visiting a racetrack. In the tablet in Alexander’s hand, a link popped up leading to information about the Randwick Racecourse in Australia, where the scene was filmed; later, a link for buying Cruise’s brand of aviator sunglasses appeared.

A New York-based industry consortium called Second Screen Society projects that the market for second-screen apps is $490 million today and could be $5.9 billion by 2017. Guy Finley, executive director of the group, says that while he’s not familiar with Akamai’s technology, faster delivery could be crucial. “Second-screen apps are all about user interface, user experience—so anything that impacts that user experience to make it more seamless and enjoyable is going to make a difference,” he says. “It will help the whole proliferation of the format in general.”

Akamai is still demonstrating the technology to broadcasters and other potential customers. Many other players are working on new strategies; in the past year, for example, Zeebox took on investments from Comcast and NBC Universal, and partnered with HBO, to deliver companion apps.

What could a widely used, super-fast platform lead to? One can imagine deeper dives into news content, or real-time polling during a presidential debate, building on the existing phenomenon of people tweeting their impressions about television shows in real-time (see “A Social Media Decoder”). But the most popular applications of new communications technology platforms—whether the World Wide Web or Twitter—are often far from clear at the outset.

Nielsen broadening TV household definition

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If a viewer watches a TV show on a tablet, should that be reflected in its Nielsen rating?

That’s a question at the heart of a complicated decision Nielsen hopes to make by the end of the first quarter regarding a new definition for what constitutes a TV household.

The new definition is almost certain, according to sources, to include for the first time viewing on TV sets that show video via broadband connections, whether from a device like Apple TV or directly into the set itself. In addition, that viewing would not have to come in the form of linear channels, which would open up measurement to on-demand options like episodes posted on a broadcaster’s website.

But what is currently being debated is whether homes that restrict their viewing to smartphones or tablets will also be considered TV households. Those devices may have to wait until their measurement can be integrated into the TV ratings system.

A proposal from Nielsen is currently being reviewed by a special committee comprised of representatives across its client base. Nielsen is said to favor an approach staggered in stages, say sources, the first of which would be ready for the 2013-14 TV season incorporating broadband-connected TV sets — but not include measurement of video consumption on wireless devices.

While the TV industry is in general agreement on the long-term goal — one measurement of all viewing regardless of platform — the dilemma is how best to proceed in the short term.

Either all viewing — regardless of the separate measurements being made on other platforms — gets counted into the TV household total, or only once Nielsen is ready to integrate any one of the separate measurements with the TV data should it be counted into that total.

Nielsen will huddle with the committee before the quarter is over to get input on the proposal before rendering a decision that will give the TV industry time to strategize how best to sell programming at upfronts and for Nielsen itself to make the necessary changes to its reporting software.

Nielsen isn’t leaning in either direction, according to Pat McDonough, senior VP insights, analysis and policy at Nielsen, who indicated there’s no chance the status quo will remain.

“The question we have with our clients is do we do that in stages or do we do that all at once?” she said. “Committee members are in process of discussing with their various companies and we expect to come back after the new year with the direction for the industry that we’re going to take.”

Given criticism the company has long endured over both its current TV measurement and the pace at which new platforms are being tracked, it’s a decision not being taken lightly at Nielsen, where the new policy will likely represent as fundamental a shift, if not more so, as the adoption of people meters or C3 currency.

The current definition of a TV household is a home with both a TV set and video delivered via over-the-air broadcast or a multichannel package supplied by either cable, satellite or telco sevices. Watching on PC, smartphone or tablet isn’t included.

What’s known internally as the “What Nielsen Measures” committee was convened in mid-2012 to reckon with back-to-back declines in the annual number of TV households, which fell from 115.9 million in 2010-11 to 114.7 million the following season — the first such drop in 20 years. An additional 500,000 households disappeared before 2012-13, leaving a total of 114.2 million.

There are various theories as to what accounts for the decline, chief among them that a new generation of viewers are doing without TVs as they embrace digital alternatives.

But while broadening the definition of what constitutes a TV household could shore up that shortfall, advocates for waiting until measurement of viewing on devices can be integrated warn that increasing the number of total homes prematurely runs the risk of diminishing ratings. If the number of screens is increased without a corresponding increase in the measurement of the viewing on those screens, that can inflate the base number against which the number of viewers is calculated — potentially skewing the rating downward.

And yet there are others that are willing to see some destabilization of measurement from year to year in the short term for the greater good of getting a truer reflection of the range of screen across what’s being watched.

At the very least, Nielsen is likely to extend measurement to broadband-connected TV sets. That is good news for companies weighing virtual MSO plays like Intel, Sony and Dish who want to convince programmers that viewing is being measured across their systems. However, in the event they also provide content

Source: Variety