Following years of pleading from Madison Avenue, Nielsen Media Research Monday quietly told its clients it would finally make TV commercial ratings available beginning in October 2005. Well, Nielsen didn't say it exactly that way. What it said was that beginning next year, it would "incorporate minute-by-minute respondent level viewing for all national programming sources and will include flags for minutes of programs with commercials." Simply put, the data will allow advertisers, agencies, and networks to easily identify the exact rating for any television minute, including ones that have TV commercials in them. "Finally," reacted an ebullient Kate Sirkin, executive vice president and global research director of Starcom MediaVest Group, following the announcement. Sirkin, who has been among the most vociferous champions of the minute-by-minute data, said the development comes none too soon. "As television continues to fragment, it will significantly change the value of a 30-second commercial," she said, adding that it has become imperative to evaluate the actual rating of commercials themselves. The Nielsen move means that as soon as the beginning of the 2005-06 TV season, agencies will begin posting buys via commercial ratings, and as soon as the spring of 2006, they will begin negotiating upfront buys for the 2006-07 TV season based on them. However, it remains unclear exactly how many agencies will actual subscribe to the data, which is expected to be sold on an a la carte basis and at a hefty price tag. Nielsen did not disclose its rate card for the new data, and said only: "This new product will be available to those clients that elect to subscribe to it." But an earlier recent pricing model for the data would have had a handful of networks and agencies sharing it on a collaborative basis at a price tag of several million dollars per year. SMG was one of the few shops to publicly acknowledge agreeing to pay for the service.
Future Network USA, the publisher of a growing cache of enthusiast titles such as PlayStation 2 Magazine, Official Xbox Magazine, and Guitar World, is launching a new group of action sports titles led by a former longtime staffer at Time4Media's TransWorld publishing group. Fran Richards was the vice president of sales and marketing and publisher at TransWorld Media, which publishes Skateboarding, Snowboarding, and other titles, from 1988 through 2002. He has been tapped to lead the new venture, Future Action Sports, out of San Diego. A still-evolving list of consumer and trade-focused titles is planned for Future Action Sports. In January 2005, the company will premiere the five-times-a-year Skateboard Trade News and the quarterly Snowboard Trade News. By August 2005, a new snowboard consumer magazine is planned, with other launches in the works. It will be in the consumer market that Richards plans to compete in a space that has been long dominated by TransWorld Media, which became a subsidiary to Time Inc. in 2000. It is his contention that a void has opened up since that purchase. He claims that these titles have become less accessible to readers, as they are staffed more and more by professional athletes rather than journalists. "Those magazines have changed tremendously," he says. "They used to be very inclusive. Now they have gotten extremely hard core during a time when the sports have actually become mainstream." Richards also complains that Time Inc. often chose profit at the expense of content integrity, accepting ads that were inappropriate for these magazines' authenticity-sensitive audience. Richards believes that Future, with its success at delivering premium content to highly dedicated niche groups, offers a more supportive environment. "Future really understands passion," he says. "They offer the right newsstand infrastructure and incredible talent. I have been really impressed with these guys." Future's titles have shown impressive growth in circulation over the last few years, despite often carrying a premium newsstand price--sometimes in the neighborhood of $10. As for the planned trade magazines, Richards says that TransWorld successfully ran similar specialized titles for 15 years before Time Inc. consolidated the majority of them. While not expected to be profitable, Richards believes these will provide "a critical leadership position" in these growing sports.
In 2009, after what will then be a 17-year run as host of the Tonight Show, current host Jay Leno will turn the slot over to Conan O'Brien. Leno officially made the announcement during Monday night's Tonight Show. "In 2009, I'll be 59 years-old and will have had this dream job for 17 years," Leno said in a statement issued by NBC. "When I signed my new contract, I felt that the timing was right to plan for my successor and there is no one more qualified than Conan. Plus, I promised Mavis I would take her out for dinner before I turned 60." O'Brien, who succeeded David Letterman as the host of NBC's Late Night 11 years ago, has signed a new contract with the network in a long-term deal that will keep him at his post for the next five years and then has him immediately transitioning as host of The Tonight Show. Leno succeeded Johnny Carson as host of the venerable late night talk show in 1992. He and Letterman famously competed for the slot, and after he lost, Letterman exited NBC to be come the host of the CBS Late Show with David Letterman.
Sync magazine's December issue will include a special CD-ROM disk featuring both bonus editorial and advertising content. The interactive CD will include trailers of holiday feature films, DVDs, television shows, music, and video games. Editorially, the disk will launch the publication's first annual holiday gift guide, complete with original product reviews and even a section devoted to shopping for the women in your life. "The idea came from readers' interest in the CD-ROM format and the "tech-tainment lifestyle," said Janet Oak, Sync's marketing director. "We wanted to create a format that is an extension of the editorial." The bundled CD program stems from an effort launched back in August, when Sync created a virtual CD on its Web site. Readers were driven to this microsite by an ad in the magazine. The virtual CD, which included trailers for movies such as "Open Water" and "Cellular," generated such a strong response that the mailer program was developed. In addition to featuring lots of video content, The CD's holiday gift guide will be e-commerce-enabled, allowing users to shop at will. "It's a great way to link purchasers with readers," said Oak. Yet she admitted that the majority of interest in the program has come from advertisers hoping to place their movie trailers and TV spots on the CD. "Direct sales has not been a huge driver," she said. "It would be great for us to get a big retail partner or a credit card provider." Advertisers have until October 20th to get signed on. In addition to gathering advertisers, the program is also an important branding tool for the four-month-old male-targeted 'tech-tainment' title, which blends technology and lifestyle. "It's very competitive out there, and we want to stand out as an innovator," said Oak.
Today, there are two battles going on in the media business that we can regard as object lessons. One is taking place in television and the other in interactive. Both of these object lessons involve efforts by some to standardize how an industry looks at itself and by others to innovate within the industry. In television, Nielsen's antiquated ratings system is under continued fire for its diary-based method of collecting data on users' viewing habits. Since the advent of digital technologies, we media types have been continuously puzzled by the lasting use of this antiquated method. Cable companies, the innovators in this battle, are pushing for more precise measures and trying to force Nielsen to replace their old system with one that provides information right from viewers' homes electronically, via an appliance that provides input automatically and minute-by-minute. In interactive, the battle that is being waged involves behavioral targeting companies Revenue Science and Tacoda. Tacoda's recently launched "Tacoda Targets" divides Web users into 22 marketing segments such as: auto buyers, diet and fitness, golfers, parents, etc. Revenue Science, Tacoda's chief rival, responded to Tacoda's announcement by proclaiming their skepticism that Tacoda's guidelines would ever yield useful marketing information. More to the point, Revenue Science correctly pointed out that only Tacoda clients stood to benefit from these measures, implying that the marketing segments had nothing to do with standardization and everything to do with productization. I'm all for the idea of a universal standard, as long as it measures the output quality of segments for advertisers, rather than defines them by a minimum set of behaviors. Most importantly, it is absolutely imperative that this is a shared standard, or else it is completely meaningless. And until we all work to create relevant and lasting definitions that speak across technologies, we are failing in our efforts to streamline the targeting within this industry. As anyone in this space knows, interactive ad shops regularly ask behavioral targeting firms to define standard audience segments across their network of publishing partners. All they care about is whether particular Web users are likely to purchase products. While it is necessary for us to answer those requests with actionable segmentation in the short term, it is equally necessary that we all work to create an accepted set of standards as a benchmark. In the future, we can expect to see more and more shifting in television measurement toward quantification. Today, however, Nielson's archaic approach is an accepted and shared standard. The core idea utilized in the television industry is one worthy of adoption. They aren't competing with one another via any kind of "innovation," they simply utilize a standard so that marketers can measure the effectiveness of their ad spends. Our industry, however, continues to feature major players that launch their own "standards" exclusively, creating fragmentation among us and confusion among our clients. And the lion's share of ad dollars remain on the sidelines, away from interactive, just waiting for us to all get along. This is not something best left to our trade associations. If each of the 20 largest marketing technology companies in the interactive space dedicated just 10 percent of their development dollars for one year to lateral innovation, not vertical innovation - that is, if we all focused on getting our products to work better together, instead of changing our products in their exclusive silos - we would make great strides toward the development of standards. But as long as our measures more closely resemble a Tower of Babel than they do any industry standard, we'll all continue to look up at TV, wishing for their revenues while wasting ours on isolated productization with no relevance outside our own office walls. R. Michael Leo is CEO of Trafficmac, which provides ad operations software, technology, and outsourcing services.