The criminal trial of former Posterscope USA executives Todd Hansen and James Buckley won’t be going forward. Both men, who initially pled not guilty and were set to go to trial next month, have changed their pleas to guilty, the U.S. District Court in Manhattan has confirmed.Hansen, 48, the former president of Posterscope USA, pled guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and one count of wire fraud. According to the Manhattan Attorney's Office, Hansen faces a maximum sentence of 40 years in prison. He is scheduled to be sentenced by Judge Jed S. Rakoff on October 11.Buckley, also 48, and the former Posterscope USA finance director, pled guilty to similar charges and also faces a 40-year maximum term. He will be sentenced Oct. 4.Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara stated that “Todd Hansen and his co-conspirator [Buckley] engaged in accounting sleight-of-hand for the sole purpose of self-enrichment, in violation of the securities laws, and his fiduciary and ethical duties to his company and its shareholders. They have now both admitted their guilt and will be punished accordingly.”The pair were arrested last fall and formally indicted in February on the fraud and conspiracy charges. According to an investigation carried out jointly by the FBI and the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s office, the former executives allegedly falsified accounting ledgers to make it appear that the Aegis Group-owned out-of-home specialist was booking more ads than it actually was in order to increase their own compensation.The alleged scheme made it appear as if Posterscope earned net income of $19.7 million more than it actually did between 2005 and 2009, per the charges. “As a result of meeting these fictitious performance goals, Hansen and Buckley were paid total salaries and bonuses in the amounts of $1.1 million and $650,000 respectively,” the initial charge sheet stated.An Aegis rep couldn’t be immediately reached for comment.
Pivotal Research Group, the media and communication research company, has lowered its organic revenue growth estimates for WPP, Omnicom and Interpublic Group for both the soon-to-end second quarter and full-year 2012. Organic revenue growth is considered a key performance indicator across the advertising industry.The downgrade from Pivotal comes just weeks after several influential ad-spend forecasters, including ZenithOptimedia, Magna Global and Barclays, lowered their estimates for 2012 ad spending growth.Pivotal Senior Research Analyst Brian Wieser cited macroeconomic worries, including ongoing concerns about Europe, as well as the slowing growth in “important advertising markets” such as China and India.For Omnicom, Wieser now believes the holding company will deliver just 3.7% organic growth in the second quarter, reduced from his previous estimate of 5.6%. For all of 2012, Wieser now says Omnicom will post organic growth of 4.2%, down from his previous estimate of 5.5%.Organic growth for Interpublic this quarter will reach just 2%, he reports, which is down from a previous estimate of 2.3%. Full-year organic growth for the firm will reach just 2.8%, not the previous prediction of 3.0%.For WPP, Wieser now estimates the firm will post 3.9% organic growth for the second quarter, down from the previously expected 4.7%. The holding company’s full-year growth will drop to 4.3% from the earlier anticipated 5.5%.Wieser reported that despite near-term concerns, “we remain very positive about the mid-term and long-term prospects for agency holding companies.”He also indicated that WPP “remains our preferred name in the sector, given its "diversified exposure to the marketing services industry, its dominance in China and faster-growing markets …and its dominant media agency division, GroupM.”That said, Wieser did not change the ratings he has on any of holding companies, maintaining “buys” on both WPP and Interpublic and a “hold” rating on Omnicom.
One day after the court's major health-care decision, CBS won a broadcast victory. The Supreme Court refused to review a court ruling concerning Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" during the 2004 Super Bowl.On Friday, the Supreme Court refused to consider a lower-court decision, which threw out the Federal Communications Commission's $550,000 fine for CBS over Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” during the network’s live coverage of the big NFL TV game.This rejects an appeal made by the Obama administration.The high court also refused to change a lower court ruling, throwing out an FCC ruling that would have allowed companies to own both newspapers and broadcast stations in the same market.CBS has already paid the fine concerning the Jackson snafu, and now the FCC needs to refund the money.Earlier in June -- in another affront to the FCC -- the Supreme Court ruled that the commission's indecency penalties against Fox and ABC should not have been made. On the issue of "fleeting" indecencies/expletives, the Supreme Court says the rules were vague and not timely.This involved Fox TV network broadcasts when -- in separate instances -- Cher and Nicole Richie uttered expletives during awards shows in 2002 and 2003. The ABC issue involved a "brief nudity" scene in one 2003 episode of "NYPD Blue." Then the FCC fined dozens of ABC TV network affiliates a total of more than $1 million for airing the episode.
Early results on Thursday show Univision scored a rare summer victory over the English-language broadcast networks -- among both 18-49 and 18-34 viewers.Nielsen preliminarily says Univision posted a 1.4 rating/4 share among 18-49 viewers and a 1.4 rating/5 share among 18-34 viewers. Among the broader 18-49 measure, ABC and CBS came next, each with a 1.3 rating/4 share among 18-49 viewers; Fox was at a 1.1/3; NBC, a 1.0/3; and CW a 0.3/1.Overall, CBS still pulled in 6.54 million viewers; ABC, 4.99 million; NBC, 4.33 million; Univision, 3.63 million; Fox, 2.61 million; and the CW, 760,000.Univision ran against a number of usual broadcast reruns, a special "U.S. Olympics Trial" broadcast on NBC, and a new summer drama on NBC. The best-rated show of the evening was a rerun of CBS' "Big Bang Theory," at a 2.0 rating/7 share. ABC was next with its season premiere of "Wipeout" at a 1.9/6. This was down more than 20% from last summer's 2.4 rating start-up.The wild card still to come is NBC's "U.S. Olympic Trials,", which preliminarily scored a 1.7/6 at 8 p.m. NBC's summer drama, "Saving Hope" picked up 40% from its somewhat microscopic 0.4 rating score of a week before -- to a somewhat visible 0.7/2.
The Outdoor Channel took a swing Friday with a promotion giving baseball fans premium outdoor real estate. Fans spent the night on the Chicago White Sox home field as the channel sought to raise awareness about its availability in Chicago.The promotion was co-sponsored by cable operator Xfinity and had fans pitching tents on U.S. Cellular Field along, while the away game against the New York Yankees was available on the JumboTron. Later in the summer, the network will have an “Outdoor Channel Night” at the stadium for a home game. Mark Zona, host of an Outdoor Channel fishing show, will throw out the first pitch. The first 20,000 fans attending will get a camouflage White Sox hat.Network CEO Tom Hornish stated that it’s a “high-exposure marketing opportunity that creatively touches outdoor and baseball sports fans.”The White Sox are in first place in their division, but rank 25th out of 30 teams in average attendance this year with 22,500 per game.Outdoor Channel has been available on a digital preferred tier on the Xfinity system in the Chicago market since last August. In May, the network said its total distribution increased to 37.8 million homes per Nielsen.Its parent company recently announced it would try to sell its non-core business that operates aerial cameras at sports events, perhaps a reason its share price was trading near a 52-week high at $7.31 Friday.
Citi is the presenting sponsor of “Live Extra,” the section on NBCOlympics.com that will offer live coverage of all Olympic events for the London Games. “Live Extra” promises to receive considerable traffic during work hours as NBCUniversal makes all events available live via a PC or mobile device -- rather than holding some events to air exclusively in prime time on TV.“Live Extra” is a TV Everywhere-type service, where users must prove they pay for TV service that includes CNBC and MSNBC.Coke and BMW also have presenting sponsorship roles on NBCOlympics.com, backing a “Golden Moments” and “Team USA” section, respectively. Both marketers have begun running pre-roll spots as the site offers coverage of the Olympic trials.Coke banner ads on the site feature soccer standout Alex Morgan and gymnastics star Shawn Johnson. BMW’s tout its sponsorship role with the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic teams.As part of its Proud Sponsor of Moms campaign, Procter & Gamble is the sponsor of an “Olympic 17” section that focuses on athletes and their roads traveled to London. Banner ads include a Facebook link.Warner Bros. is backing a “Meet The Olympic Athletes” section. It’s presented by “‘Magic Mike,’” a film released Friday that may not be drawing significant interest by the time the Olympic flame is lit. The Steven Soderbergh-directed film focusing on a male stripper played by Channing Tatum, has a banner ad with a Facebook thumb that reads: “Help Make Stripping An Official Sport!”
The challenges of mobile measurement are numerous and familiar: a lack of tracking cookies, fragmentation among devices and platforms, the split between apps and the mobile Web, and a daunting array of analytics tools among them. In the absence of standardized metrics, a new Forrester report outlines strategies for piecing together different data sources to effectively track mobile campaigns. Companies should start by categorizing their mobile “subchannels” including search, display, apps, Facebook and ad networks as a foundation for benchmarking ad performance. Each channel yields its own data set, and first-party data from owned sites and apps are the most reliable. Layered on that should be contextual data according to factors such as the operating system, handset, location, and time of day, which provide ways of targeting users at the right time. Also, companies should collect interaction data including impressions, clicks and conversions. The data should be tagged to specific product “life cycle” stages. “For example, display impressions connect to ‘discover,’ while Facebook time-spent type data on your page should be tagged to ‘engage,’” states the report authored by Forrester analyst Anthony Mullen. This approach, he noted, helps marketers see what levels of reach and engagement they are achieving across different mobile ad formats like display, social and branded apps. Beyond taking these initial steps, Forrester also recommends more specific tactics -- such as turning to agencies with mobile expertise, including SapientNitro, Tribal DDB, and AKQA that have created “custom integrations to draw the disparate pieces of mobile measurement and campaign planning puzzle together,” according to the report. (Forrester ranked top mobile agencies in a previous study.) The research firm also suggests working with agencies and mobile analytics providers, such as AdMob, Rosetta and Bango, that have relationships with wireless carriers to help identify unique users more accurately. They can also report on which devices and operating systems people are using. Because of the limitations of Web cookies for mobile tracking, the report advises turning to proxies. That approach itself has become more challenging, given Apple’s restrictions on use of its unique device identifier (UDID) by third parties for tracking app usage. Apple is expected to include a more privacy-friendly UDID alternative in the latest update to its iOS platform. By building “hybrid” apps that incorporate HTML5 technology, brands can also more effectively collect data from cookies. Forrester notes that Facebook, British Airways and many other companies are starting to take this approach with new apps. The study stresses the importance of ongoing A/B and multivariate testing around measurement data to ensure that campaigns are optimized for the right channels, device types and time of day. As an example, it pointed to an SMS campaign that MTV ran with Starbucks that tailored messages by handset model and stored that information to retain the right preferences. With continued testing and refinement, it found the optimum message length to be 120 characters -- even less than the 140-character maximum for a Twitter post.
KOHLER, Wisc. – The answer was all around them. Five panelists sat onstage considering the problem: “Proving Social ROI to the CFO.” The occasion was the MediaPost Brand Marketers Summit. The venue was The American Club, a resort where the WASPy tradition infuses every cubic inch of the sprawling campus, like the fireplace smoke that clings to the leather chairs in the hoary library. Compared to this place, the Ritz-Carlton is a kibbutz. The American Club is the palace that plumbing fixtures built in the town that plumbing fixtures built. Teeing off at Kohler’s Whistling Straits, one of the finest golf courses in the world, it’s hard not to wonder how many urinals underwrote the experience. But back to the panel. There were five experts onstage, mulling over the problem of proving social media’s value to Chief Financial Officers, who tend to view even advertising as expensive smoke and mirrors of dubious benefit to shareholder value. Thus have CMO’s been obliged to fixate on ROI metrics that often are themselves dubious, and in any case do not conform with any standard accounting notions of return on investment. The quants say these modern metrics can somehow isolate a correlation between a given piece of spend and sales lifts. And maybe they are right, but the CFOs of the world would be forgiven for rolling their eyes. So now comes social media and the justification exercise gets genuinely absurd. What a scene: five very smart executives sitting in comfy executive chairs uncomfortably – if not embarrassedly – invoking such fuzzy “metrics” as engagement, awareness, shareability, recency, sentiment and KPI s. A KPI, of course, is a key performance indicators, i.e., a factor so obviously without statistical basis nobody can bring themselves to even call it a metric. Some scary things were said, such as the repeated references to social “campaigns.” Social, of course, is no place for campaigns. It is no place to drive brand messages, or to excessively dangle brand offers or to in any way be nakedly transactional. It is a place to cultivate relationships with people who, for whatever reason, have an affinity for your brand. Social is a place for sharing, helping and seeking common cause with individuals who relate to you. Mounting campaigns there is like handing our business cards at the neighborhood picnic. Unfortunately, the obsession with metrics leads directly to exactly the sort of heavy-handed campaign mentality that denudes the social space of the very authenticity and spontaneity that makes it so special. Jim McCain, manager of global customer relations management and social for Amway, spoke eloquently about the value of ongoing dialogue to direct-selling organization, but then made my heart sink by speaking of data-informed posts: grading response to various social content so as to later, “replicate the tonality or topic of successful posts.” No. No. No. That is not social. That’s direct mail. Erica Barth, vice president products and partnerships at Resolution Media, was as close as anybody to articulating the central fact the C-suite needs to understand: “It’s not just another line item I’m putting in a media plan,” she said. “It’s a lot of small interactions that can add up over time.” Just as ordinary human relationships add up over time. Social is the place where there can be segments, but there cannot be targets. It is not about conquest, any more than friendship is about conquest. It is about shared interests and shared values that can be the basis for priceless but utterly immeasurable lifelong relationships. Customer relations management fits in, the odd offer fits in, but manipulation has no place. And if you do it right – on the subject of “adding up” -- the resulting trust and loyalty increase your lifetime customer value and reduce your promotional spend dramatically. Grant Munro, managing director for strategic accounts at Syncapse, spoke of a Coca-Cola initiative called Coca-Cola Rewards, in which Coke drinkers could take a bottle-cap code onto the brand’s fan page and register for a prize. This created tracking data so the brand could model the relationship between social behavior and purchasing behavior. That’s fine; it’s always good to know what’s happening out there. Yet, in a way, the deep dive into behavior is irrelevant -- just as the question addressed by the panel is irrelevant. Proving social ROI to the CFO? Nobody needs to do that, because no brand can opt out of social. Every brand is in social, whether they spend a penny there or not. It is a fact of life forevermore. The only question is how thoughtfully you will participate. Which gets back to the venue for all of this: Kohler. The five-star resort, the four golf courses, the spa, the beach, the restaurants, the dead-animal skins, the smoky libraries – they are all here because the company recognized existing technology and brought it to the world. That technology was indoor plumbing. This palace was literally financed by the throne. As the children’s book sums up the marketplace so nicely, “Everyone Poops.” Even employees and customers and vendors. Yet has any CFO ever demanded the ROI on the men’s room? Of course not. We need to have a place for our hygiene activities and that’s that. No key performance indicator necessary. So when the CFO demands for justification for your output, just say, “Sure, if you’ll give me the justification for yours.”