Turner Broadcasting has awarded its estimated $150 million media-buying assignment to Horizon Media after a review. The agency will handle buying for all Turner Networks, which include CNN, TNT, Cartoon Network, Turner Sports and TBS among others. However, Turner will continue to handle search marketing and social media in-house. The incumbent was MediaVest, part of Publicis Groupe’s Starcom Mediavest Group, which won the business in 2010. Previously, Turner had handled buying in house. Turner confirmed that MediaVest was not invited to defend. “It was time to make a change,” said Dennis Camlek, SVP Turner Media Group at Turner Broadcasting. “We worked with them for five years, which says a lot.” As for the choice of Horizon, which will officially take the reins at the start of 2015, Camlek credited their category experience, both past (NBC broadcast and cable networks) and present (A&E, History). “They’re well known and well respected and have deep expertise in tune-in,” which Camlek said is especially critical in today’s on-demand environment. Camlek also said that Horizon’s pricing proposals were “strong.” And Horizon has an impressive array of advanced activation tools that Turner can tap into, said Camlek, an agency veteran who worked at both Horizon and Omnicom’s PHD. Camlek said he is still working with the agency on who will lead the Turner business. The review began a few months back and Turner talked with six or seven shops, narrowing the list down to three finalists, which he declined to disclose. The Turner assignment is the second big piece of business that has shifted from Starcom MediaVest Group to Horizon this year. Earlier this year Burger King shifted its estimated $250 million media assignment from Starcom to Horizon. Turner did not use an outside search consultant to assist with the process.
While the ad industry has embraced conventional audience ratings as a method for determining the reach of their online ad campaigns, new trend data from Nielsen indicates that brands are basing their digital audience buys on increasingly narrower targets. The data suggests that marketers target more narrowly with digital media than with television, and that as more advertisers begin utilizing digital media ratings, they gravitate toward increasingly narrower segments. The data, which comes from the second annual Online Campaign Ratings Benchmarks report being released today, shows that the percentage of campaigns targeting broad demographics declined from 40% when Nielsen first benchmarked the marketplace last year to 36% this year. The shift doesn’t necessarily represent a change in the behavior of specific marketers, but may represent a shift in the composition of marketers utilizing the OCR ratings. Nielsen executives say the number of campaigns being tagged for OCR ratings has doubled in the past year to more than 10,000 currently. Regardless of the reason for the shift toward narrower targeting, the result is that a lower percentage of online campaigns are reaching their intended targets. The percentage declined from 69% of all campaign impressions being tracked last year to only 59% this year. “It’s mostly due to the fact that there has been a change in the diversity of the kind of campaigns that are being tracked,” explains David Wong, vice president-product leadership at Nielsen. While the decline in the overall percentage of targets reached with online campaigns dropped 10 percentage points in the past year, Wong says it actually reflects a positive trend from Nielsen’s point of view, because it means more brands are utilizing the data to target their audiences more narrowly. “It means they are using OCR to measure their ROI,” he says. Wong says the next development to keep an eye on is Nielsen’s next report, which will include data on mobile audience exposure, which Nielsen began tracking in July. The next report including the mobile audience data should be released near the end of 2014.
Interest in native advertising is surging among brand marketers and agencies alike, but many still don’t know how to begin adopting this new channel, in part because they lack content that would be suitable for deployment in native ads. To help brands and agencies overcome that hurdle, native ad distribution platform Nativo has created a new Content Creator Consortium that can get marketers up and running with native ad content faster than they could on their own.The new consortium includes content creators NewsCred, Contently, Visual.ly, Niche and Poptent, together offering marketers custom content capabilities across digital media categories, such as articles, visuals (e.g. infographics) and video. In creating the consortium, Nativo hopes to offer marketers a way of streamlining the process for creating native ad campaigns, from conception to creation, distribution, and measurement.Chris Rooke, Nativo’s senior vice president of strategy and operations, noted: “Within the last 18 months, we’ve seen this huge influx of media agencies and brand marketers interested in native distribution. This is great, [but] what we didn’t anticipate is that many brands would come without content to distribute, or that the content wouldn’t be just right for native placement.”Rooke added: “We realized the way to close that gap was to facilitate content creation on their behalf, to help get them started. We’re helping them thinking about their content strategy and getting going immediately, without having to go away and come back six months later.” The content creation partners were all selected based on their ability to produce content of suitable quality quickly and on budget.Under the system organized by Nativo, clients and agencies always know who created the content, Rooke emphasized, adding that the company has already seen a lot of activity through the consortium, which launched informally six months ago: “Typically the flight dates extend and the budgets expand significantly. You can go from one article a month all the way to an annual requirement of 50 pieces of content or more.”
Apple has published new guidelines for developers submitting apps to the iTunes store that serve ads. The Cupertino, Calif. company said it will reject any mobile app that does not use Advertising Identifiers. The IDFA is a unique ID for each iOS device and is the only way to offer targeted ads across its network. Similarly, if the developer indicates that the app uses the IDFA, but does not have built-in ad functionality or does not display ads properly, Apple could reject the app. If the developer indicates that the app does not use the IDFA, but it does, Apple will put the app in the Invalid Binary status. For many reasons, it has become increasingly important to identify content-related ads in apps, as more developers use deep links to help people find relevant content. Mobile deep links contain a uniform resource identifier with all the information needed to directly find a particular location within an app from another application or search engine. Bing uses Bing App Link, whereas Google offers App Indexing. Mobile advertising continues to become increasingly important to Apple. In late August, Apple formally released a new ad format in iAd, and in June published an overview on how to monetize apps in the iAd network. The overview also highlights new ad formats for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad apps running on Apple's network. Apple has expanded its iAd advertising network into 16 countries or regions, expanding into Russia and Switzerland through the iAd Workbench. Apple touts the platform as a simple way to advertise in apps to the millions of people who use Apple products. The platform lets app developers choose your audience, set the price to pay for ad targeting, and create a campaign. Apple is preparing to make an announcement on Sept. 9.
Hyundai is returning for its fourth year as NCAA college football sponsor with an integrated campaign touting the brand’s car lineup. The effort also has a strong regional focus around the 17 college football programs it sponsors through IMG College. The campaign -- comprising TV, print, radio, digital, and social media -- also brings in Santa Monica, Calif.-based YouTube and social food network Tastemade, adding spice to an experiential component at each of the schools it sponsors. The campaign, via Innocean U.S.A, Hyundai's agency of record, includes a national TV spot and a raft of regional ads to air in college markets where Hyundai-sponsored teams are located. The national spot, “Hands,” examines fans’ hand signals representing their teams, with footage of fans in stadiums making the hand signals (like University of Texas' “hook 'em” sign) culminating in the "number one" sign for winners. The spots air during the 18 SEC on CBS national games. At schools like Alabama, Clemson, Florida, Ohio State, Penn State, UCLA, USC and Wisconsin, Hyundai will have a grassroots program comprising some 114 events, via Advantage International. They center on a "Hyundai Fieldhouse" experience at games like Auburn vs. Alabama, Oregon vs. Stanford, Penn State vs. Ohio State, and USC vs. Arizona State. The 2,400-square-foot setup has TVs, lounge seating and appearances by college notables. Hyundai will also have its lineup of cars at the events with a focus on a modified Santa Fe crossover, the 2015 Sonata, and Tucson Fuel Cell car, which will be featured at California games. The regional team-sponsorship arrangement includes Tastemade making a 13-episode “Grill Iron” series on YouTube about each schools' epicurean habits around football. At the grassroots game-venue Hyundai Fieldhouse events at featured games, Tastemade will have local chefs doing cooking demos in a "Tastemade Kitchen." At the end of the regular season, Hyundai will host a cookoff in Los Angeles with the season’s best chef selected by the viewing audience at Tastemade’s studio. Hyundai says it is also continuing sponsorship of the Hyundai Sun Bowl in El Paso, Texas on Dec. 27.
The tablet market continues to cool as demand in mature markets like the U.S. and Western Europe flattens out. Following a second straight quarter of softening sales, research firm IDC on Friday again lowered its worldwide forecast for tablet growth to 6.5% from 12.1% previously. The new estimate is also well below the 22.5% growth that IDC had projected for 2014 at the end of last year. The updated outlook signals a sharp decline in tablet demand in mature regions — from 25% growth in 2013 to none this year. Analysts have cited the rise of phablets, or large-screen smartphones, such as Samsung’s popular Galaxy line of phones, as a factor behind the dropoff in tablet sales. Apple is expected to join that group soon with the release of a new iPhone model featuring a 5.5-inch screen. In addition, replacement cycles for tablets have also been longer than anticipated, at close to three years. And devices are typically handed off to another family member or someone else when a new one is purchased. While sales for tablets, along with 2-in-1 devices like’s Microsoft’s Surface, will level off this year in North America and Western Europe, 12% growth is projected for the rest of the world. "When we look at the global picture, it would be easy to say that the tablet market is slowing down," stated Jean Phillipe Bouchard research director for tablets, at IDC. "But, when we start digging into the regional dynamics, we realize that there is still a good appetite for this product category. The firm expects falling prices for smaller-screen tablets (under eight inches) and evolving usage patterns will drive demand in emerging markets. While average selling prices in mature markets will stabilize at $373 this year, average prices elsewhere will decline 10% to $302. The IDC report also noted growing shipments in the Asia/Pacific region (excluding japan) for tablets with a voice calling option. “This trend suggests that end users in this region are looking for a single device that can meet their needs in terms of voice communication and media consumption, and for some that single device is a tablet and not a smartphone,” it stated. Looking further ahead, IDC projects growth even in less developed markets will slow to 5% by 2018—about the same level as the 4% growth expected in North America and Western Europe by then.
Drone use is highly controversial in the United States, but that hasn't stopped Google from experimenting with an unmanned delivery service through its Project X division. A prototype dubbed Project Wing with a 5-foot-wide single wingspan carried candy bars, dog treats, cattle vaccines, water and radios to farmers in Queensland, Australia -- about 30 test flights in all. Tests conducted in mid-August show an unmanned drone hovering above the ground as it lowers packages. The Atlanticdetails how at the end of the tether, electronics detects the package has hit the ground, detaches from the delivery, and gets pulled back up into the body of the drone. A video on YouTube shows how it works. While drones are a far cry from search engine marketing, display advertising, and programmatic technology, perfecting the ability to deliver packages via an unmanned aircraft will help Google better understand the nuances in building a variety of hardware. Earlier this year, Google began acquiring satellite companies. It purchased Titan Aerospace, a maker of drones that Facebook also was reportedly interested in buying. Google also got help from an expert in robotics. Nick Roy, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology roboticist, took a two-year sabbatical from MIT to lead Project Wing. His mission was to determine whether the idea of drone delivery made sense or was just a pipe dream, and whether Google should pursue the creation of a real, reliable service. It's all about changing the world -- something Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin know well. Although Roy says yes, they have yet to build a reliable system. The "yes" does give Google the fodder to grow the program and push to create a service that will deliver things people want quickly. The details in The Atlantic describe Google X's "The Hatchery," how the project originated, who worked on it, and what the drone might look like in the future. Google has not settled on this design for all its future program development, but it has formed the platform for much of their testing," writes The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal. "While the hardware is a significant part of the problem, they seem largely agnostic about which flying machine might ultimately serve their needs best," Madrigal writes, explaining how the real challenges on the project will come in the design of the rest of the system like the delivery mechanism.
Consumers who are suing Google for allegedly snooping on their WiFi transmissions shouldn't receive a “windfall” for failing to secure their networks, the company says in court papers. “Plaintiffs configured their Wi-Fi networks to be open and to broadcast data at least as far as the public street, but now claim that they are entitled to a windfall as a result of that very activity,” Google says in papers filed this month with U.S. District Court Judge Charles R. Breyer in San Francisco. Google filed its papers -- an official “answer” to the 2010 wiretapping lawsuit -- several weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the company's appeal of an earlier decision allowing the case to proceed. The litigation stems from the 2010 revelation that Google's Street View cars collected a trove of “payload” data -- including emails and browsing activity -- from WiFi networks that weren't password-protected. The company said that it intended to destroy the data, but the incident still prompted a class-action lawsuit against the company, as well as investigations by government agencies in the U.S. and abroad. The Federal Trade Commission closed its probe without taking action. The Federal Communications Commission, which also looked into the allegations, fined Google $25,000 in 2012 for refusing to cooperate with the investigation. Google previously argued in court that even if its cars collected data, doing so didn't violate federal privacy law. The company argued that it was protected from liability by the wording of the wiretap law. That law bans the interception of radio and electronic communications, but contains an exception for radio communications that are “readily accessible” to the public. The search company contended that it met the requirements for that exception, given that it only captured data from unsecured networks. A trial judge and appellate court rejected that argument, and the Supreme Court recently refused to hear the company's appeal. The Supreme Court's rejection of the case in June paved the way for the lawsuit to go forward. Google's answer to the complaint marks the most recent step in that process. The company raises several arguments in its answer, including that the consumers waived their claims by using networks that weren't password-protected. Google also says in its answer that the lawsuit should be dismissed because the people who sued lack evidence that their data was captured. “Plaintiffs have failed to plead facts or produce evidence showing that a Street View vehicle actually acquired payload data that plaintiffs broadcasted,” Google argues.
"Sesame Street" turns 45 this season and to sustain its digital relevance, PBS Kids and Sesame Workshop are debuting their first app, Cookie Monster's Challenge, geared to 3- to-5-year-old kids. "Sesame Street" has long utilized TV to help children build educational skills. Available at the App Store on iPad Sept. 15, the Cookie Monster app is designed to teach self-control, focus and problem-solving. There are 10 mini-games and nine levels, plus a feature that creates profiles for each player, so they can progress at their own pace. “We’ve created a series of fun brain-building games designed to challenge and engage young children and to help Cookie get what he desires the most—a cookie!” stated Scott Chambers, senior vice president, Worldwide Media Distribution, Sesame Workshop. “As children play, they practice important skills that are essential for school readiness.” Cookie Monster’s Challenge promotes the same school skills as the TV show, which is adding new installments of “Cookie’s Crumby Pictures,” a five-minute segment in which Cookie Monster helps kids learn various coping strategies. The new season will also include new “Elmo the Musical” and “Super Grover 2.0” segments. A half-hour “Sesame Street” will complement the regular series on weekends and weekday afternoons. Abby’s Sandbox Search, a new game that focuses on letters, letter sounds and alliteration, kicks off on pbskids.org/sesame this fall. "Sesame Street" reaches 156 million children in over 150 countries.
GumGum, which specializes in digital in-image advertising, has named digital media veteran Mike Rosner as its chief revenue officer, the company announced Friday. In his new role, Rosner will be responsible for global sales for GumGum, including relationships with agencies and brands deploying in-image advertising. Previously, Rosner served as vice president of sales for MediaMind (now Sizmek), a technology company specializing in multiplatform ad-serving and creative optimization, from 2011-2014. Before that, he was the co-founder and president of Beanstock, a pioneering publisher trading desk. He also served as senior vice president for global sales at EyeWonder, which acquired Limelight Networks under his leadership. “Having someone of Mike's caliber leading our sales effort is well-timed for the company and will directly benefit our advertiser and publisher clients," stated GumGum founder and CEO Ophir Tanz. "His deep understanding of the display advertising ecosystem will support GumGum as we expand our offerings, and his experience will bring value to both the teams and the advertisers he will directly serve.” GumGum’s in-image advertising technology overlays interactive ad units on the lower portions of photos selected for contextual relevance, reaching an audience of more than 300 million people per month around the world. Separately, this week GumGum also published data from online studies showing that in-image ads are more likely to actually be seen than other types of display advertising -- even when those display ads are technically “viewable” according to the new viewability metrics approved by industry bodies, such as the Interactive Advertising Bureau. Citing research by Sticky using eye-tracking technology, GumGum claims that overall 60% of respondents viewed in-image ads for more than two seconds, while figures from MOAT show an average “time in view” of 26 seconds for GumGum ads, versus just 20 seconds for display ads in general.
Uh-oh. House of Cards. Masters of Sex. Girls. Game of Thrones. Parks and Recreation. True Detective. Bob’s Burgers. The Good Wife. Veep. Mad Men. The Killing. Broad City. Sherlock. Silicon Valley. Orange is the New Black. Fargo. The Americans. Archer. Portlandia. Sons of Anarchy. The League. The Walking Dead. Louie. Nathan for You. Homeland. The Colbert Report. Verily, we live in a Golden Age of TV -- terrestrial, cable, streaming, telepathic, whatever. And whatever previous TV age you might consider to rank as runner-up, by comparison, is not silver. It is maybe a base metal. Your Show of Shows in the 50s. The Man from U.N.C.L.E. in the 60s. All in the Family in the 70s. M*A*S*H in the 80s. E.R. in the 90s. Relative to the astonishing cornucopia of video greatness we now enjoy, they together hailed from the Zinc Age of TV. How wonderful is that? Unless you are devoted to the major networks, or stuff yourself on so-called reality TV, if you are seeking cultural treasure you’d be hard-pressed to fail. It’s like fishing in a stocked pond. Everybody leaves with a full creel. So much genius, so little time. No gainfully employed American has the time, no matter how many devices he might own, to consume it all. And the foregoing list is just the stuff being produced right now. We have equal access to Arrested Development. The Sopranos, The Wire, Friday Night Lights. Breaking Bad. Twin Peaks. 30 Rock. Dexter. Lost. Seinfeld. The Simpsons. Not to mention I Love freakin’ Lucy. Oh, and every movie ever made. Oh, and the bottomless candy dish that is YouTube. That question about wonderfulness was not rhetorical. We are living amid an unprecedented genius glut, and this is a double-edged sword if ever there was one. For, absent scarcity, content is not king. Attention is king. It is not hard to imagine the future of high-production-value scripted programming. All we need to do is look at the present of independent film…i.e., the ultimate fragmentation nightmare. The digital revolution dramatically lowered cost of production, resulting in an explosion of new titles, on the order of 50,000 per year. And once again, they are cumulative. So if you spend three years developing, financing and producing a film, you will release it into a very, very stocked pond. Sure, all the fishermen go home happy with a creelful, but 99% of the fish are unseen by human eyes. It is an obviously unsustainable ecosystem, and an unsustainable business model. Thousands of masterpieces languish unnoticed, thousands of filmmakers can never return Aunt Myrtle’s gracious investment, and like some sort of Moliere farce, greatness and audience never quite meet. This is not an apocalyptic Chaos Scenario future I’m describing. This is a Chaos Scenario right now. There are some businesses that can prosper in these condition. Netflix, by bundling the long tail of content, is essentially the stocked pond. It makes its money from the fisherman. But for any ad-supported channel, fragmentation is the enemy of revenue. Gluts -- even gluts of genius -- drive down audience and drive down rates. There are no magic beans, there is no alchemy that can change the laws of economics. Accordingly, this magnificent Golden Age of programming is being financed by speculators and the last inhabitants of a dying star…namely, the cable and broadcast infrastructure, which survives increasingly on monthly cable bills the public is decreasingly willing to pay. It’s a supernova, exploding blindingly in its last moments. Enjoy it while it lasts. And take comfort in this: just as there is no alchemy that can turn zinc into gold, the real gold stays gold forever.
I wouldn’t call it a binge, but lately I have been getting reacquainted in a big way with the classic ‘70s drama “The Waltons” -- a series I recall enjoying in my youth, but one that I hadn’t given a lot of thought to since. Regular readers of this blog will recall that an episode of “The Waltons” from Season Nine about the arrival of television on Walton’s Mountain caught my eye several months ago. I’ve been sampling episodes of the show ever since. Some I remember watching the first time around; others are completely new to me because I stopped watching “The Waltons” midway through its first run and never went back. Thanks to Hallmark Channel, which runs several episodes of “The Waltons” on weeknights, I have been able to easily review episodes from the first two seasons of the show, when it was at its very best. And I am more impressed by it than ever before. I didn’t really think about what I was watching when I was a kid. I simply reacted and enjoyed. That was certainly true of my experience with “The Waltons,” which in its day was heralded as an outstanding family drama. Richard Thomas received much praise (and an Emmy Award) for his portrayal of young John-Boy. In fact, all of the characters and the actors who portrayed them were recognized in one way or another for the fine work they were doing. As the show continued through subsequent seasons the Emmy nominations and awards kept coming. But time, adulthood and a career as a television critic have me looking at the show now in an entirely different context than I did way back when. To begin with, I now understand that “The Waltons” was the first true family drama on broadcast television. (Apologies if there are any prior family dramas with which I am unfamiliar.) Significantly, only a few family dramas have followed, most of them in the ‘70s, including “Apple’s Way,” “Eight is Enough” and “Family.” They were fun at the time but didn’t exactly make history, and they haven’t been very visible since. The next family dramas of any note wouldn’t come along until the current millennium: HBO’s “Six Feet Under” and NBC’s “Parenthood.” (I’m excluding dramas with families in them such as HBO’s “The Sopranos” and CBS’ “Blue Bloods” that fall into other categories first, such as crime shows or police shows.) As far as family drama goes, there had never been anything like “The Waltons” and there hasn’t been since. The same can be said of the performance of Richard Thomas, which I now recognize in hindsight as one of the best, bravest and boldest in the history of the medium. Had there ever been a drama series with a teenager as its lead character? (Thomas was in his early twenties when he first played the role.) Had we ever seen a teenage male in a television series that was depicted as unashamedly sensitive and caring? (That’s not to imply that John-Boy was a wimp. In an episode from Season One he picks up a large stick and threatens to clobber a homeless youth he perceives as possibly menacing to his younger siblings.) The only other teenager I can recall as having genuine emotional complexity on any television series before “The Waltons” is “Bud” Anderson (played by Billy Gray) on “Father Knows Best,” though he wasn’t in a league with John-Boy. (My newfound familiarity with “Father Knows Best” comes as a result of watching it on Antenna TV.) Sensitive, multidimensional teenage characters began appearing with some frequency in television dramas after “The Waltons” – including “Buddy” (Kristy McNichol) and Willie Lawrence (Gary Frank) in “Family,” James Hunter (Lance Kerwin) in “James at 15/16,” Angela Chase (Claire Danes) in “My So-Called Life” and Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Gellar) in “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” plus all those moody kids in “Dawson’s Creek,” to name a few. But John-Boy got there first, at a time when viewers weren’t used to seeing young men portrayed that way. The character was the object of much derision in schoolyards but much admiration elsewhere. Thomas nailed it, and his work holds up spectacularly well today. Watch for a rerun of “The Love Story” from Season One as a prime example of a young actor in top form. I believe it is the episode that won Thomas the Emmy as Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series, which was yet another “Waltons” first. Before Thomas no actor had ever won an Emmy for portraying a teenager. In another first, when Ellen Corby -- who played Grandma Walton -- suffered a stroke in real life, her character was also stricken. After a relatively brief absence Corby (who won three Emmys for the role) returned to the show as a stroke survivor portraying a stroke survivor. Her performance was stunning. I’m also impressed by the way “The Waltons” -- which was set in rural Virginia and at the start took place during the Great Depression -- handled the subject of religion. I remembered that John Ritter portrayed an arrogant young preacher whose fire-and-brimstone intensity alienated people. But I had forgotten that Olivia Walton was a Baptist, that her husband John was not a religious man and that they would sometimes clash over their choices about how to raise their children. Also, there was a fascinating episode in Season One in which a Jewish family that had fled Nazi Germany was seeking a peaceful life on Walton’s Mountain. To ensure their safety, the father insisted that they hide their faith and that his son not experience his bar mitzvah. Nobody could have known at the time that “The Waltons” would occupy a singular position in television history that would hold for decades to come. I can’t help but wonder why the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences or the Television Critics Association (which every year honors programs and performers who have made extraordinary contributions to the medium) have not done more to recognize the contributions in hindsight of this extraordinary show. Furthermore, one almost never hears or reads anything about it in the entertainment media unless someone in its cast passes away. Thank heaven for the Hallmark Channel; without it, “The Waltons” might be all but forgotten today.