Characterizing it as a “development to watch,” Nielsen issued a new report to clients Wednesday showing that the number of U.S. households that bypass cable or satellite TV and subscribe only to broadband Internet access has grown dramatically in the past year, and not surprisingly, they spend dramatically more time watching TV over the Internet. The Nielsen report said it is too soon to determine whether these households are so-called “cord-swappers” -– swapping the cable/satellite TV cord for the broadband Internet cord -– but they are growing faster than any other segment of the “cross-platform” television marketplace. While the percentage of Internet-only TV homes is still relatively small -– less than 5% of all TV households -– they grew 22.8% over the past year, according to the report, which reflects data for the third quarter of 2011 vs. the third quarter of 2010. Not surprisingly, these households are streaming more than twice as much TV online as the general population: an average of 11.2 minutes daily vs. 5.0 minutes for all TV households. While these households are relatively low users of TV -– at about half as much as the time spent watching TV by the general population –- they currently are watching more than 9% of all their TV minutes online. According to Nielsen’s data, the average TV household currently is watching about 1.9% of their total TV minutes online. “The increase in broadcast-only/broadband homes is the most significant of any category, though it is not necessarily an indication of downgrading services,” reads the Nielsen report, which will be released to the media today. “Rather, this could reflect broadcast-only homes upgrading to broadband as their needs change. Further underscoring the importance placed on broadband Internet, the number of homes subscribing to cable-plus and no broadband decreased 17.1 percent since last year.”
With Toy Fair 2012 just days away, Mattel says it is introducing a new global campaign for Barbie, designed to appeal to the fashion sense and imaginative skills of little girls around the world. Mattel, based in El Segundo, Calif., says “See What Happens When You Play with Barbie” invites girls to walk “through the giant pink doors to Barbie’s Dream Closet” in TV advertising. There’s also an augmented-reality online destination, a new line of apparel, and new products, all meant to encourage girls to experiment with fashion. “In Barbie’s world, role play often leads to real life,” says Stephanie Cota, SVP/global Barbie marketing, in the company’s release. “Barbie gives girls the opportunity to be anything they want to be, from a princess to a president.” Toy buyers, gathering for next week’s event, are getting ushered into an actual closet in New York’s Lincoln Center, with jewel-encrusted 24-foot doors, and 9,000 square feet devoted to various fashion vignettes. But Barbie, which saw a 6% increase in worldwide sales in the fourth quarter, is facing some midlife speed bumps, including younger competition from other toy companies, as well as global resistance. “Barbie's challenge is how to change an iconically blonde doll with a literally unmatchable figure into a global brand that attracts all ethnic groups and body types,” Richard Gottlieb, CEO of Global Toy Experts, tells Marketing Daily. “The closing of the widely heralded six-story Barbie store in Shanghai after two years shows that something did not click. I believe that Barbie was too sexy for China,” says Gottlieb. “They like cute: Think 'Hello Kitty.' And Barbie is too Western in its facial construct.” TV spots, directed by Floria Sigismondi, best known for the popular music videos of such artists as Katy Perry and Christina Aguilera, are scheduled to run in the U.S., France, Brazil, Australia, Mexico, and Germany. The online destination, BarbieWow, is designed for fans in more than 30 countries, with new media channels for “sharing and trending,” enabling girls to raid Barbie’s closet in real-time. Augmented-reality “mirrors” let girls dress themselves up in her clothes, and using such digital and style destinations as Polyvore, Pinterest and Rent the Runway, “girls can take inspiration from Barbie to create real-life looks and designs that are all their own,” the company says. And in “Behind Pink Doors,” top fashion influencers share stories from their personal closet “as an example of the transformative power of fashion.”
Giving its Web TV network more room to wiggle, Blip just raised $12 million in a mix of debt financing and equity. No flash in the pan, Blip has spent the past six years growing its audience -- until now under the name Blip.tv. Dropping the “.tv” -- from its logo, at least -- Blip now plans to develop new tools and services for independent online producers; invest further in advertising and distribution platforms; and foster more syndication relationships. Blip now claims more than 13 million unique monthly viewers domestically, and about 30 million worldwide. According to the company, its various series attract more than 330 million video views per month. The company grew annual revenue by 100% in 2011, according to Steve Brookstein, chief operating officer for Blip, but he will not translate that into dollar amounts. “In 2012, we will further commit to our producer base by offering exclusive arrangements that will continue to drive our common goals,” Brookstein said. Brookstein has served as Blip’s de facto leader since its co-founder and CEO Mike Hudack left last year. The company continues to search for a permanent replacement. Not unlike YouTube’s recent facelift, Blip relaunched last year as a curator of content. As such, Blip now considers itself the place to discover original Web series from both professional and up-and-coming producers. Rather than relying on some fancy algorithm or user voting system, Blip’s producers feature videos that they like. The company currently syndicates series to iTunes, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Roku, Verizon FiOS, TiVo, Sony TVs and elsewhere. Per a joint study with Dynamic Logic, Blip recently reported that 35% of its viewers chose online banner ads as the preferred form of advertising, followed by 15% who said they liked pre-roll ads. Investors include Bain Capital Ventures and Canaan Partners.
Doritos’ “Sling Baby” ad earned the “rare distinction” of being both the most memorable and best-liked ad in this year’s Super Bowl, indexing 177 on the former and 190 on the latter, reports Nielsen. In addition, Doritos’ “Man’s Best Friend” pulled a second-place ranking on best-liked (indexing 182), and a third place on best-remembered (indexing 173). As in recent years, the ads were user-generated winners of Doritos’ “Crash the Super Bowl” video contest. “Sling Baby” also emerged as #1 in the USA Today/Facebook Super Bowl Ad Meter. This year marked the first time that viewers (rather than a preselected panel) determined the meter’s results. M&M’s’ “Just My Shell” was close behind Doritos in the Nielsen results, scoring second in the remembered rankings (175) and third among best-liked (171). The rest of the best-remembered winners: #4, Skechers’ “Go Run Mr. Quiggly!” (164); #5, Coca-Cola’s “Catch “ (163); #6, Bud Light’s “Rescue Dog-Weego” (161); #7, Pepsi’s “King’s Court” (155); #8, Budweiser’s “Eternal Optimism” (150); #9, GoDaddy.com’s “Body Paint” (149); and #10, Budweiser’s “Return of the King” (145). The rest of the best-liked winners: #4, E*Trade’s “Best Man” (158); #5, Coke’s “Superstition” (152); #6, Bud Light’s “Rescue Dog-Weego” (143); #7, Audi’s “Vampire Party” (139); #8, Chrysler’s “Half Time/Clint Eastwood” (137); #9, Chevrolet’s “Happy Grad” (130); and #10, Honda’s “Matthew Broderick’s Day Off” (129). In the USA Today meter results, Bud Light’s “Rescue Dog-Weego” placed a close second, and the Chrysler Eastwood ad and Kia’s “A Dream Car. For Real/Adriana Lima” tied for third.
If there was any doubt that Fox network didn't do well this fall, all one needed to look at was the bottom line -- literally. News Corp. said its fiscal second-quarter 2012 financial results reflected a boost in the operating income of its television businesses -- of which Fox is a part -- by 25% to an operating income of $189 million. The Fox network in the U.S. grabbed big double-digit-percentage rating gains during the fourth quarter. The reasons for the hike include higher advertising revenues resulting from higher-than-normal ratings for "X-Factor" and "New Girl" -- as well as a full complement of seven games from October's World Series, which always improves profits. News Corp. television businesses witnessed an 11% increase in revenue to $1.5 billion. For the company as a whole, News Corp. gained 2% in revenue to $8.98 billion and 16% improvement in operating income to $1.5 billion. News Corp. also noted that revenues from retransmission fees grew 100% in the quarter versus the same period a year ago. While TV did well, Fox's theatrical and home entertainment business fared even better. The Fox Filmed Entertainment businesses more than doubled profit to land at $393 million on a 17% gain in revenues to $2.1 billion. Much of this comes from home entertainment revenue from “Rio,” “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” “X-Men: First Class” and “Mr. Popper’s Penguins,” as well as theatrical revenue of “Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked” and “The Descendants.” News Corp.'s cable TV group grew 20% to $882 million in income and 9% in revenue to $2.2 billion. U.S. cable TV advertising revenue grew 6% -- primarily because of ratings growth at the FX Network. This was partially offset by advertising declines at the Fox Sports regional sports networks that resulted from the NBA lockout. News Corp., however, was not immune to the declines in print businesses, with net income dropping 43% to $218 million and down 9% in overall revenue to $2.1 billion. This was the result of lower advertising revenues --- at the Australian newspapers and lost income from the closure of its U.K.-based "News of the World."
It's official: Fox TV will have fewer shows with characters looking for lies. The series "House" is ending after eight years and 177 episodes -- including such head-scratching moves as a jealous Dr. Gregory House crashing his car into a former girlfriend's living room, and setting up elaborate tricks such as trapping Dr. James Wilson in a big animal net high over a living room. "Everybody lies” is the constant refrain from the complex and infuriating character. House is a master diagnostician, which unfortunately extends not just to seemingly unsolvable medical illnesses, but to business decisions, other people's relationships, and his own foibles. House especially loves discovering lies from the people around him. Network and advertising executives might not go to such extents in figuring out problems. Hopefully, there are fewer outright liars in their businesses these days -- though some half-truths continue to infect the fit and healthy. As usual we can revel in watching the performance of a TV character -- who, while he doesn’t really exist, gives hope to viewers that somewhere such a physican really does figure out medical mysteries. Lying? That can be a cousin of anger. Which brings us to Charlie Sheen. Sheen will possibly be appearing on a new FX series, "Anger Management," which will in all likelihood gain marketing benefit from the actor’s real-life personal riffs that built steam just about a year ago. Not so coincidentally, FX is a sister network of Fox TV -- where angry, unappreciated, misunderstood characters exist, hopefully building crowd support in rooting for them to succeed and/or be repaired. "House" is not the only Fox TV show in which lying has played a central role in the subject matter. The short-lived, but well-liked, series "Lie To Me" recently ended. Starring Tim Roth, it focused on the science of those who lied or revealed other semi-truths through facial ticks, verbal indicators and other tells. But don't worry. Plenty of lying will remain on TV screens in 2012. Just wait until those political advertising campaigns really get going.
CIMM is taking a pro-active role in advancing new media nomenclature and processes with both its Lexicon(terms and definitions associated with Set-Top-Box data measurement) and Asset Identification Primer (glossary of asset terms). These documents form the basis of this column, which offers a common language for Set-Top-Box nomenclature that can expedite the rollout of the data for its many industry applications. The common currency for commercial measurement is C3, which we defined in a previous column earlier this year as the average of the performance of all commercials in a program plus three days of DVR playback. But there are other commercial measurement metrics in use by measurement companies today. Here is a sampling of some of the more common terms and definitions regarding live commercial ratings. Commercial RatingsSee also: Rating CIMM DEFINITION: Percent of homes or viewers who tuned into a commercial out of the specified universe of homes or viewers whether their sets were in use at the time or not. Commercial ratings can be average minute or, with second-by-second Set-Top-Box data, on an average second rating level. 2: Commercial rating defines the average second audience for the specified commercial/advertisement. Rating is calculated as the total tuned seconds divided by the total possible tuned seconds for the content and time period specified. (Source: TRA NOTE - How granular does the Set-Top-Box data need to be - One second? Five second? More? And then what about Latency, which can make accurate measurement at the one second level difficult. Commercial Live RatingSee also: Rating CIMM DEFINITION: A commercial rating viewed live in a linear fashion, that is, without any trick play. 2: Percentage of STBs or STB Households tuned to a specific commercial without timeshifting. (Source: Nielsen) NOTE - Can only measure “Opportunity to See,” as opposed to actual confirmed viewing. (Source: TIVO) Please refer to the CIMM Lexicon online at http://www.cimm-us.org/lexicon.htm for additional information on these and other terms.
It seems like over the last several years, in every major interview, the same general questions are being asked of entertainment executives: “Where do you see the future of television?” “How is digital media going to impact programming?” “What’s next for digital and entertainment?” All major conferences or events I’ve attended have addressed these topics through multiple sessions. While it may seem that these questions were on everyone’s mind only in recent years, it’s fascinating to take a step back and see that the reverse is true. 2012 marks the 15th anniversary of the Television Academy Foundation’s Archive of American Television’s extensive video interview collection, which began in 1997, a year in which the concept of digital TV was already top of mind for many TV executives. Back then, even before we knew how or when our content would enter the digital realm, one of the boilerplate questions we asked our interviewees was, “Where do you see the future of television?” Not surprisingly, many of the answers are the same answers we’d hear today: Betty White, Actress, June 1997 “Networks are a little troubled at this present day and age, because suddenly their whole world has fragmented, what with the various channels available now, and getting stronger all the time. Now the listings, you look down the list, you've got a zillion choices. You can't say, ‘oh television is so terrible now’ because, you've got another choice somewhere along the line. The networks just really have no way to fight that undermining. It's like a river running through, and pretty soon the banks get shallower and shallower.” Thomas W. Sarnoff, TV executive, June 1998 “I think there’ll be some dramatic changes. I think there’ll be more of what we see today, but the Internet operation, the computer operation, will materially change the way people look at television and at entertainment and I think there’ll be more interactive participation by people -- on television as well as on the computers and the Internet. But basically there’ll always be programming, there’ll be news... and I think it hasn’t really changed that much. The forms of programs may have changed, but the substance is still the same.” Dick Clark, Host/Producer, July 1999 .... Could television be dead? No, it will take its place along with some form of a thing that’ll be probably covering the wall of your room, that will feed you music, television, sports, news when it happens. That entertainment center, I’ve been talking about that for 30 years, will be a wall-sized television.... Radio didn’t disappear when television came along, magazines and newspapers didn’t go out when radio came along. So television is in that same spot. We’ve just got to find our niche. If I were 40 years younger I wouldn’t be the least bit concerned. I’d be looking to the new stuff to see what can I do to amalgamate what I know from the old media into the new. It’s all distribution.” Ted Turner, Executive, June 1999 “Television’s really not much over 50 years old today. It wasn’t invented and employed till 50 years ago. We now have the Internet and telephone companies getting into television and television and the cable companies, it’s very hard to ah, predict what we’ll see 50 or 100 years from now or even 20 years from now. It’s very hard to see, at the current time, for the time horizon of the next five to ten years, the networks will not go away, and the broadcasters will not go away. …Only the rocks last forever. You know nothing’s going to last forever. Not even this digitalized image that we're doing. It ain’t going to last forever.” Dick Wolf, Producer, March 2003 “If anybody knew [what the future of TV will be,] they could turn themselves into a truly wealthy individual because the whole system is going to go on its ass in about five or six years, because what's going to happen -- and it's already happening -- [is] that once you have video streaming and video-on-demand, 'Law And Order' will come on at 10 on Wednesday and it will start streaming and it will stream that episode. You will be able to call it up whenever you want until 9:59 the next Wednesday when the new episode will come on. What that means is that advertising on a cost-per-thousand basis won't make any sense at all because you're not going to be delivering the same number of mass eyeballs, but over the course of an entire week, a lot more people may see the episode… What's going to happen is,s you're going to have targeted consumers. And if you go into a BMW dealer over the next month, you're going to get sixteen BMW ads because that's going to go into their database. Then those will be tracked. All of a sudden, you'll get four Mercedes commercials because I know you're thinking about a BMW, but maybe you should come in and test drive the E-320. This is going to be targeting consumers…. And once that happens, I don't know what the economic model is. Because you are not going to be selling a cost per thousand. You're going to be selling a cost per consumer. Because they will be able to tell you, we can target your prime consumer on a basis that has never been possible before. What's that worth? God knows.” Don Ohlmeyer, TV executive, November 2004 “One of the big problems going forward is that people are on overload. They’re actually missing a lot of great stuff cause they just don’t know it’s there. You can only keep track of so many channels. You can’t comprehend what’s on 400 channels, so people narrow it down and the statistics show that up to 100 channels people will make room in their lives for. There’s too much to absorb...." Leslie Moonves, TV executive, December 2006 “The business is all about content and providing stories. We should look at the world as, now people can get our content in a hundred different ways. It used to be they just got it over the air. Then it became over the air and repeats. Then it became over the air, repeats and syndication. Over the air, repeats, syndication, DVDs. Now it's everywhere, TiVo, U-Tube, DVRs, Amazon – either in whole episodes, whatever. So our content is being distributed in 100 places, while 10 years ago it was distributed in one place or two places. So the world is rapidly changed. The key is to get paid for that. Because that’s going to have to replace advertising revenue, which may or may not go up or down or whatever--– that will be a key. But everybody should remember that the storytellers are always going to be needed. That it's always going to be about that, no matter how you get that content. So I think we should all be secure in the fact that if we do the good work, it will still translate. TV is not any different than it was 50 years ago, really, in a lot of ways. Yes, it's more sophisticated. But you watch a sitcom from then and you watch a sitcom from now, it's about telling a story. And some of the stories are exactly the same. I am bullish about broadcasting and creativity and the fact that we serve a major purpose in society. We inform people, we entertain people and we will continue to do that.”