TV media buying and selling executives now seem to have a similar perspective for the upfront selling period for the 2012-2013 TV season: modest dollar revenue gains. Brian Wieser, senior research analyst of Pivotal Research Group, writes in a recent report: “Consensus expectations from [TV] sales teams for volume are remarkably similar to those of buyers, with a view toward 0% to 5% volume increases for prime time advertising inventory.” Last year’s upfront take for broadcast networks had been estimated around $9.0 billion, with cable TV networks taking in roughly a bit more at $9.3 billion. Both buyers and sellers, according to Wieser, are estimating an 8% to 10% hike over CPM rates set during the upfront a year ago. A year ago at the upfront, CPM increases were around 9% to 12%. Back in late February, Wieser surveyed mostly media buyers for his original estimates. In line with these estimates, senior media buyers at the recent MediaPost Outfront event believed that around 3% more in upfront volume could be expected this ad selling season. As other media analysts have noted, Wieser says there is “no correlation -- at least on the network TV level -- between upfront pricing and broadcast-year revenues.” Much of this depends on the yet-to-be determined levels of inventory sold during the upfront, which can range from 70% of commercial inventory supplies to 85% levels. Still, Wieser says this should help media companies' Wall Street fortunes. “If nothing else, it should contribute to positive sentiment around the relevant stocks as we approach the May-June negotiating time-frame.” Concerning big efforts of heavyweight digital/online video providers YouTube, Hulu, AOL, Facebook and others, that are creating their own version of upfront presentations, so-called “NewFronts," Wieser thinks this will be a “sideshow” to the main event. Online viewing, as a comparison to all TV viewing, equates to a low-single-digit percentage share. That said, he notes U.S. online video growth will remain healthy in 2012, 22% higher to $2.3 billion.
In a bid to take so-called eSports mainstream, CBS Interactive (CBSi) Tuesday revealed exclusive partnerships with TwitchTV and Major League Gaming (MLG) to handle ad sales for both companies. TwitchTV is an online platform broadcasting live coverage of “eSports,” including competitive video game competitions. MLG is the world’s largest competitive video game league. As part of the agreements, TwitchTV’s coverage of live gaming competitions and events will be featured on GameSpot.com, CBSi’s flagship gaming site. CBSi will also be the exclusive online broadcaster of MLG’s “Pro Circuit” competitions. The deals make CBSi the exclusive seller of all advertising, promotions and sponsorships for both TwitchTV and MLG. "The eSports scene is one of the hottest trends in video, and is rapidly attracting the core 18-34 male demographic in greater numbers than any other medium or category," stated CBS Interactive President Jim Lanzone. Rex Harris, media supervisor at Publicis’ SMGx unit, pointed out that the CBSi partnerships echo the explosive growth of Machinima, the YouTube premium channel devoted to gamer-inspired content -- which “is consistently one of YouTube’s highest viewed and, consequently, monetized premium channels.” He said it’s a “smart move (for CBSi) to stick a flag in the ground of the ever-growing mountain of niche video content found on the Web.” From a brand perspective, Harris said the only potential downside to these deals is the unpredictability of live streaming, which might cause some brands to shy away. TwitchTV estimates it attracts more than 16 million uniques per month, who tune into its events and competitions for an average of 23 minutes. MLG claims to have served over 15 million hours of live video to its fans during the 2011 Pro Circuit season. As the video gaming league’s exclusive broadcast rights holder, CBSi is hoping that as eSports grow in popularity, so too will MLG.
Media General grabbed double-digit gains in revenue from its television stations amid higher political advertising and retransmission revenue in the first quarter of 2012. But the company’s net losses grew to $34.4 million from $25.8 million in the period before, with the company blaming some debt modifications. Media General said its operating losses actually improved to just $3.2 million from $4.2 million in the first quarter of 2011. Broadcast revenue -- from its 18 network affiliated stations -- climbed 12% to $73.4 million. All digital media -- TV and print-related -- slipped to $8.8 million from $10.2 million in the first quarter of 2011. Print/newspaper revenue dipped to $67.3 million from $73.3 million from the first quarter of 2011. Total revenues in the first quarter of 2012 were virtually the same at $149.5 million, increasing just 0.4%. Broadcasting political revenues were $6.2 million, compared with $188,000 last year. Cable and satellite retrans fees increased 63% to $8.7 million, the result of rate increases in contract renewals. The company said its local media sites generated $7.8 million in revenues -- up 5.4%. There was nearly a 13% growth in local online advertising. It also said mobile digital revenues were up nearly threefold, with mobile page views almost doubling versus the period before.
Television media buyers who are familiar with gross rating point metrics -- but struggling to understand digital measurements -- now have tools from Google that bring the familiarity of measuring offline campaigns online. Google's Active GRP and Active View integrate into the DoubleClick for Advertisers ad-serving platform used by publishers and marketers. The company launched a pilot program as a first step. Google hopes that Active GRP, a GRP metric modeled on TV advertising measurements, will become the standard for online advertising. A Google spokesperson noted: "It's a tough technology puzzle to solve." Active GRP, the counterpart to traditional rating metrics, relies on a statistical model that combines aggregate panel data and anonymous user data, either inferred or user-provided, which occurs when people voluntarily join user panels. Calculations determine a marketer's reach with each online buy. The tool serves up information on measurements from a variety of media, such as mobile, display, and video. Marketers can take immediate action on the measurements viewed in a dashboard. Google will likely make offline GRP metrics available in the dashboard, because it follows the company's focus to give marketers the ability to compare offline and online campaigns and data. The Google spokesperson declined to comment on future features. The Active GRP tool integrates with another product Google, Active View, which measures viewed impressions. Through a tag in the ad creative piece, the Active View technology can tell Google's platform whether at least 50% of the ad has been in view on a Web page for at least one second. After ads serve up and render on the publisher's page, for example, Active View measures the ad unit position and browser dimension. It also registers any events that might change the layout of the page, and what the ad industry calls "viewability." Active View metrics, such as the percentage of the ads inside the browser viewport and corresponding duration, are measured. Active View will roll out in the coming weeks in the Google Display Network Reserve, which supports targeting relevant content channels, timing and advanced targeting, such as geographic, demographic and above the fold. It claims to help advertisers keep track of the services and products received for money invested in campaigns. In the past, brands might have known the ads were served, but did not understand if the ads were viewed. Google is not the only company that launched a viewability service this week. AdSafe Media also introduced a similar service. The company's CEO, Scott Knoll, said the technology blocks between 3% and 7% of the nearly 2 billion ads served daily from serving up next to inappropriate content. It can also tell advertisers when someone viewed an ad.
The way to throw a spear really far is to use an extension, which is kind of a lever that fits on the end of the weapon, so you can really wing it. Mitsubishi Motors North America has one of those. The automaker doesn't have a big media budget, but it tends to do campaigns that grab attention because they go to extremes in one way or another. The latest such effort from the Cypress, Calif. company is “Temp Drive,” wherein people get to take a break from work and spend the day à la Ferris Bueller with the new 2012 Outlander Sport (starting at $18,795). The wacky part of this is that consumers are to go to mitsubishicars.com/tempdrive to apply for a temp to replace them at their job for one day. And it gets a little stranger. The temps who will perform the duties for the three people Mitzu chooses for the "play day" will not come from Kelly Girl. Instead, they will include an opera singer, magician, deejay, librarian, meteorologist and rocket scientist. The effort is via agency of record 180LA, which also did the effort that put Mitsubishi Outlanders on the infamous Bolivian Road of Death, among other places. The agency was also behind Mitsubishi Motors’ “Live Drive,” a pure online test drive where consumers could robotically drive a real Mitsubishi crossover. The marketing campaign includes television, digital, social media and public relations. The television spot highlights the features and capabilities of the Outlander Sport that the consumer discovers during his day off. All campaign elements lead consumers to the Web site to sign up. Digital is being handled by Possible Worldwide.
BMW North America is preparing its largest-ever national retail and advertising push aligned with its sponsorship of Team USA. The campaigns will include national and local television ads; digital advertising; and a new version of a retail program launched last year to get people to test drive BMW vehicles, a program that also raises money for Olympians. There will also be promotional elements dangling trips to the games. At retail, BMW is running its second "BMW Drive for Team USA," which invites consumers to go to BMW dealers to test drive the new 3 Series. For each test drive BMW North America will donate $10 to Team USA, for a maximum donation of $200,000. The automaker did this program last year as well, but Stacy Morris, who handles marketing and culture communications for the Woodcliff Lake, N.J.-based BMW North America, says this time around the program expands from 277 test drive events last year to over 300 events. The events will include appearances by U.S. Olympic and Paralympic hopefuls, former athletes, and other Olympics personages. The automaker's Mini USA division will run a separate program called "Mini Takes the States," a series of events for Mini enthusiasts benefitting the Paralympic Team. Morris tells Marketing Daily that BMW North America's Summer Olympics ad buy on NBC will be the biggest single media buy ever for the company. She explains that the BMW Group corporation is handling worldwide efforts around the games, while BMW North America sponsors Team USA. "The marketing campaign is a significant buy with NBC, as we are the foreign automotive advertiser for the London Games, exclusively." Morris says the test-drive program will be supported this year by CRM and direct-marketing efforts to owners and prospects -- not TV ads, as was the case last year. Dan Creed, VP of marketing for BMW of North America, said in a statement that last year the automaker had 20,000 customers participate in the "BMW Drive for Team USA" events, with dealers getting a 23% conversion rate, "yielding the most-ever purchases following a marketing event,” he said. BMW North America is supporting 11 Olympic and Paralympic athletes and hopefuls, collectively the "BMW Performance Team U.S." In London this summer, the automaker will have a pavilion above the Waterworks River near the Olympic Stadium and the Aquatics Center. BMW will also have something like 4,000 vehicles including low-emission diesel, hybrid and electric cars, motorcycles and even BMW bicycles at the behest of the London Organizing Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games.
Regardless of how technologically advanced a neurosurgical suite, or how talented the surgeons working the room, if the patient isn't on the table within the "golden hour" after having been stricken with such catastrophic cerebral events as aneurism or stroke, all bets are off. And until recently, the odds would have been for the house in the southern part of the Garden State -- an area that includes Burlington, Ocean, Camden, Gloucester, Salem Cumberland and Cape May counties. Until now, the only comprehensive stroke and neurosurgical facility was at Atlantic Care, which is in Atlantic City, and close to nothing but water and slot machines. But the new Kennedy Neuroscience Center of Southern New Jersey, part of the Jefferson Neuroscience Network, has changed that map for people south of I-195. And a new ad campaign, via Philadelphia-based LevLane, targeting women 25 to 54, includes a 30-second TV spot talking about how the $5.7 million, 1,098-square-foot Interventional Neurosurgery Suite means faster response times, top doctors and cutting-edge technology. The TV spot shows a helicopter setting down at the Kennedy Hospital in Washington Township with a stroke victim who is wheeled into a state-of-the-art neurosurgical suite. There, we see the neuro team doing contrast dye MRI series on the hybrid surgical/diagnostic table using the über futuristic Phillips Allura Xper Bi-Plane 3-D intervention radiology imaging machine. The commercial closes with the message: “This is a life-saver for our community,”and the tag “When moments matter, we’re ready.” The spot will run during prime time on ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC on shows like "Biggest Loser," "The Voice," "The Bachelor," and sports programming including the Summer Olympics. On cable the ad will run on A&E, Family, Food Channel, HGTV, Lifetime, TLC, TNT and USA. The campaign will also have full-page ads and fractionals in local newspapers and magazines, and outdoor billboards at interstate and primary thoroughfare locations. The hospital says Gloucester County -- home to one Kennedy Health System facility -- and neighboring Salem County have the state’s highest stroke death rates. Previously, over 400 neurosurgery cases a year had to be transferred out of the Kennedy Health System, primarily to Philadelphia hospitals.
Imagine if TV distributors started to charge consumers “usage fees” for watching TV shows -- live, time-shifted or whatever. Comcast levies “data use” caps for some apps, but not for its Xfinity Xbox app. Reed Hastings, chief executive officer of Netflix, says this means Comcast “no longer [is] following net neutrality principles.” Forget for a moment what Hastings sees as a big inequity: Comcast’s imposition of a “data usage” cap on Netflix’s app. Imagine if some of this thinking applied to the bigger traditional TV platform. What if you watched 15 shows a week, but your neighbor – who has a lot of time on his hands – logs in 40 shows? Say you both have the same TV distributor. But that distributor has a usage thing going -- and your neighbor’s shows amount to 40 gigabytes, and your TV time spent comes to 15 gigabytes. Should both of you pay the same amount? And while you think about that, think about other consumer price points -- like putting gas in your tank. This is where the proposed so-called “a la carte” cable network purchasing strategy -- which would make consumers pay for only the channels they get -- comes in. But it goes farther. Because in the digital world, channels matter less -- while programs, the specific videos, are key; Consumers don’t really think about this much apart from iTunes. Like cable, satellite, and telco operators, the Hulus and Netflixes of the world have all-you-can-eat monthly plans – for $7.99, $8.99 or whatever. If “usage” plans applied to traditional TV, trouble for all kinds of would break loose –-- for ESPN, if say you don’t watch sports; or Food Network, if say you aren’t at all interested in food TV programming. National advertisers would be in a panic. If cable channels -- or their programs -- no longer had 85% or 95% penetration of U.S. TV homes, if they had say 55% or 45% penetration, this would mightily upset the TV apple cart. We all know there are bigger financial and economic considerations that make the current traditional TV system work the way it does. But that system is being pushed around for big change.
You have to admit that the announcement “He was caught with chewing gum on the pubis!” is a new one, a big surprise no matter what you think of the season so far. Don had earlier suggested that you’d need a cold shower after driving the new Jaguar. But who could possibly come up with a fix for that post-wad-o’-Doublemint predicament? “Signal 30” was slow at times, but deeply layered, and had its fair share of surprises. Who ever expected Pretty Boy Pryce to put up his dukes and proceed to make rum steak out of Pete “The Weasel” Campbell’s face, right there in the conference room? I’ve never seen a fight scene seem simultaneously so weird and poignant; it appeared to stop time without being in slow motion. That’s what I call a show-stopper. The episode opens with, and gets its title from, a grisly 1959 film about car accidents, which Pete is watching as part of his driver education class. That is fitting, since almost every man in this episode is a car wreck, excluding Don. (But his new wife is in the driver’s seat, big-time.)And Pete’s a man without a license. Yes, the Gangs of SCDP are almost paralyzed. Props to Matt Weiner and John Slattery (Roger) who directed this episode, for finding a literal way of showing the concept of bruised male egos. No one could man up enough for this episode, and both Lane and Pete ended up in (excellently acted) red-faced humiliation. Again with the issues of identity and duality, Matt Weiner? Yup, plus we get lots of forebodings of that year-round MM staple, death! What a lovely noose Don was doodling! But the best new added twist comes from “account man” Ken Cosgrove’s latest fiction: it tells the story of a robot fixing a bridge that united two different planets. He loosens a bolt and everybody commuting from both sides of the bridge plunges to their death. More than two-two-two things in one, this episode showed people with split career ambitions, split personalities, and split loyalties. (Plus several screws loose.) Ken Cosgrove’s new genre is “somewhere between fantasy and science fiction.” Megan is living somewhere between actress and wife/writer. (And I don’t trust her!) Don is somewhere between Dick Whitman and ad exec Draper, and between his two families. The Jaguar guy’s wife is living in Manhattan now, but wants to be a hog farmer. With Lane and Pete, we get two men with Daddy issues going at it. Let’s approach it man-to-man: (but not necessarily Englishman-to-Englishman, the way Lane bungled the Jaguar deal.) Lane is one freaky fellow. And the fact that we saw his father beat him with a cane last season certainly set him up to defend his manhood with his fists after being insulted and called a “homo” by Pete, the wicked son. (By the way, that was one of two allusions to homosexuality. The other one was when the Madam thought Don was sitting the session out because he played for the other team.) But back to the fight: the way Lane took his 19th-century English-public-school stance for the fight was so old-school it was hilarious; then Joan’s icing warmed up the wounded warrior enough for him to go in for a brutish kiss (gasp!) which she handled with aplomb. (I must say it lasted a few seconds to0 long, and I was worried.) But pugilists Lane and Pete are more alike than they know: they’ve both cheated on their wives, and generally don’t treat their spouses well; each feels underappreciated at work (Lane feels like a fraud, whereas entitled but unloved Pete is outraged by the lack of acknowledgement, craving it most from his father figure, Don.) Outside of work, each feels like a stranger in a strange land: Lane with his new allegiance to New York City and the U.S.; Pete with his new family life in the suburbs. And that’s where Pete has become the evil (or shadow) Don. Slinking in the back door late at night, lying, drinking, cheating, disrespecting his wife, Pete’s going all Donny Darko lately. A few seasons back, Trudy and Pete lived in a mod high-rise apartment while Don was in a big house in Westchester, and now it’s the reverse. The dinner party scene was wonderful, complete with Pete, who is obsessed with size and his lack thereof, showing off his HUGE stereo unit, which could accommodate even Wilt Chamberlain! Less funny was the coffin idea. I guess those things were the flat screens of their day. The point was really made that Trudy is putting down roots in Cos Cob (where there aren’t any Greenbergs!) and turning back the clock. When she was living in the city she was a fashion plate --now she’s in a tight-waisted, big skirted floral dress (Earth Mother?) while the other women are in modern, narrow sheaths. And the house is pure 1950s, similar to the set Lucy and Ricky used when they “moved” to Connecticut. Yet reality knocks, even if Trudy doesn’t want to let it in. The dinner party guests bring up the latest specter of terrifying violence in the news, only weeks after Richard Speck’s massacre: on August 1, 1966, an ex-Marine sharp shooter climbed to the top of a bell tower at the University of Texas with a cache of guns and ended up killing 17 people. It was a genius job of interweaving history into the episode: before shooting from the tower, Charles Whitman, as he was named, killed his sister and his mother. His father was a strict, abusive man who owned a plumbing business. Drip. Drip. Drip. Though he didn’t want any part of the evening in the beginning (just as Lane tried to get out of the “football” engagement with his wife) Don really warmed up. He even corrected a guest on the sniper’s last name: Whitman. (I was wondering whether Weiner chose that name originally as Don’s alter ego because it would resonate in the ‘60s.) At dinner, Don was so forthcoming that he admitted he grew up on a farm with an outhouse, about as far away from Pete’s upper-crust upbringing as you can get. So let’s get to the symbolism and imagery of the faucet. Pete, (whose mother was a Dykeman, remember!) is a fish out of water outside Manhattan. Previously, the kitchen faucet drip was driving him crazy, (Trudy didn’t hear it) and he got up in the middle of the night to fix it. Then the water exploded out of the faucet in the middle of the dinner party; in the male swagger department, turns out Pete hadn’t fixed it-- he only made it worse. Don tamps it down, and then dramatically takes his shirt off to finish the job with the right tools, with the women swooning and calling him Superman. Pete’s emasculated and pissed; not only can the new, scared-straight robo-Don tamp down the faucet, but he can also resist the charms of the prostitutes in the upscale brothel they go to with the would-be Jaguar client. (That was kind of depressing, to learn that all it took to be a great account guy was to know the best brothels.) Roger leaves with a Joan look-a-like, while Pete needs to hear that he’s a “king” in order to perform. When he and Don share a cab on the way home, Pete’s all angry and paranoid (for a change), acting like he took one for the team. He points out the sudden hypocrisy of Don being on his “high horse” (whorehouse Don on his high horse!) But Pete’s like an alcoholic who thinks everyone is watching him drink. Don gives Pete the same advice he gave Peggy long ago in the hospital: “Go home, take a shower, and forget this happened.” (He forgot to add, “‘You grimy little pimp!”). Don is behaving well, and tells Pete he should think about what he has to lose. There was more Pete-Don imagery in the driver’s ed scenes. In previous seasons, we’d seen Don, all suited up, sitting in a student desk in a classroom. Pete’s leering at an innocent young high school girl, who tap tap-taps her flowered flip-flop, very much the way the faucet gets Pete’s attention in the following scene. But Pete’s leering at a much younger woman (to deflower?) reminded me of Don’s Maypole scene, when he was ogling the teacher and pulling on the grass, alas. (More opposites now: Don was concerned for the young woman he met back stage at the Rolling Stones concert, while Pete wants to show off and take the girl to the Bronx Botanical Gardens, which his tony ancestors helped to found. But he is pushed out of the way by Handsome (heavy-handed much?) After Pete drops off Don in the cab ride, he tells the driver he’s going to Connecticut. “You have to pay both ways,” the driver says. Pete responds, “I’m aware of that.” The final scene is really sad, with Pete, whipped from the fight, crying in the elevator and going home early. “I have nothing now,” he tells Don. The voiceover is of Ken, reading from his latest story. Undeterred by Roger, he’s now using the nom de plume of Dave Algonquin (a name Dorothy loves, natch, and which was also mentioned by Pete at the party when he said Cos Cob meant “briefcase in Algonquin.”) He’s given up science fiction/fantasy, and instead writes poetically about Peter’s life. (This was a similar ending to Jon Hamm’s reading from “Meditations in an Emergency,” to close season 2.) Pete mentioned his gun at the dinner party. He said he needed it to shoot “varmints.” I have a bad feeling that the subject of the Bronx Botanical Gardens (a great burial ground) will come up again before Pete fights his way back to sanity.
Pat Dineen, SVP Nielsen, is a member of Nielsen’s Local Television Audience Measurement Product Leadership team. His responsibilities include leveraging Nielsen’s technology and know-how in the local measurement sector. Pat is relatively new to Nielsen, coming from CMR, where he built large databases and used analytics so advertisers could maximize their local presence. In my interview with him, Pat talks about Nielsen and STB data measurement, local targeting and segmentation, Nielsen’s Code Reader, diary measurement and data ownership, as well as offering some predictions of what’s next in media measurement. Below is an excerpt of the interview. See the rest here. CW: From your perspective, what are the challenges of set-top-box data for measurement? PD: First of all we should know that we are at the very early stages of set-top-box measurement and its impact on this industry. And with that comes all of the growing pains associated with a growing technology. The biggest issue we have is that it is scarce. Less than one in five of the subscriber-paid television households provide return path data that is commercially available. That is too little, in our view -- certainly too little for a good census measurement -- and a challenge [for] how we can effectively produce a representative sample. The data is, to use a technical term, “splotchy.” It arrives based on the geographies of the various contributing MSOs, and the delivery technology is not standardized across all MSOs. So we wind up with some markets where some neighborhoods are fully covered, and others are not. We then have the issue of how we can best balance that out. How can we create an effective representative measurement when you only have some neighborhoods providing new data, and others not? So our challenge is how we can leverage our assets, leverage our local panels and integrate set-top-box data with that in order to be able to create representative measurement. And that is exactly what we are doing now with our hybrid measurement methodology. CW: I am curious to know how you are hybridizing the data in the three different types of markets – whether it is a people meter market, a household meter market or a diary market. PD: The core of our measurement is our people meter panels -- both our national panels as well as our local people meter panels that are available in our largest markets. The process of hybrid measurement is to leverage that data in a statistical process, where set-top-box data can provide you with the large sample size you need in order to take away some of the sample size issues associated with smaller panels. But your panel helps you overcome the challenges associated with the non-representative nature of set-top-box data and where it comes from. There are a couple of different techniques we are using in different types of markets. We will be presenting the details of that to our clients, as well as to the MRC very shortly. But the bottom line is, how do you take the challenges of a small panel away and take away the challenges of a large data set that is skewed by where it comes from. CW: Is there a priority to concentrate on the diary-only markets first? PD: Not necessarily. Each one of the market segments poses different challenges and have different client needs. And we are subject to the availability of data -- what markets are delivering set-top-box data. So all of this has to be taken into account when deciding which markets will get our initial attention for hybridization.
While watching live TV, I use the mute button a good percentage of the time when commercials come on. (Sorry, marketers. You still don’t know what makes me click.) But here’s the silver lining: Your commercial runs until “completion” and sometimes I even see most of it. Hulu says it will now only charge advertisers for commercials -- around 96% of them -- that users run until “completion.” To be fair, when was the last time anyone said they could fast-forward through a commercial that runs during an online showing of a full-length TV show? Online, you have to watch almost everything to completion. If you abandon an online commercial, most times you are also abandoning the show itself. Hulu will levy no extra charge for its commercial completion guarantee. Some facts: Hulu showed more than 1.5 billion video ads to viewers in February, compared with Google's 1.2 billion. In 2011, Hulu pulled in $420 million in revenue, a 60% gain over the year before. Traditional TV networks continue to abide by the rules of completion. I have yet to see, in recent memory, any commercial that stops midway through airing without the help of the TV viewer through DVR or otherwise. While advertisers get the completion guarantee for commercials they buy directly from Hulu, they don’t if they place ads on Hulu via buys from Fox, NBCUniversal or Disney-ABC. Marketers say commercials with greater completion see higher recall rates and better overall brand lift. So completion is a good deal. Putting aside time-shifted viewing, we understand the need to make sure consumers get a commercial’s message in one way or another. But the usual complaints arise: Are viewers really getting the “message”? Are they fully engaged? Do they want to talk with their friends about it? Media buying plans need to work harder to satisfy the appetite. Completion is only the first step. Real digestion is another issue. And I’ll un-mute when I feel hungry.
More than 25% of all video viewing in broadband homes in the U.S. is taking place on venues besides the TV, according to fresh data from research firm, Parks Associates. That includes PCs, smartphones and tablets, and that’s also a weekly figure, underscoring that off-TV viewing is becoming a regular behavior for consumers. What’s more, about one-third of homes said they’d streamed a TV show in the past 30 days. Given this not unexpected, but still encouraging data, it’s even more vital for marketers and agencies to track the success of their ads in such shows. Ad management platform Vindico said that completion rates for video ads in long-form content averaged about 88% last year, compared to 76% for short-form content, based on an analysis of impressions served for its clients including GroupM, Havas, IPG, Publicis, Omnicom and others. Based on these findings, Vindico expects different creative will be developed for different lengths of content in 2012. Mid-rolls, not surprisingly, have the highest completion rates at about 94%. Vindico’s next prediction? Expect the amount of long-form content online to grow this year, and the number of mid-roll ads to also grow. On the creative front, the ad platform’s analysis showed that while 90% of all video ads in 2011 were standard ad types and usually repurposed TV spots, some progress is being made toward new creative. “In 2010, 1% of video ads were custom video environments; such as overlays, billboards and tiles, and 1% were interactive, with little money going to mobile video ads. In 2011, 6% of ads were custom video environments, 2% were interactive, and 2% were mobile,” Vindico said. Look for interactive and custom spots to rise in use this year.