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.
According to Bonin Bough, VP of global media and consumer engagement for Kraft Foods, the digital media executives inside brands that are having the most success right now realize that they must take advantage of the huge channel that TV is by evolving and integrating it with other media, rather than treating it as its own animal. Bough, speaking at the Brand Innovators Digital Video Advertising Summit, said the best example of this is the work that the so-called “Godfather of Digital Video,” Marc Fonzetti, media director at Verizon Wireless, is doing. Shortly before the Digital Content NewFronts in mid-April, Fonzetti organized a ‘Digital Daypart’ summit for all of Verizon’s digital video agencies and partners. The idea was to bring together all providers, both traditional and digital, to break down the silos under which some of them operate in order to have an open strategy session where everyone could voice their concerns and ideas. The results were fantastic, Bough said. For its part, Kraft is also being progressive when it comes to embracing digital video, Bough said. “We’re going after digital video (and mobile) in a massive way. We are moving to screen-neutral watching -- why wouldn’t we?” However, he noted that there are some tough obstacles to fully justify digital video buying to the most senior brand managers. Even though he agreed that the GRP sells digital short, Bough said marketers need to work with what’s currently available and they need to push the measurement folks to get it right.
GroupM Chairman Irwin Gotlieb stated at his keynote at the recent ARF Audience Measurement 7.0 conference, that the media industry needs to create standard measurement definitions. CIMM could not agree more. It has been our contention that the development of a common language would help facilitate the integration of Return-Path data into media measurement and move audience measurement forward in the digital media world. CIMM (the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement) is a group of buyers and sellers of advertising-supported media formed to promote innovation and explore new high quality ways to measure audiences across traditional and new media in the United States. CIMM has two major initiatives – Return-Path Data and Cross-Platform measurement. As part of our RPD initiative, we commissioned a “CIMM Lexicon of RPD Terms and Definitions” and have shared some of these in a weekly Word-A-Week TV Board column that has appeared on Thursday for the past 18 months. The Lexicon was first released in 2010 when we set out to codify terms and definitions for Set-Top Box Measurement (now termed Return-Path Data). The release of Lexicon 1.0 contained over 800 terms and definitions with accompanying notes. Two years later, as the media landscape continued to evolve and transition, we realized that the Lexicon could serve a more universal purpose by expanding from its original intent to now include terms and definitions for ACR (Automatic Content Recognition), VOD, DVR, the Internet and Cross-Platform. The updated Lexicon has expanded by +70% to more than 1,400 terms and definitions. As with the first Lexicon, we received great support from the industry and in many cases were allowed to include terms and definitions collected by other industry groups into Lexicon 2.0. With the imminent debut of this updated and expanded Lexicon, we now need to reassess the original intent of the TV Board Word-A-Week feature and have decided to put the column on hiatus as we reconfigure the article series. Thank you all for your comments, questions and encouragement over the past 18 months. Please look for the new, updated CIMM Lexicon 2.0 on our website www.cimm-us.org soon!
Even as the big broadcast networks continue killing off or otherwise compromising their daily daytime dramas – the only genre of television programming they can still call their own – a basic cable network has stepped up to prove that soap operas don’t have to die. They simply need to adapt to changing times. If that means migrating from broadcast to cable, so be it. The network at the forefront of what could become just such a shift for soaps is Nick at Nite, which two weeks ago premiered a one-hour week-night serial titled “Hollywood Heights.” Based on the Mexican telenovela “Alcanzar una Estrella,” “Heights” will play out until sometime in October with a total of 80 episodes. Now, 80 episodes is a long way from the approximately 250 per year that are produced for network soaps, but it’s a good deal more than the episode order for the dominant teen- and young-adult targeted prime-time serials that are hot at the moment, including ABC Family’s “Pretty Little Liars” and “The Secret Life of the American Teenager” and MTV’s monstrously good “Teen Wolf” (which in its second season has become the most entertaining drama featuring werewolves on television). Amazingly, despite the demands of so much larger an episode order, “Heights” is as well-produced and professionally packaged as those shows. The credit for this efficient excellence goes to executive producer Jill Ferran Phelps, a broadcast soap veteran whose most recent credit is a 10-year run on “General Hospital,” and head writer Josh Griffith, an alumnus of the late and lamented “One Life to Live.” They are both doing terrific work here as they blaze what may be a new trail of daily soap storytelling in the creatively fertile world of basic cable. To date, “Heights” has revolved around a pretty young high school student with a crush on a successful rock star. It is no secret to anyone familiar with “Alcanzar una Estrella” that over time she will break into the music business herself and become involved in a rocky romance with the current object of her affections. That’s about as basic and sturdy a foundation for a soap opera as any other: girl likes boy she thinks she can’t have, boy takes an interest in girl, girl and boy become a star-crossed couple, romance and heartbreak ensue. During the glory days of afternoon soaps – that would be the late ‘70s and the ‘80s – that simple narrative structure was a proven formula for unprecedented success, no matter how outrageous or outlandish the overarching plotlines. A good love story laced with occasional pleasing payoffs was all it took to keep millions of viewers enthralled – that and a backdrop of multigenerational family drama, something that has been all but eradicated from network soap operas, but which has been carefully constructed in “Hollywood Heights.” This might be a series that focuses on the trials, tribulations and triumphs of kids and young adults, but their parents and other grown-ups are very much a part of the action. “Heights” is in every way a major experiment for Nick at Nite, from production to scheduling to publicity and promotion. It’s off to a great start and is already far superior to the unfortunate telenovela adaptations a few years back on MyNetworkTV. Nobody can say how “Hollywood Heights” will perform over the next four months, but with any luck it will earn ratings and respect significant enough to warrant a second season renewal, and perhaps the development of an additional nightly serial by Nick at Nite -- preferably a complete original and not one derived from an existing international program. Creatively, I think that “Heights” so far has been a bit on the safe and sterile side, even more than “Degrassi” and certainly more than the often quite edgy fare on ABC Family. So I’m hoping it takes a few content risks as it goes along, which will make it more appealing to teens. I also think that five hour-long episodes per week may be too much of a demand to place on potential viewers in the new media world of ever-increasing competition and ever-shrinking attention spans. That’s a common concern expressed about network soaps -- but if the end product is strong enough, that need not be an issue, right? Then again, if “Hollywood Heights” becomes a social-media phenomenon like “Pretty Little Liars” that may be all it needs to become a groundbreaking success. I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if during its run as the most popular program on the planet with young people “General Hospital” had been able to benefit additionally by the kind of massive support that digital technology and social media today provide. (How much bigger would the audience for Luke and Laura’s record-setting wedding have been if people had been able to watch it on mobile devices?) “Hollywood Heights” can’t hope to achieve the same level of success that former teen fave “General Hospital” once enjoyed, but it would be nice if it ushered in a new era of popularity for its seemingly outdated genre, just as “GH” did back in the day.
No junk food ads for kids and no political junk ads for adults. Those are some specific results -- or benefits? – that the commercial-skipping AutoHop feature of Dish Network's new DVR unit, The Hopper, could soon bring to viewers. In questioning Charles Ergen, chairman of Dish Network, during a recent Congressional hearing, Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.) worried that the new DVR machine could cause Dish's audience of some 15 million homes to miss out on all those key political messages. The truth is that nearly half of the country already has access to DVR technology that allows them to do this manually. But AutoHop gets rid of all prime-time commercials automatically during next-day viewing of prime-time programs from the four broadcast networks. Dingell's intentions seemed earnest enough: Easier commercial-skipping will make it harder for politicians to communicate with their constituents. But political ad messages weren’t singled out. During the questioning, Ergen said he believed the AutoHop feature would be good for parents and kids in automatically skipping those nasty junk food commercials. And even ads for alcohol. The real issue isn’t the elimination of certain TV messaging over other TV commercials. The underlying message from Dish is that entertainment consumers can still choose. Are marketers --- including political marketers -- looking to find ways around this? Or do some feel that Dish is looking to accelerate the process -- and will thus consider pulling back their advertising from Dish altogether? Ergen's position is that consumers desire new entertainment technologies. Let them figure out their specific use. You want to see commercials? No problem. You don't want to see commercials? Also no problem. Lawsuits are still in play from the broadcast TV networks against Dish's "Hopper." Meanwhile, the Consumer Electronics Association this week gave "Hopper" a "Best of Show" award during its CEA Line Shows event in New York. Maybe by the time automated commercial-skipping technology becomes more widespread, we will all be watching programs through Internet-like online digital services -- those websites and digital areas where you can't skip or fast-forward commercials. So while "communicating" with one's constituents seems noble enough, consumers also know what “negative” political advertising sounds like. Would you like some Twinkies with that?
Online video advertising is a powerful tool to boost the reach and effectiveness of a TV campaign, according to a comScore report on cross-media marketing. If an advertiser allocates 90% of a campaign to TV and 10% to digital video, that mix can increase the reach by 5 percentage points and the effectiveness by 16 percentage points, comScore said. The combination also often increases visits to a brand Web site, comScore said. Viewers who saw one ad on TV and one ad online for the same brand were 28% more likely to check out the brand’s Web site than consumers who were exposed to just a TV ad. While those numbers may point more to the necessity of multiple exposures in general for marketing to elicit an action, they also illustrate the value in layering in digital components to make a TV campaign truly pop. The findings jibe with other important digital studies. The Interactive Advertising Bureau’s recent study on multiscreen marketing also found that additional devices and screens increase the recall of TV ads. More than half of viewers with tablets, TV, smartphones and computers could recall the ads that had run on their favorite shows. Also, 61% of consumers between the ages of 18 and 44 who used four screens could recall the ads in their top shows.