At a time when networks are starting to ramp up campaigns for new fall shows, Arbitron is launching a measurement tool looking to link ad exposure with tune-in. The product uses the company’s portable people meters (PPM) to track how many people are exposed to particular TV and radio promos -- and whether those consumers watched a particular episode. Arbitron uses PPM for its core radio ratings and is looking to find more applications for them in the TV space, notably in cross-platform measurement and with out-of-home viewing. The fledgling Promo OptimiXer tool culls data from the PPM panel with 69,000 participants in 44 markets. The tool is malleable in that it can measure connections between purchased ads on tune-in -- as well as the impact of in-house promos or DJ chatter on viewing. It can offer a “conversion percent” for one promotional channel or by combining all of them. The DJ chatter aspect offers marketers a chance to gauge how much “earned” media they receive for outreach campaigns targeting radio personalities. Also, there is the potential to gauge any link between a star’s appearance on a radio station and tune-in in that market. Discovery used the product as a gauge of how a radio and TV campaign drove tune-in to its April 12 premiere of “Deadliest Catch.”
Aegis Group’s Carat has struck a deal for one of the first product-placement deals on commercial TV in the UK. The agreement is with commercial broadcaster ITV to place its client, tourist organization Welcome to Yorkshire, in the popular prime-time soap opera “Emmerdale.” Product placement, while commonplace in the U.S., is a fledgling business in the UK. The practice was authorized just last year and is tightly regulated. Marketers have just begun to test it. According to David Croft -- the account director at Carat, who negotiated the deal on behalf of the tourist group -- the Emmerdale agreement is the first product-placement deal for both Carat in the UK and the ITV program. It is probably among the first deals to be implemented since the practice was authorized last year. The industry is cautiously feeling its way into the sector, he said, noting that “you can probably count on one hand” the number of deals in place at this point. That said, the UK ad industry has expectations that product placement will grow into a multimillion-dollar business in a relatively short period of time, said Croft -- estimating that it will grow into the “tens of millions” over the next three to five years. The sector’s growth will likely follow the pattern of sponsorship activity, which was authorized in the UK about 10 years ago, Croft adds. At first, sponsorships were more tightly regulated than they are today, and activity was slow to start. A decade later, as marketers became more familiar with the field and saw valuable results, the UK sponsorship sector grew to an estimated $2 billion-a-year business. The placements for Welcome to Yorkshire include branded leaflets, posters and stickers on doors, per Croft. By regulation, he noted, placements must be “editorially justified and within the context” of the broadcast. Programs that carry product placements must also notify viewers by displaying the letter “P” at the start of the broadcast. News and children’s programs are still banned from the practice, as are certain brand categories, including alcoholic beverages as well as certain soft drinks and snack foods. "Emmerdale" attracts an average audience of 7.6 million viewers and 34% share of the audience for each of its five episodes every week. The Welcome To Yorkshire deal is effective from July through the end of the year. As part of the agreement, ITV has commissioned brand research company Repucom to analyze the placement program, providing details about how much on-air exposure the product placements receive, to what extent they register with audiences and how the total program translates to paid media impressions. “We think over time there is a lot of value there,” said Croft.
The recent death of Andrew Sarris recalls a time when film criticism really mattered -- while simultaneously reminding us there has never been a television critic with his reach and intellectual influence. And that goes for his contemporaries Pauline Kael, John Simon and Stanley Kauffmann, too. Sarris, of course, was famous for popularizing the “auteur theory” of film criticism, which posited that the way to understand and analyze film is to regard the director as the “auteur,” or author, of the work. Sarris had his pantheon of great filmmakers – Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, Orson Welles, Jean Renoir, etc. – whose main appeal wasn’t just that they made great films, but that they had a recognizable style and recurring set of themes that allowed a critic to compare and contrast the whole body or work. It’s only been in the last decade that a similar theory of authorship has begun to grow up around the creation of works of art that originate on television. And that’s probably because it’s only been in the last decade that you could use the words “works of art” and “television” in the same sentence. Not that there wasn’t outstanding television way back in the 20th Century. Even in the ‘60s and ‘70s, when the most popular shows seemed to be the schlockiest, there were pockets of excellence like “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “The Carol Burnett Show.” But except for very rare cases such as Rod Serling’s “The Twilight Zone,” most television shows didn’t derive from the singular vision of one creator. You never thought to ask about the creative power behind “Gunsmoke” or “The Beverly Hillbillies.” That began to change when powerful producers with distinctive visions started creating a new kind of serious television: people like Norman Lear (“All in the Family,” “Maude”), Grant Tinker (“The Mary Tyler More Show,” “Hill Street Blues”), and Steven Bochco (“L.A. Law” and “NYPD Blue.”) But even these producers, being too busy with multiple projects to claim the sole creative vision of any one show, weren’t seen as the “authors” of their series. I don’t know where I was when I first heard the word “showrunner.” Maybe I wasn’t paying attention, but the phrase seems to have come from nowhere to omnipresent in every critical analysis of television. I look forward to the next edition of the Oxford English Dictionary to discover its derivation, but in the meantime television finally has its own version of the auteur theory. The showrunner is the author of a television series, and we can focus our critical analysis on him or her. Formally, a showrunner might sport one of a variety of producer-type formal titles, such as executive producer or senior producer, but since a proliferation of these honorifics has diluted their real meaning, the phrase showrunner is used to indicate the ultimate creative authority on a show. A showrunner is frequently the creator and head writer (and not the director, who is typically seen as a craftsman one step above set designer.) This reflects the difference between television and film: a movie screen, being a hundred times bigger than a TV screen, is a more visual and social medium than television, which is experienced at home more intimately and casually through the spoken word. It’s no coincidence that the most critically acclaimed shows seem to have the strongest showrunners. An empowered showrunner will deliver a distinctive style and avoid the corporate blandness that results from a show that is written by committee with intrusive network input. Andrew Sarris had his pantheon of great directors and a similar hall of fame for great showrunners is beginning to emerge. In the area of drama, this would include: David Chase (“The Sopranos”), Matthew Weiner (“Mad Men’), Alan Ball (“Six Feet Under” and “True Blood”), Aaron Sorkin (“Sports Night,” “The West Wing” and “Newsroom”), Vince Gilligan (“Breaking Bad”) and David Simon (“The Wire” and “Treme”). There are great showrunners in comedy too, including Larry David (“Seinfeld” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm,), Louis C.K. (“Louie”), and Greg Daniels (“The Office” and “Parks and Recreation”). What’s tricky from the critic’s point of view is that showrunners can leave shows they created before they come to an end. This is more common for broadcast television shows, where the networks sometimes want the show to go on long after the creator has run out of steam (I’m thinking about you, NBC and “The Office.”) Once the “author” is gone, it’s harder to assign credit and blame. We’ll soon have a test case of how much the showrunner matters. Dan Harmon, who was the creative force behind “Community,” was fired when NBC picked up the show for next season. If the show somehow manages to hang onto its very distinctive vision even without Harmon, we might need to reconsider the mystique of the showrunner. Then again, the auteur theory was itself an imperfect tool: who’s the “author” of “Gone With The Wind,” which had two directors (Victor Fleming and George Cukor)? Even with the rise of the showrunner, television criticism will continue to be a messy job. A great show will be a great show regardless of who gets the credit, and comparing showrunners will never be as easy as comparing movie directors.
TV advertising may still command billions of dollars each year, but its growth will be largely flat over the next few years. So marketers should seek out connected TV opportunities to keep growing the video ad market, according to an IHS Screen Digest report commissioned by ad management platform VideoPlaza that is slated to release today. The report focuses on the United States and on Western Europe including France, UK, Spain, Italy and Germany. As evidence of the evening out of the TV ad model, IHS Screen Digest notes that in Western Europe and in the U.S. TV is no longer a growth market, with compound annual growth rates continuing to slow. Online video may pick up the slack for brand-building, especially as IP-delivery and connected TVs open up more avenues for digital video, the report suggests. At the end of 2011, there were about 124 million active connected living-room devices across North America and Western Europe, including TVs, gaming consoles and set-top boxes. That compares to 245 million PCs and 305 million TV homes in those regions. But by the end of 2014, the number of connected devices in those regions will surpass the number of PC homes as well as TV homes. “The growth in living-room devices will be spearheaded by connected TVs, the manufacturers of which are hoping to help drive sales using a mixture of attractive hardware combined with a content offer -- a strategy which has served technology players such as Apple well in the past,” the report said. “Connecting such devices is becoming increasingly easy for consumers, with simple wireless network integration helping to improve the connection rates. Manufacturers such as Samsung are ultimately hoping to achieve connection rates of 70 percent of installed sets -- on par with devices such as game consoles.” This growth could pose challenges for content companies because costs to migrate an online video service to a connected TV can range from $77,000 to $232,000. IHS Screen Digest says. Add in the extra cost to deliver ads to the proper devices and the proposition becomes more expensive for media companies. But ad revenue is rising on other devices, luring programmers to new platforms. VideoPlaza says broadcaster ad delivery to connected devices other than PCs has grown from 2% to 16%, from April 2011 to March 2012, of the total ads delivered for its European clients. As advertisers begin to run more spots on connected TVs they’ll need to pay close attention to ad loads, frequency capping, video length and click-through rates, IHS Screen Digest advises.
When we launched “TV Watch” eight years ago, the mission was to watch the people who watch TV: not consumers, per se, but the people in our industry – insiders, analysts and journalists – who shape the way we view the medium from a business perspective. On Tuesday, I received an interesting analysis from the folks at IHS Screen Digest that could, if true, change the way we look at TV forever. The report projects that by 2016, the primary way most subscribers will receive TV won’t be from a set-top converter box, but from a variety of newer “multiscreen services,” including computers, phones, tablets, and other newfangled gadgets like “connected TV” devices. The tipping point is significant for all the obvious reasons, but today, I’d like to focus on the most fundamental – and if you ask me, most existential – of them all: What is television? Is it a screen? Is it a device? Is it a form of content? Is it a business model? Is it an experience? Needless to say, it is all of these things, but the exact nature of it is somewhat in the eyes and ears of the beholder. I first learned this when I was covering television during the early 1980s. It was during the rise of cable TV, and our industry was spending a great deal of time, energy and research dollars focused on the differences between broadcast and cable. Of course there were some real differences, including the means of transmission (though over time most of “broadcast” TV would come to be distributed by cable and satellite technology) and how many and what types of viewers each form reached. But if you asked people outside our business (you know, consumers) what television was, they would simply cite their favorite shows or channels. They didn’t care much how they received it (other than how much they might be paying for it). They cared about the content. In fact, in its earliest days, cable was not defined as a distribution medium, but by its content. People didn’t “subscribe to cable,” they “got HBO” or they “wanted MTV.” The rest was just semantics, because fundamentally, they were experiencing television – more or less – the same way, regardless of whether it came from an antenna, a dish or a coaxial or fiber optic cable. Viewers watched it on screens that were in one or more rooms of their house, in the houses of their neighbors, or sometimes communally in a bar or student center, etc. But the shift that’s taking place now is different, because it significant alters how, when, where and why people experience television across a multitude of screens that can dramatically alter the context of what the medium means. And it’s not just time-shifting and place-shifting, though those are significant factors being enabled by the shift toward what Screen Digest calls “multiscreen services.” The bigger shift is what I would call “mind-shifting.” Or maybe a better term would be “state-of-mind-shifting.” Over the last couple of years, I’ve written a lot about some new research indicating that the screen on which people experience content, and the setting where the screen is watched, dramatically affect the way people experience content. Boston-based Innerscope Research even came up with a model for understanding it. Dubbed the “Brand Immersion Model,” the technique plots the relative experience a user has with a screen, with axis points representing how immersed a user is in the screen experience vs. how “flexible” the experience is. Obviously, there are a lot of factors influencing how people experience content on a screen, including the nature and quality of the content, the individuals experiencing it, and the setting they are in, but Innerscope’s research found that a conventional television experience is generally more immersive than some of the kinds of “multiscreen services” (computers and hand-held devices) that Screen Digest says are becoming the dominant television platform. Those devices tend to be more “flexible,” meaning users are apt to do other things while on their computer or hand-held device, like communicate via email, browse other content, take a call, tweet, etc. Innerscope recently presented updated findings of this research with client Fox Broadcasting during the Advertising Research Foundation’s Audience Measurement Conference in New York, which reinforced the notion that – in general – people are more engaged when they are watching television than when they are using more flexible screens. The big question is what happens when users are consuming content originally created for television on screens and in situations that are more flexible than a traditional TV set. Innerscope Co-Founder and Chief Science Officer Dr. Carl Marci told me this is an area the company hopes to study more in the future. That’s probably a good idea, because if Screen Digest is right, more people will soon be watching “television” on something other than a television set.
Negative campaigning reached a new low over the weekend on ABC’s “This Week” thanks to Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal. Using the narrative that the GOP’s Mitt Romney has been an astute businessman, Jindal accused President Obama of having “never run a business, never run anything -- including a lemonade stand” before the White House. If Gov. Jindal is among those who believe President Obama was born in Hawaii –- and not somewhere overseas where Romney might stash money -- this is a risky charge. It’s hot in Hawaii. It seems plausible the future president and some friends may have set up a lemonade stand. Has the president been asked about this and admitted that was not the case? Perhaps a newly fair-minded Donald Trump could investigate. This is great stuff. Negative campaigning -- Democrats wondering about Romney's Swiss bank accounts, Republicans suggesting Obamacare is a socialist plot -- needs to be embraced. Bring on the super-PAC-ing, swift-boating, he’ll-tax-you-into-oblivion ads from both sides. The ads need to be appreciated for their skilfull use of outrageous claims and truth-stretching. t’s ludicrous that with all the country’s troubles, there are enough people and entities willing to give candidates multibillions of dollars to slug it out, but since that’s inevitable, enjoy the slugfest. This is not to say, of course, the presidential race is all one big game. Obviously, there are serious choices before the country. The massive difference between politics and policy needs to be pointed out more. The most erudite TV commentators focus too much on the former. But a narrative needs to be advanced that negative political ads are more entertainment than substance. The media could help the republic by taking that approach. Cable networks, notably CNN, try to point out the falsities and exaggerations, but more needs to be done. End the segments with: "It's all just entertainment. Enjoy it." The old adage is that negative campaigning works. It’s time the American people realize the statement is an insult to them. With the Internet, the citizenry should work harder to gather information to help them make a more informed, sober evaluation of the candidates (and laugh at the attack ads in the process.) Laughter brings people together, so the amusement could carry some needed bipartisanship. Those who believe Romney’s economic policies could turn lemons into lemonade, and those supporting a president who allegedly never ran a lemonade stand, should join together before they vote differently. Laughter may be the best medicine to at least try to persuade politicians that attack ads provide entertainment -- not education.