As the lines continue to blur between conventional TV and online video advertising, yet another TV ad convention is going online: upfront audience guarantees. In what is believed to be a first-of-its-kind offer, Undertone has quietly begun guaranteeing advertisers delivery of the most premium online advertising video formats: so-called “user-initiated” video ads. But unlike conventional TV audience guarantees, which normally provide advertisers “makegood” audience impressions, Undertone’s new Video Guarantee will give cash-back to advertisers for campaigns that do not deliver the audiences they contracted for. The new program, which is being unveiled publicly today, will refund advertisers the full cost of their campaigns up to $50,000, if their ads appear within in-banner auto-play streams or other non-user-initiated video ad inventory. The program is similar in concept to a program Undertone launched in March giving advertisers up to a $50,000 refund on its display ad network buys if they failed to meet agreed-upon “brand lift” guarantees, and follows an earlier “quality guarantee” it implemented in 2008 on the quality of the pages its clients' ads are placed on. Undertone claims to have run “more than 10,000 campaigns” to date qualifying for its Quality Guarantee. Undertone executives said they are offering the new online video audience guarantees as part of an effort to differentiate their premium, user-initiated video ad buys, which they claim are the crème de la crème of the online video ad marketplace, and need to be differentiated from other formats, especially auto-stream inventory that may appear below the fold and may not even be viewed by users that advertisers are paying for. “The industry needs to coalesce around a set of quality standards for digital video," said Adam Kasper, executive vice president-partnerships and investments at Havas Digital, who has been evaluating the new Undertone program for his clients. "There are just too many horror stories about video being mis-sold -- stories that could ultimately derail the growth the space is currently enjoying. It’s great to see Undertone lead the way with a guarantee that gives buyers more confidence that they’re getting what they pay for.” Undertone’s new Video Guarantees actually represent a more rigorous standard than conventional TV ad guarantees, which only cover audience exposure, or opportunity-to-see, delivery, because it’s assumed that user-initiated ads are likely to have been seen by the audiences initiating them.
Despite growing use of new tablet and other devices, one Wall Street media analyst believes total kids' viewing continues to climb on traditional TV.In looking at 8.5 million set-top-box data homes, Brian Wieser, senior research analyst of Pivotal Research Group, says, "total ratings across the entire group of kids-focused TV networks have been up by mid-single digits in most months since last November." He adds: "Kids have not abandoned TV for new video platforms."All the findings point to some good and bad news for Viacom's big Nickelodeon kids' cable network which, for some, mysteriously witnessed a drop in Nielsen rating by up to 20% starting last fall. Early on, Viacom's executives explained that kids' TV set-top-box viewership data -- when it came to Nickelodeon -- conflicted with viewership data from Nielsen.That said, Wieser adds: "From our analysis, we believe that problems at Nick must be due to programming issues and competition, with little to do with childrens’ viewing habits on new devices and platforms."He concludes that there isn't evidence that online video or Netflix impacts traditional TV viewing, and that the ratings drops at Nickelodeon are still real. Set-top box data provides more detail on Nick's competition.Nickelodeon’s domestic programming generated around $900 million in advertising revenue in 2011 -- a big chunk of the nearly $5 billion total advertising at Viacom networks around the world, says Wieser."This revenue base has eroded substantially since that time, and is the primary driver of the company’s domestic underperformance," he says. "We expect this underperformance to continue for several quarters to come, including a 6% decline in advertising revenue."
As the 2012 political conventions come to a close, we thought we’d look back 60 years, to the 1952 conventions -- the first time the conventions were telecast to a national audience. Television was in its infancy, the United States was in the midst of the Cold War era, McCarthyism and anti-Communism were on everyone’s minds, and incumbent President Harry S. Truman had decided not to run. Ultimately, at their respective parties’ National Conventions, Democrats chose Governor Adlai Stevenson (Here is a video of him accepting the nomination) and the Republicans chose war hero General Dwight D. Eisenhower (video of 1952 Republican Convention). Absent in 1952 were the hundreds of consultants, lighting designers, focus groups, stylists, and other modern-day staples of the political process. Here are some of our Archive of American Television interviewees speaking about how different -- and, at times, how real -- the process was: Before 1952, conventions were not produced with the audience in mind. "All three networks took a feed. There was one director of the pool and he would look at the six pictures, and he would pick one, and it went out to all three networks. Everybody had the same picture. If the president or Speaker of the House, or the majority leader, or the head of the party, was speaking, we’d follow him for a while. They ran on too long. We learned a valuable lesson. They ran till two, and three, and four o’clock in the morning. People got tired. The hall would be half-empty, and we knew nobody was looking at television by that hour. We learned then to cut everything back. That’s how '52, '56, and '60 were quite successful. They were produced with audience in mind, not the candidates." -- Bob Doyle, Director of pool coverage for the 1952 conventions Visual effects were primitive. "We're at the 1952 convention. When somebody was speaking, if you took a cutaway shot, you had to dip the track for Cronkite to say 'that's Senator Taft, that's Governor Dewey, that's Nelson Rockefeller.' I said, 'I wish we could superimpose those names.' But there was no way that the artist could make these supers fast enough. I'm sitting in a diner one morning pondering this problem. The waitress says, 'What'll you have?' I look up at her, and I look up at the board over her head that said ‘soup 35 cents, hamburger, 75 cents, apple pie, $1.25.’ I said, ‘I'll take that board with the little white letters on the black background.’ She called the boss over. I said, ‘How much do you want for that board?’ He said ‘I'll sell it to you for 50 bucks.’ I took the board off the wall, took the letters, went out to the hall and said, 'When you see a guy, put up the blackboard and you grab the letters and you put R-O-C-K-E-F-E-L-L-E-R.' That was a first time we ever superimposed names, and it all came out of a diner. You were making up stuff as you went along." -- Don Hewitt, CBS producer There was no such thing as media savvy. "In 1952, the challenge was to be on the air for hours on-end, and we were there for the whole gavel-to-gavel coverage. The conventions went on forever. They were the genuine event, as they had been for more than 100 years. [Later] they... lost that character as the political parties took over and tried to clean them up for television. But those 1952 conventions were pure conventions. The chairs they used were kind of picnic chairs, so that as the day wore on, they got jumbled up and all over the floor. It wasn’t very well air-conditioned. People removed their coats and most of them were men and sat there in their suspenders, their ties undone, [and they] read the newspaper through a lot of the proceedings, shouted back and forth. [There were] demonstrations on the floor at the podium, [and] the chairman of the meeting stood there pounding the gavel….The platform was debated actually on the floor of the convention." -- Walter Cronkite, CBS News 1952 was the last ballot convention to choose a nominee. "I covered both conventions in 1964. Those were years in which things happened, although the last multiple-ballot convention to choose a presidential nominee was 1952, when it took the Republicans two ballots to put Dwight Eisenhower up for the presidency. Still, in those days things happened that mattered and could change the course of a convention. Today it’s all done for television. It’s all canned before it starts. It’s boring in the sense that there are no surprises. I think conventions today are important in some senses. [They] still expose national candidates, perhaps for the first time, to a wider audience, and I think that’s important. The work of the convention is nothing, but in those days it was very interesting." -- Sam Donaldson, ABC News OK, maybe there was a little media-savvy, but it backfired. "There was the great Taft/Eisenhower fight at the 1952 convention, where television was kept out of the crucial meetings of the credentials committee and of the Republican National Committee. The Taft people tried to drive through and the reporters were allowed in, but the cameras were not. So the cameras took pictures of a closed door. And that closed-door symbol is much more important than fact. Television pictures of closed doors, I think, got Eisenhower the nomination. Certainly after 1952 the parties knew that it was all television that made their case." -- Reuven Frank, NBC News The technology wasn’t so great, either. "We had floor reporters who would report back on-camera. They had big backpacks that they carried with the electronic equipment for the microphone.... Because the radio transmitters for those backpacks were long antennae that the people bumped into and interrupted the transmission, they had one of these little beanies with big long antennae up there with a little plastic disk around it so it wouldn’t touch anybody And with the pack on their back and the headset, they looked for all the world like men from Mars. They looked pretty silly, to tell you the truth. But it was effective. …. I suppose it would be effective if there were a story to tell in the conventions today, which there is not. They’re only shows now. They’re not real conventions…. And as a consequence, we have now been selecting our candidates before they ever get to the convention. There’s no real battle. The big story is gone." -- Walter Cronkite, CBS News The Huffington Post just reported that an episode of TLC’s “Toddlers and Tiaras” spinoff “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo” matched that of CNN’s coverage of President Clinton’s live DNC nominating speech, and bested the RNC ratings in the previous week. With those numbers, it will be interesting to see what the consultants and stylists will recommend to keep the ratings up in 2016. Maybe a mud belly-flop contest?
Place a value on this: viewers of MTV's "Video Music Awards" last Thursday posted three times more social media messages than a year earlier --19.2 million versus 5.6 million, according to Trendrr. But the show's actual viewers fell by half – from 12.4 million to 6.1 million, according to Nielsen. National advertisers might scratch their heads over this one. It might make them more resolute in wanting to continue paying for traditional TV advertising the way they have done for many decades -- with Nielsen-based viewer currency. Still, something is going on here. Sure, you can blame the "VMAs" being up against President Barack Obama's big acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention on a Thursday night. The “VMAs,” MTV's highest-rated show of the year, usually runs on Sunday nights against a bunch of summer reruns. Proponents of social media will tell you that good high-level chatter means engaged viewers, which is good for advertisers. Naturally, MTV's young audience is fertile ground for offering this kind of mind-bending metric formula. Broadcast programming Thursday night offered another interesting wrinkle: Though Fox's "Glee" and CBS’ "Big Bang Theory" have been heavily in repeat land, they were the second and third biggest shows (52,700 and 41,600 respectively) in number of social messages, according to Trendrr. Older TV viewers were doing some social interaction as well on one of the biggest nights for those with a yen for political content, with from 21,000 to 37,000 social messages related to various DNC network coverage. Nielsen viewership? From 1.5 million to around 7 million, depending on network. Question is: Does all this make these any of these shows less valuable? No one has a clear picture yet. Maybe these rerun or political-happy social media users are heavy buyers of cars, washing machines, financial services, iPads or pricy pharmaceuticals. Much has been made of social media helping TV maintain -- or even improve in some cases – viewer interest in traditional TV shows. But not everything works according to preconceived formulas. The "VMAs" was probably only one example. Strong social media proponents might tell you it isn't really about the intersection between the new and old metrics, but that the newer social media research tells you a lot more about what a particular piece of TV content really means to viewers: that this kind of information is of premium value, or should get some kind of award.
A steady stream of recent data illustrates continued torrid growth of video advertising relative to TV advertising, the difficulty of reaching certain demographic segments (particularly younger demos) viaTV as they choose to consume their video content online, and the resulting importance of developing unified plans and buys for video and TV advertising.Media industry forecaster Magna Global Intelligence recently projected that digital video advertising will grow 28 percent this year, a rate six times faster than the growth of the total US advertising market.Programmatic buying of digital advertising is growing at an even faster growth rate of 39 percent, according to Magna.In response to this changing ad-buy landscape, prominent industry leaders like Nielsen and Adap.tv have recently developed tools that will allow marketers to more comprehensively develop and implement plans and media buys that align their TV and online campaigns.As TV and online video converge, new opportunities will arise for both advertisers and publishers to reap the benefits of more precisely defined channels for message points to reach their intended audiences.Yet like any industry-wide transition of this magnitude, a new set of obstacles arise. From fragmented audiences to incongruent technology and data to measurement challenges, marketers will need to learn the landscape and adjust accordingly.These and other issues will be examined at prominent industry gatherings, such as MediaPost’s “Future of Media” forum in New York City on October 3.They will also be the focus of the Adap.tv’s first annual Adapt Conference, taking place in New York on September 18. The event, which will feature insights from some of the industry’s most influentialleaders, will provide a forum for information-sharing among senior executives. Perhaps more importantly, it promises to lead to solutions to the issues that are of greatest concern to marketers.These include: