Online research giant comScore is teaming with the radio industry’s Arbitron Inc. to launch what they claim to be the “first-ever five-platform” audience measurement service simultaneously tracking video, audio and display content across radio, TV, PCs, smartphones and tablet computers. The new service will provide persons-level data by integrating the array of audience measurement services offered by both companies, including comScore’s census and panel-based PC, mobile and TV set-top systems, with Arbitron’s portable people meter technology. The companies announced that ESPN would be a charter client, and will “collaborate on the design” of the service, including how it will measure and report ratings for video, audio and display content via television (both in-home and out-of-home), online and mobile video, PC web, mobile web, apps, tablets, digital audio and terrestrial radio. “This initiative lays the foundation for a national-scale, continuously operating, syndicated cross-platform measurement solution for the media and marketing industries,” the companies said in a statement announcing the initiative this morning. “The goal is to produce common metrics across all platforms at the scale and granularity required by both content providers and advertisers, and to demonstrate the audience reach and duplication of each media platform.” ESPN, comScore and Arbitron will unveil details of the new service during a series of events on October 1st, 2nd and 3rd as part of Advertising Week in New York.
Local advertising by retailers will grow their online share of marketing -- as well as on TV, radio and local cable by 2016 -- while direct response and newspaper budgets will continue to decline.BIA/Kelsey says retailers will spend $4.2 billion this year in online marketing -- including mobile -- a 13% share out of an estimated $26.8 billion in all local TV advertising spent by retailers. This will climb to a 16% share in three years.Local TV broadcast's share will rise to 8.4% from 7.9% in 2013 for retailers; with radio increasing to 10.8% from 10.2%; and local cable TV to 2.6% from 2.5%; and out-of-home, 2.9% from 2.6%. Mobile advertising will more than double to 2.1% share from 1% by the end of 2013.Direct response marketing -- far and away the largest local marketing category for retailers -- will dip. Its share is projected to sink slightly, to 41.5% from 42.5% this year. Newspapers will slide the most, to 15.5% from 19.5% by the end of 2016. Local magazines will dip to 0.8% from 0.9%.Mark Fratrik, vice president and chief economist, BIA/Kelsey, stated: "Within the online segment, video display is seeing some of the greatest gains, with the top five business categories expected to account for an increase of $232 million in local spending nationwide in 2013 alone."BIA/Kelsey projects retailers will spend $635 million on online video next year; general services advertisers, $190.3 million, with financial and insurance marketers getting to the same level; automotive, $182.4 million; and restaurants, $137.7 billion.Overall estimates are that local automotive advertising spend will be $16.9 billion in 2013 with $2.7 billion coming to online marketing; general services will get to $15.3 billion and $3.1 billion going to online; restaurants, $14.0 billion overall and $2.3 for online; and financial and insurance, will be at $13.9 billion and $2.7 billion.
For advertisers, TV is becoming a lot less about reach, demographics and cost per points and more about brand targets, relevancy and cost per value points.At least that’s the case for clients of Horizon Media, said the agency’s founder and CEO, Bill Koenigsberg, speaking at the TVB Forward Conference in New York on Wednesday. Koenigsberg provided a glimpse of some of the new metrics that Horizon is using to assess the TV medium and how and to what extent clients ought to use it.“The world is changing,” Koenigsberg told the gathering of TV station managers at the conference. “If you can adapt, there are incredible opportunities.”How the agency is leading clients is “very different than it was just three years ago,” he said. The overarching focus now is “how to create value for clients.” The agency now uses a number of new proprietary tools to determine if television should be in the mix for a client. Processes also use new criteria for selecting TV programs, channels and station audiences.“We’re not telling clients” which choices to make, said Koenigsberg, noting that purchase behavior can be linked to viewing preferences, which now weigh much more heavily in TV planning and buying decisions.Thus, highly rated shows and channels don’t automatically make the cut if other data indicates they are used by consumers as “wallpaper,” but not places where viewers are open to receiving messages about purchase decisions, Koenigsberg said.Increasingly, advertisers are looking for and finding audiences that are patched together across multiple media with the common characteristic that they are open to receiving a message about specific products and brands.Programs are now assigned “brand values,” said Koenigsberg, which will vary by category and brand. Throwing out hypothetical numbers to illustrate the point, he said that a spot in the "Today" show might be priced at a $1,000. But given the purchase behavior patterns and other characteristics of the audience, the spot might be worth $1,600 to Target but only $1,350 to K-Mart. “All impressions are not created equal,” said Koenigsberg."Social currency” is now part of the buying decision process, as well. Factors such as how much “chatter” programs generate and length of time spent viewing are considered.Usage may have been the old core of TV buying, said Koenigsberg. But now advertisers want environments where viewers are most receptive to messages about their brands. As a result, “relevance and the importance of channels to viewers” are front and center metrics in the TV buying world.
To hear TVB President Steve Lanzano tell it, Henry Blodget isn’t any better at writing about the media than he was researching stocks for Wall Street. In his opening remarks kicking off the TVB’s Forward Conference Wednesday morning, Lanzano challenged a recent story by Blodget, the disgraced research analyst-turned blogger who declared that the TV industry was headed toward collapse.Lanzano asserted that Blodget “didn’t let the facts get in the way of” his reporting. “Our value proposition has never been better,” declared Lanzano, citing various third-party sources to make his case.Contrary to Blodget’s assertion that just about everybody time-shifts and nobody watches commercials any more, Lanzano referenced Nielsen data. It indicates that live viewing accounts for 87% of all TV watching, which continues to make it the dominant way audiences access the medium.As to who does or doesn’t watch TV ads, Lanzano cited Nielsen data reporting that 50% of viewers watching programming in DVR playback mode watch the ads, as well. (To what extent they’re actually watching the ads versus just not skipping through them remains the subject of debate.)While TV viewing via the Internet and computers is catching on, the TV screen still dominates in that regard, accounting for 95% of all viewing, Lanzano said.Television is still the “primary action driver through the consumer purchase tunnel,” he said, citing Nielsen surveys that show 37% of respondents believe television is the most influential medium impacting their purchase decisions.Clearly, the amount of time people spend watching TV on a daily basis -- more than five hours -- wouldn’t suggest a medium that is dying. By comparison, he noted that the average daily time spent with Facebook and Pinterest is about 13 minutes and 1.6 minutes, respectively.
In the first battle between the two heavyweight singing competition shows, NBC's "The Voice" easily bested Fox's "X Factor" in a head-to-head battle on Wednesday night -- but both suffered from lower ratings versus comparable original episodes."The Voice," running from 8 p.m. to 9 p.m., pulled a Nielsen preliminary 3.3 rating/11 share among 18-49 viewers and 10.7 million overall average viewers. It earned a 2.7 rating/10 share and 7.5 million viewers for the first hour of its season two-hour 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. premiere.Despite the presence of new celebrity judges Britney Spears and Demi Lovato, "X Factor" dropped 25% lower to a 3.3 rating/10 share versus its premiere of a year ago. But "The Voice" didn't come away unscathed -- its results were 18% lower than its 4 rating on Tuesday.After the one-hour "Voice" left the airwaves, "X Factor" had some clear sailing and rose to a 3.9 rating in the 9 p.m. to 10 p.m. hour.The heavy competition did not seem to affect CBS' near-end-of-the-season "Big Brother," which pulled in a 2.0/6 -- down just one-tenth of a rating point from a week ago. The network aired reruns in the rest of its Wednesday night schedule.NBC had other decent results for the entire night. Its summer reality competition effort "America's Got Talent" took in a 2.9/8 between 9 p.m. and 10 p.m., and the debut of its new sitcom at 10 p.m., "Guys with Kids," registered a strong 2.2/6.ABC ran a full night of reruns.For the night, Fox was tops in the demographic group that still matters most to prime-time advertising: 18-49 viewers. It had a 3.3/10; NBC, a 2.7/8; CBS, 1.5/5; Univision, 1.5/5; ABC, 0.9/3; and CW, a 0.3/1.
CBS CEO Leslie Moonves said the company will ultimately drop its flagship network from Dish Network unless the satellite operator discontinues its Auto Hop ad-skipping device. CBS is in litigation along with other networks trying to thwart the device, but even if that proves unsuccessful, CBS could simply decline to renew a carriage deal with Dish when the current contract runs out. Other networks could follow, putting Dish with its 14 million customers in a tough spot. Still, Dish has given no indication that it will pull Auto Hop, which is part of a Hopper DVR service, from the market. Auto Hop allows for automatic commercial-zapping of prime-time fare. Moonves said he doesn’t believe that Auto Hop will survive because of marketplace dynamics. “If they want to eliminate our commercials, we will not be in business with them -- it’s pure and simple,” he told investors Wednesday. “We cannot produce an episode of a show for $3.5 million and have the people at Dish say: ‘We can pull out the commercials.’ That’s not how the ecosystem works. If they want to continue down that line, then we will just not be on Dish. That’s what will happen. We will go elsewhere, and people will take our content.” Similarly, he said CBS will continue to fight Aereo, a device that offers CBS content on mobile devices in New York without compensating the network. CBS and other networks are also in litigation with Aereo, but that case carries a different dynamic. If the networks lose, they can’t pull programming off Aereo, since it plucks it via over-the-air distribution. Separately, Moonves suggested CBS might consider getting into the cable business with a general entertainment network. Could CBS operate current cable assets better? “There’s no question about that,” he said. CBS also said recently that it expects to pull in $1 billion annually via carriage fees from distributors. It recently made deals with Cablevision and AT&T and has avoided blackouts during negotiations. “The good news is we haven’t gone dark anywhere,” he said. “It’s not that we’re not tough negotiators … people are realizing the value of our content.”
TV and movie viewing on tablets by older Americans is quickly rising, according to a new study. The number of tablet owners 55 and older who watch TV and movies weekly on tablets increased from 11 percent last year to 19 percent in 2012, while the number of tablet owners in the 45 to 54 age range who watch weekly rose from 15% to 24%, said strategy consulting firm Altman Vilandrie & Company, based on an online survey conducted in partnership with Research Now. “The implications for marketers and the future of advertising are profound: video advertising on tablets can be more timely (inserted at time of viewing), more targeted, and more interactive than has yet been possible with TV advertising,” said Jonathan Hurd, author of the study. What’s particularly interesting about tablet viewing habits is that they don’t seem to be cannibalizing other media. Research firm TDG found that among those in the key 18 to 49 demo who use tablets to watch online TV, 39% said their tablet viewing has led to a rise in their regular TV viewing, while another 46% said they have experienced no change, and only 15% reported a drop in regular TV viewing. Among tablet owners 50 and older, the impact of tablet viewing on regular TV viewing is virtually negligible, TDG found. When consumers watch TV shows and other video programming online, they are also interacting with the ads more. Digital advertising company MediaMind reports that the click-through rate for online video ads (IAB standard video ads) averages 2.84%, which is 27 times higher than that of standard banner ads, and nearly 12 times higher than rich media ads, according to a MediaMind study of more than 3 billion ad impressions in the first six months of 2012.
Messy prime-time schedules can follow Sunday afternoon NFL games, especially doubleheaders. Sunday prime time runs from 7 p.m. to 11 p.m. in the Eastern and Western time zones -- and one hour earlier in Central and Mountain time. CBS, long-plagued by NFL overruns lin the Eastern and Central zone, has decided to make things easier by shifting everything a half-hour later -- which should take care of almost all long-ish games. (Mountain and Pacific prime time starts stay the same). So CBS' "60 Minutes" on those nine big doubleheader days will start at 7:30 p.m., with everything else also starting a half-hour later. The network's last show of the night, "The Mentalist," will air from 10:30 p.m. to 11:30 p.m. CBS says DVRs -- which are pegged to TV listings -- will be adjusted accordingly. It would be good if all TV worked this way. Right now, viewers can sometimes get caught in TV netherland when a live program like "American Idol" runs long and their DVR doesn't pick up the whole show properly. (Hey, you should be watching live anyway!) Perhaps CBS will get a bit of an advantage of sorts -- especially with viewers in DVR-less homes who can't find anything to watch on ABC, NBC, Fox or the hundreds of cable channels where the majority of shows start on the hour. You may remember those super-sized NBC episodes of some sitcoms that Jeff Zucker liked some much. They would run just over 30 minutes, leaving viewers to consider staying with NBC for another show (since the viewers had already missed the beginning of other shows that started exactly on the hour or half-hour). CBS' intention isn't necessary to mess up other network schedules. All this is important when considering that over 50% of U.S. viewers still don't have a DVR. So CBS wants to be more predictable in Sunday prime time -- even against such strong competition as NBC's "Sunday Night Football," last year's number-one rated show among 18-49 viewers. Then again, maybe there is a marketing silver lining here. Many years ago, TBS started some shows at 7:05 p.m. 8:05 p.m or 9:05 p.m. to get an extra marketing wrinkle from standing out in TV Guide and other program listings. Maybe starting most shows on the half-hour will be the new thing.
Josh Chasin, chief research officer of comScore, is an expert in IP measurement who launched his career at Arbitron and is currently overseeing all research initiatives at comScore. ComScore has four core business models, from audience analytics to advertising analytics to Web / monetization analytics and mobile operator analytics. In my interview with him, Josh talks about his work at comScore, the changing metrics in the online world, out-of-home insights and the importance of understanding how the online world works and evolves in terms of content delivery. Josh also shares his views on what the media landscape will look like five years from now. Below is an excerpt from the interview, whose videos can be seen here.CW: You speak of Web ad measurement based on an “Opportunity To See” metric. Would ad placement on a site be impacted by above the fold or below the fold? JC: Placement on a site is absolutely an issue. People naturally think that more credit is given for ads placed above the fold. But I think it is more important to understand how inventory behaves on a page. For example, if you have a page that contains a long, engaging article where the headline is two-thirds down on the screen because there is branding and navigation taking up room at the top, the ads that are located below the fold in this case will often perform better. A lot of it has to do with the content itself and the way people interact with the content. So the first thing you learn is that above the fold is a good thing -- your ad will be noticed -- and if your ad is way down the page, and no one ever scrolls that far, then no one has the chance to see it. But the second thing is more profoundly interesting to the buyers and sellers. It is that there is “gold below the fold” – there is a lot of inventory below the initial fold that is extremely valuable because you go to a page to read an article, and if the article is good and engaging almost everyone who goes to the page will want to read the article and ends up spending a lot of time with the ad in view, even though it might be below the fold. CW: Is there any type of content that performs better online – whether based on length or number of links or pages to follow? Any content truisms – content that draws in viewers and keeps them? JC: The short answer is no. If anything, the rule is that there are no rules. CW: In terms of measurement metrics, what about the page views? JC: When the Web started out, the metaphor we migrated to was that of the magazine. We called them “publishers,” we looked at pages. And yes, you look at an article and it says “click to go to the next page.” The concept regarding clicking to a new page is good because it gives you the opportunity to serve up a new ad, and it also enables the counting of ads and the closer counting of pages. But increasingly there are technologies that let the publisher dynamically serve and refresh content. So you can be on Google Maps, for example, and navigate around a map -- zoom in and zoom out -- and it is all a single page view. You are interacting with content. The same is true with Facebook. You can be on a Facebook page, you can go to your Facebook news feed and there is no page two – you can just keep scrolling and scrolling and scrolling. It is all a single page – one page view quote / unquote. So I personally tend to think that the metric of the page view is going to decrease in importance over time. When I joined comScore five years ago, there were already articles on “Is the Page View Dead?” Clearly the page view is not dead, but I if were to predict, I would predict that you will see a migration toward a new metric which might be called events or actions. So if you are on your Facebook page and you click on a poll, it is an event. So you have interacted with a page and as a result of your interaction you are going to get a new piece of content but it is still the same page. Requesting a new page will also be an event, but it will be a page-changing event. I think what you might start to see is the tracking of events as a more granular interaction with the content page. So you will have events, pages and duration, so that over time -- once you have the event metric -- it would free people up to rely less on page views. Pages can’t go away because a lot of business is managed against page views, but I think it will decrease in importance -- especially when more of the publishers don’t serve their content in pages.
If for no other reason than the fact that writing and reading about the iPhone 5 has become downright tiresome at this point, it is worth remembering how most people still communicate on their mobile devices. The basic one-to-one contact of voice and text continues to be the channel with which most people feel familiar and comfortable on their mobile phones. That becomes even truer as the demo gets older and farther outside the early-adopter realm that is currently distracted by iPhone hype. But since the geek squad is safely sidelined today, gushing over how thin, fast and long the new iPhone will be, we can talk among ourselves about something closer to most Americans’ hearts -- infomercials. Infomercials already have a direct connection between the main TV screen and the second screen of devices -- a call-now phone number. Finding ways to get people to their landline or mobile device while watching a direct-response TV (DRTV) spot is the essence of the “limited time” offer. Tired as the pitch may be, “call in the next 15 minutes” must have some legs to it, because DRTV hucksters just don’t give it up. Finding new ways to engage the phone with the TV message is critical to maintaining the life of the DRTV ecosystem. Songwhale recently introduced a “Paywhale” platform that enables DRTV marketers to include an SMS call to action in their spots that that company claims is the first “text-to-buy” model for DRTV. The company just partnered with Cannella Response Television to make the payment method available to clients. Its first campaign involves a short spot for Sootherz stomach relief and a long-form infomercial for NuWave Precision Induction Cooktop. In the short spot I watched, the viewer is prompted to text “RELIEF” to the Paywhale shortcode 94253. I don’t watch enough niche cable programming to know whether this is really the first ever of anything related to DRTV. The Songwhale system actually works best for those who are chronic buyers of DRTV pitches, because it only becomes seamless once the viewer is already fully registered with Songwhale. When I tried texting off the Sootherz ad I was led to a long sign-up form for personal info and credit card information. They say that once users are registered with their payment system, then buying off the TV will be as simple as texting the keyword to their existing account, which has payment and shipping information already on file. The model is not about payment as much as it is about re-marketing. For marketers the real value add is that it gets to access the infomercial buyer by another less expensive and more direct screen. In the announcement Songwhale claims, “Regardless of how a consumer signs up for Paywhale, once they are registered they can be reached via text message by DR marketers with offers for new products and product upgrades.” Which only goes to show how broadly the mobile screen can interact with other media and displays. If mobile can be made into a more efficient and direct route to a core customer base, then it benefits direct marketing to push those users away from the high-cost scattershot approach of the past to more targeted channels on the phone.
The past 15 years have brought an extraordinary fragmentation of audiences due to a fast-expanding array and diversity of new-media products, channels and platforms. Just within television -- the largest consumer media platform by far in the U.S. in terms of both audience time and advertising expenditures -- over that time we’ve seen a tenfold increase in the number of channels and a hundred-fold increase in the number of programs and episodes. What was once a “take it or leave it” daily special menu of meatloaf, mashed potatoes and overcooked peas is now an on-demand restaurant row of everything from three-star Michelin gourmet cooking to ethnic delights to comfort food. No wonder more Americans watch more live TV today than they did fifteen years ago. According to Nielsen, total TV viewing time and viewing time per person is up more than 10% over that time, an extraordinary statistic given that the Internet, a big part of media habits today, wasn’t even competing for audience attention back then. While all this new choice is without question a great thing for consumers, it has a distinct downside for marketers trying to reach their target audiences. Audience fragmentation makes buying media harder and more complex. You need to evaluate more media choices. You need to maintain more relationships. You need to traffic more ad spots to more partners. You have more competition for larger properties. Per-campaign reach goes down. It’s harder to avoid concentrating message frequency on the “heaviest” TV viewers. Fragmentation also impacts the quality of the media product a buyer can deliver for his or her clients, as the ability to guarantee “perfect” content environments diminishes significantly. Unfortunately for the industry, TV content and TV audiences will never be as homogenous as they were in the ‘70s and ‘80s. That’s reality and not going to change. The only way to deal with -- or overcome -- the challenges of fragmentation is to adjust our approach to TV media buying, selling and measurement. Here’s what I mean: Recognize that audience heterogeneity can be a good thing for targeting. Today, TV advertisers can reach precise audiences in highly contextual content. Fifteen years ago we didn’t have vehicles like HGTV and Food Network to reach fixer-uppers and folks who love to cook. Data is helping mass marketers develop tighter and tighter segmentations of their target consumers. Isn’t it time we helped them leverage those insights in TV advertising? Challenge the outdated, anecdotal truisms that drive so much of our industry. Fragmentation of audiences not just by program and channel, but by daypart, now means that significant concentrations of target audiences can now be found in non-intuitive places. Data from Nielsen shows us that both billiards on ESPN and FOX News in certain dayparts draw Hispanic viewers in extraordinarily high concentration and volumes. Maybe it’s time to throw out some of our outdated anecdotal truisms about audiences and their behaviors, and lean into empiricism? Recognize that delivering scaled reach, and buying shows with low average ratings, are not mutually exclusive. Buying spots on lower-rated shows doesn’t mean you can’t deliver campaigns with massive scale and reach; quite the opposite, in fact. As noted media planner and researcher Erwin Ephron preached to us years ago, it’s actually much easier to build reach on TV by intelligently assembling spots on lots of lower-rated shows than by buying a few big shows in prime time, since high-rated prime time also tends to deliver an inordinate amount of duplication among heavy TV viewers. Yes, fragmentation means that effective TV campaigns will require many more spots than they used to do. There isn’t an alternative without sacrificing advertisers’ best interests. Stop focusing on bulk GRPs. The gross rating point is a very valuable and resilient metric that will not only be with us for a very long time, but will find lots of value and applicability as it is extended into online ad campaigns as well. However, the GRP alone, when it is not qualified by target rating points and incremental reach points, is as meaningless as only counting empty calories when trying to measure nutrition in a diet. Delivering 100 ads per person to 5% of a target audience watching TV in a two-week campaign should never be valued the same as delivering 10 ads each to 50% of the target audience on TV. Same GRPs, massively different value and results for an advertiser. Think I’ve made up an extreme and ludicrous example? Analyze TV campaigns for some recent movie releases using Nielsen’s AudienceWatch. We must learn to embrace, leverage and exploit the reality of a fragmented TV media world. It is essential to the long-term health of television advertising, and it won’t be painless. But, like other markets in transition, those who move early and do it well will have an advantage. Those who don’t, won’t. What do you think?
Many Internet entrepreneurs love the idea that consumers can pay for the exact content they want without dealing with the vagaries of advertising. But after a while these same business professionals think, "Wait. Maybe I can monetize a little more." Ex-Fox News host Glenn Beck took his efforts to the Internet about a year ago, just after his ouster from the cable network. For a while, his Internet-based programming service TheBlaze (formerly GBTV) claimed some 300,000 monthly subscribers. At around $100 a year (or $9.95 a month), this would bring Beck and his company Mercury Arts a tidy sum of $30 million a year. By any stretch of the imagination, that’s far more money -- less production expenses -- than Beck earned through his annual Fox News contract. It also lessens the need for national advertisers – the one thorn for any controversial, perhaps fringe, political host. At his best, Beck pulled in around 3 million prime-time viewers on Fox. Now, he claims 300,000 Internet subscribers, additional audience from his radio show, and 9 million monthly uniques from TheBlaze website. But as any good business entrepreneur dreams, more is better. Dish Network has agreed to carry TheBlaze as a 24/7 network. Mercury will get a small, undisclosed monthly subscriber fee. Dish has around 14 million overall subscribers. But the bigger question is, “How much, if at all, will national advertisers be part of this new effort?” To get TheBlaze, TV customers will have a choice. They can get it by subscribing to Dish's big 250-channel monthly service. Or, if they have a lesser-priced Dish service, they can pay an extra fee (around $5) like they do for HBO or some regional sports networks. So it seems TheBlaze has some solid financial backing and now wants to look for national marketers like every other cable network. The Dish/Beck announcement made no mention of business specifics in this regard. (One current marketer on TheBlaze website includes the Tax Resolution Services Company). Lowered ratings -- and the usual result of such metrics, lower advertising revenues -- contributed to Beck’s downfall at Fox News. Some controversial statements by Beck also sent marketers running. How big a picture will advertisers play in Beck's new TV venture? For many, it's a non-story in the Beck 2.0 TV adventure.