• TV Of Tomorrow Reveals Future
    The TV Of Tomorrow NYC conference is to cutting-edge media intellectual property what the CES is to electronics: standing on the cusp of new innovations for the media industry. Even its conference location this year -- in a warehouse building near the new Hudson Yards development -- spoke to an early insider's look of what the future will bring.
  • The Enduring Appeal of 'A Charlie Brown Christmas'
    It hardly seems possible that the big three Christmas specials of my youth - "Dr. Seuss' How The Grinch Who Stole Christmas," "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" and "A Charlie Brown Christmas" - still attract such large audiences nearly 50 years after their first airing. According to all conventional wisdom, these shows should not do so well. They are not broadcast live, have no major stars, are not edgy or ironic, and have no sex appeal. Moreover, most of the audience has seen the shows multiple times.
  • We Need Both Right-Brain And Left-Brain Experts
    It's not every day that you get to sip a glass of wine while listening to NBCU's Linda Yaccarino and Magna Global's Tim Spengler talk about their college days. But Simulmedia's Salon series offers such an opportunity. However October's event was not all waxing nostalgia. Simulmedia CEO Dave Morgan also wanted to know how media companies recruit and retain new talent. And that is the $64,000 question today. View video excerpts of the panel here.
  • Sports Marketing Moves Ball Into Digital Zone
    Innovative cross-platform marketing has been part of the sports marketplace for years. Now, with the ability to leverage social media and partner with a variety of brands, sports is heralding in a new era of cutting-edge partnership and measurement efforts. The recent Promax Sports Media Marketing Summit showcased some of the more ground-breaking campaigns from a range of programmers, brands and advertisers.
  • Podcasts: What To Listen To When You're Not Watching TV
    You can tell that television retains its cultural importance by the number of online communications platforms it helps keep afloat. Social media, for example, was supposed to undermine television's dominance -- but Twitter, Facebook, etc., would be considerably less active if users didn't have television to talk about. Similarly, there would be considerably less for bloggers and recappers to write about if television didn't exist. You know there's a power imbalance when one party obsesses constantly about the other (e.g., a teenage girl mooning over the high school quarterback) -- but the other side barely acknowledges its existence. And then …
  • No Asset Identification, No Monetization Of Cross-Platform
    The world of asset identification can be a bit confusing. What exactly is asset identification? What are the different types? Why is it so important? These questions and more were answered at the Digital Management Association conference, where I moderated the panel "Asset Identification - If You Can't Identify It, You Can't Measure It. If You Can't Measure It, You Can't Monetize It." The panelists -- Jane Clarke of the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM); MAGNA's Janice Finkel-Greene, Ad-ID's Harold Geller and NBCU's Steven Hernandez -- engaged in a lively discussion of asset identification from both the programming and …
  • Fifty Years After JFK
    You may have heard this already, but we are approaching the fiftieth anniversary of two famously important events in television history: the JFK assassination and the Beatles' appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. It doesn't take much Googling to find references to the significance of the assassination for television. The Associated Press maintains that, "in life and especially in death, John F. Kennedy changed television forever" because his murder showed that this then-youthful technology could hold the country together in a moment of crisis. Similarly, there is near-universal agreement that the first televised strains of "I Want to Hold Your …
  • Q&A With Annalect's Jed Meyer
    Jed Meyer was recruited by Nielsen out of college and from there launched a stellar career that took him all across the United States and as far as China. His experience includes building the set-top-box data and Web measurement businesses for Nielsen, and elaunching television measurement program for Nielsen in China. Now, as U.S. research director for Annalect, he is responsible for all the day-to-day research at OMD, as well as all of the data-driven businesses owned by Annalect itself.
  • Those Cozy TV Critics
    Television is arguably the country's dominant art form, but it has yet to spawn a really great critic who can make sense of it all. Oh, there are lots of good television writers, but no authoritative cultural thinker to compare with the likes of such great mid-century film critics as Andre Bazin, Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris, John Simon or Stanley Kauffman. As Kenneth Tucker, himself a respected TV reviewer, admits: "Unlike film or rock criticism, television criticism has never yielded a significant body of work-or at least an acknowledged one enshrined with any permanence in book form."
  • The Power Of The Crowd According To Twitter
    The State of TV conference held this week as part of NYC's Television Week explored the impact of the crowd on advertising, sports, online, broadcast and cable. Does it shift the business model away from the predictability of what is and what is not "successful" content? And what does successful mean anymore: Ratings? Affection? Acceleration? Does the expansion of platform choices cannibalize or complement media choices? The answers may surprise you.
« Previous Entries