In a fortuitous development for citrus growers, the Florida Department of Citrus (FDOC) is launching a digital campaign for Florida orange juice featuring TV personality Nancy O'Dell, just as her visibility is on the rise, big-time. The campaign also employs educator/parenting expert/author Michele Borba, a frequent guest on "The Today Show" and talk shows. CBS has just announced that O'Dell, formerly co-anchor of "Hollywood Access," will replace Mary Hart as co-host of "Entertainment Tonight" next year, when Hart exits at the end of the show's 30th season next year. O'Dell will join "ET" in January, initially as a special correspondent. In addition, O'Dell will co-host, with Carson Kressley, a show on Oprah Winfrey's new cable network, OWN ("Your OWN Show: Oprah's Search for the Next TV Star"), also launching in January. O'Dell is also the author of two books, including "Full of Love," about the "power of the family photo album," recently published with scrapbooking company Creative Memories. The company also markets a line of scrapbooking products bearing O'Dell's name. The OJ connection: Odell, mother of a toddler and stepmother to two teens, is being featured in a series of videos on the Florida orange juice site (floridajuice.com/morning_squeeze.php) and Facebook fan page, showing "hectic and funny" situations her family faces each morning. O'Dell's videos tie into a contest, "The Morning Squeeze," in which OJ fans will submit their own videos sharing their families' morning challenges. The winner, to be chosen by FDOC and Borba, will receive a family trip to Florida. The campaign keys off the findings of a recent survey conducted for the FDOC among a representative sample of U.S. parents ages 25 to 54. The study found 75% agree that mornings are an important part of the day to spend time with children, but most feeling like personal assistants or "traffic cops," and one-third avoid disagreements during this hectic time by letting kids "tune out" with TV, computers, cell phones and video games. The campaign seeks to help parents build in more "quality time" with their kids during the morning rush period -- including a pause to connect over a breakfast that includes a glass of OJ. Orange juice's nutritional benefits for kids and adults alike are woven into messaging. Borba is offering tips for creating morning quality time -- and also helping to build awareness of the video contest and O'Dell's videos -- on the Florida orange juice Facebook page and through her own Facebook page and Twitter presence, according to a PR spokesperson for FDOC. O'Dell is also posting/tweeting on her own Facebook/Twitter presences about her videos and the videos, the contest and Borba's tips.
Video ad network YuMe is expanding to mobile, launching software development tools for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch as well as a pair of new mobile ad units. By adopting its software, publishers and app developers will be able to use YuMe's ACE technology platform to tap into multiple video ad networks, including its own, to run video ads across iOS devices. The system also lets publishers bundle mobile video ad inventory with online inventory for direct ad sales and target specific devices for directly sold campaigns. The two new in-app ad units from YuMe are designed as high-impact, interactive formats. One dubbed Mobile Connect delivers a full-screen video ad overlaid with icons users can tap to further engage with the brand. Ads can include social icons connecting to their Facebook, Twitter or YouTube page, as well as the App Store, or others that link directly to their Web site, downloadable coupons, or contact information for sales or customer service help. The other unit -- Mobile Billboard -- is a full-screen banner or rich media ad that launches before a video or game and allows the user to watch video or link to social networking and e-commerce sites. YuMe says both formats provide interaction data such as percentage of video viewed or use of icons to optimize ad creative or media buys. With its move into mobile, YuMe will be competing with a host of vendors already offering rich media or video ad solutions in the space from Medialets and Crisp Wireless to mobile video ad networks like Transpera and Rhythm NewMedia to JumpTap, which added video to its mobile ad network in June. But YuMe can leverage the solid base it has built on the Web, where it boasts a network of more than 600 premium publishers including Microsoft, Viacom and NBC and a potential reach of 57% of the U.S. online audience, according to comScore. The company has raised $46 million in funding to date from investors including Accel Partners and Khosla Ventures. Mobile video, however, is still in its infancy. Research firm eMarketer predicts the U.S. mobile video audience will grow almost 30% this year to 23.9 million, or only 7.7% of the total population and less than 10% of mobile subscribers. That audience is expected to more than double to 56.7 million in four years, with revenue from direct downloads, subscriptions and ad-supported video projected to climb from $548 million this year to $1.34 billion by 2014. An earlier version of this story mistakenly referred to Rhythm NewMedia as Rhythm NewNetworks. This has been corrected.
Premium online content is increasingly being monetized in ways that most closely resemble traditional broadcast television, according to new research from FreeWheel, whose Monetization Rights Management platform helps content owners and distributors sell ad inventory. Publishers are using more combinations of pre-roll, mid-roll, post-roll, and overlay ads throughout premium content as shown by ad volume growth rates. Completion rates for video ads -- pre-roll, mid-roll, and post-roll -- have steadily risen throughout the year, with mid-rolls showing the highest average ad completion rates at 90%. Meanwhile, consumers appear to be learning over time that -- like television -- top-quality content is monetized in part with advertising. In the third quarter of the year, pre-roll video ads remained the dominant video ad format, representing 91% of the video ad volume, while mid-rolls show the highest growth rates -- 693% since the first quarter -- and represent 8% of total video ad volume. As ad-supported revenue models continue to prove effective, and as consumers continue to show tolerance for watching ads, mid-roll volume is expected to continue to grow, according to FreeWheel co-founder and CEO Doug Knopper. "Clearly, the hero of this story is mid-roll adoption by both content owners and consumers," said Knopper. "The largest media companies are increasingly monetizing their most valuable content in ways that closely mimic television, and consumers are indicating that they understand that to continue to access their favorite shows, they will be exposed to ads." Added Knopper: "These are all good trends for video and television industries and indicate that real revenue generation across devices and platforms is possible." At present, FreeWheel claims to serve over 3 billion video ads per quarter.
Much has changed since "Unplugged" first premiered on MTV in 1989. The show weathered Bon Jovi through Nirvana through Jay-Z (all featured in landmark episodes), but since the 2000 the show had been revived as only occasional specials. Then last year MTV revived the show as a Web series sponsored by Starburst. Plans are now underway for a second sponsored season, with a broad social media push, putting the latest incarnation of the series on everything from flatscreens to mobile phones. The show, of course, got its name from the act of largely electric bands playing acoustic -- like Dylan at Newport in reverse. Part of the fun of the series had always been seeing bands in surprising new contexts, whether hard rock bands like Kiss or Alice in Chains without their amps, rappers like LL Cool J and Jay-Z backed by bands, or, even the likes Roxette and Mariah Carey unadorned. The idea to resurrect the show online had been kicking around at MTV for some time, according Chris Ficarra, vice president of integrated marketing at MTVN. Then Starburst, working with Starcom, approached MTV wanting to do something with the "Juicy Contradiction" campaign the candy had launched at the time. "We immediately gravitated toward the idea, because 'Unplugged' is a contradiction," Ficarra told Online Media Daily. "To understand why this partnership works, you have to look at Starburst campaign," says Jennifer Jackson-Luth, senior manager, marketing communications for Starburst. "We think of Starburst as the ultimate contradiction - it's solid, yet it's juicy like a liquid - and we are using the Unplugged music series to showcase our contradictory personality." The centerpiece of each episode plays up the "Juicy Contradiction" messaging with each band or artist performing a cover song fans normally wouldn't expect. The clips lend themselves to viral pick-up. The video segment of Reba McEntire covering Beyonce's "If I Were A Boy," became one of the show's most-viewed clips and, in fact, McEntire reprised the performance on the CMT Awards. There are plans to release the cover as a single. The online "Unplugged" now boasts a Daytime Emmy Award in the "New Approaches" category honoring broadcasters and new media for innovative ways to present programming to viewers. In this, the second year of 'Unplugged' as a Web series, Starburst will extend the partnership beyond static sponsorship. "The Starburst partnership with 'Unplugged' is a multiscreen approach including digital, mobile and social extensions that give us the opportunity to engage in a dialogue with our consumer versus waiting for them to find us," says Jackson-Luth. "We're going to eventize this a little by having viewing parties on social media," says Ficarra. When episodes first air they'll be accompanied by a chat module pulling in conversations from Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms. The episodes will air live on MTVN web properties (depending on artists, the shows air on either MTV.com, VH1.com or CMT.com) as well as MTV's Facebook page, and Starburst's fan page. The first season of the partnership featured performances from B.o.B., Train, Vampire Weekend, the Silversun Pickups and Katy Perry, among others, all having their own contradictory moments. The second season's lineup has not yet been announced.
Despite an accelerated shift towards online advertising spending, most traditional media companies (TMCs) are more reluctant than ever to believe the "content wants to be free" mantra. Everywhere you look, the diagnosis is bad: Disney's CEO Bob Iger this past week admitted that the fall in DVD sales is "sobering"; meanwhile, sales of Zagat's Guides are starting to erode. Indeed, regardless of whether TMCs are accustomed to charging consumers or companies, content sure looks like it wants to be free -- though at the Monaco Media Forum, James Murdoch, News Corp (CEO for Europe and Asia, summarized what everyone would agree on: the "first rule of monetization is that if you aspire to charge for something, you probably should not give it away for free." Self-serving observation? Sure. True? Let's see. Do Media Executives Need a Lesson in Economics? On the one hand, you don't need a degree from the London School of Economics to recognize that excess supply will drive prices down. That's the basic concept of scarcity, but what the rise of video consumption and advertising is doing is differentiating between, not just video versus text, but mainly, real scarcity vs. false scarcity. Real scarcity is when there is actually more demand than supply. False scarcity leads to a false sense of security about demand for one's product. False Sense of Security Hollywood's strategy was forever to create false, or forced, scarcity. Examples are numerous, but the best one is the slotting of a show at 9 p.m. on Thursday evening during the late 1980s, wedged in between stellar shows including "The Cosby Show," "Cheers," Night Court," etc. Invariably, you could slot someone watching grass grow and in between those kinds of established shows, the 9 p.m. show would have built an audience. Fast-forward two decades and you saw how false scarcity led to the disaster at NBC involving Conan O'Brien and Jay Leno. Though lower ratings for Leno's show harmed the lead-in to NBC affiliates' important 11 p.m. newscasts, the fact that audiences didn't follow this established star had more to do with Hollywood's tried and tired strategy of creating false scarcity for their offerings. Getting back to video, the reality is that TMCs should wake up before it's too late by: Realizing that creating false security by putting up paywalls with text content will prove futile; Acknowledging that nothing will replace the billions and billions in their traditional businesses, but that doesn't mean that they should not be focusing on new revenue streams and businesses, even if that means becoming a smaller business. Of course, Hollywood executives swill never accept the latter and will fight to their last drop for the former. Text Content is By Definition Easy to Duplicate, Thus Impossible To Defend With articles, true scarcity is hard to create because content can be duplicated very easily. Even if the New York Times is behind a pay wall or a Vanity Fair article is only found in a printed issue of a magazine, nothing is stopping an online blogger to pay for a newspaper or magazine, only to turn around and paraphrase or quote from it -- that's fair use. Some among the blogger's readership might be inclined to pay for the source content, but a large share will content themselves with the abridged version. Now replicate that phenomenon across hundreds of bloggers, and you get the idea: there's a lot of supply created around that story, and while the advertising rates for Times and Vanity Fair content are much higher than all of the rest combined, it doesn't change the fact that there's a shift in equilibrium, especially when you toss in things like behavioral targeting and demand-side buying, where some advertisers don't even care if their ad is placed on the source publications. Why Scarcity Works Differently With Video With video, it's just not that straightforward or easy to increase supply, especially in the short-term. In two weeks I'll sfocus on scarcity in online video and what both TMCs and new media producers need to do for a better prognosis.
Digital video may still have its issues when it comes to advertiser metrics -- but growing dollar signs now speak for themselves. Hulu chief executive officer Jason Kilar says the premium digital video site will pull in $240 million this year in advertising, more than double its $108 million take in 2009. Kiler says 41 cents -- almost two quarters -- of every dollar generated from video content is from advertising, while 30 cents is from subscription fees. Hulu has had some 352 different advertisers so far buy video messaging. While we don't know the size of these marketers, this would seem to correspond to the 300 to 400 upfront TV advertisers networks regularly get to appear on their airwaves -- typically your bigger year-to-year advertisers. More perspective: Hulu's ad revenue is roughly equal to what a mid-size cable network can tally in yearly sales, or what a mid-size cable network might get from cable operator subscriber fees. Taking into account Hulu's short three-year history, these are pretty good metrics. The bigger YouTube, of course, has better results: some $500 million in ad dollars, though much of this comes from display ads, not the full-motion video ads that make up virtually all Hulu's ad dollars. Total video advertising dollars will get to $1.5 billion this year, according to eMarketer. For all that Hulu crows about, the digital media ground can quickly turn to quicksand. (Just ask those once high-flying MySpace executives). In that regard, executives are more focused on what's next: the Google TVs, Apple TVs, and a host of new hybrid TV-Internet services, including new entrant Boxee. Why are these so important? Because those are the viewers in front of pixels advertisers value most -- the bigger, lead-back TV screen, where advertisers are still habitually used to paying much more money for messaging than on other new digital platforms. That is still a $60 billion market. Right now NBC, Fox, CBS, and ABC, haven't placed their bets on any of the TV-Internet businesses. One of the easiest questions to ask any of these big entertainment content machines is whether they want to be owners or joint venture participants in one of these more technology-driven services. Senior TV executives, no doubt, must be mulling this as they block businesses like Google TV from taking their TV shows from the likes of Hulu and other digital places. So for all the good news about Hulu, where does this leave the service -- especially with one of its three major partners changing ownership? We speak, of course, of Comcast's takeover of NBC Universal. Valuable content still seems to be a big push by entertainment creators. But with Comcast -- whose forte is TV distribution -- at the wheel, things might change. In a rapidly changing digital media era, where hedging media bets is assumed the proper play, perhaps the Hulu brand will look to expand, or at least consider a joint venture with a Google TV or an Apple TV-like entity.