Univision unveiled a multiplatform upfront strategy Friday that includes more than a dozen new prime-time programs across its terrestrial networks in addition to a number of new online series and several other digital initiatives that will make much of Univision’s programming available to viewers on demand on multiple devices. Embracing the theme “Latinos Live Here,” Univision CEO Randy Falco told reporters on a press call that with a 73% share of the Spanish-language TV audience in the U.S., marketers “need to come to us if they want to reach them.” The new Univision programming announcement followed word that the network had done the first major upfront sales deal this year, inking a deal with Publicis Groupe’s Starcom and sister multicultural shop Tapestry for clients including Kellogg, Mars/Wrigley and Burger King, which are shifting dollars from English to Spanish-language TV. New prime-time novellas (produced through an exclusive arrangement with Mexican programmer Televisa) include When The Heart Commands, billed as a love story about resentment and revenge. Also on tap is a romantic comedy, For Her, I’m Eva. The network, which celebrates its 50th anniversary in the fall, also unveiled a new digital network, UVideos, which will offer thousands of hours of Univision programs on demand and that will be accessible via multiple devices including game consoles, smartphones, tablets and Internet-enabled TV. It will feature social media options as well, including TV check-ins and other social streams, and will launch this summer. “We’re doubling down our effort to meet the overwhelming demand from consumers and advertisers for premium digital content,” said Falco, “and we’ll be offering much more of our popular” programming across multiple platforms. The network is pitching marketers that its array of assets is the best way to reach the estimated 20% of the average marketer’s target that is Hispanic. Unlike many nets, said Falco, Univision still has 94% live viewership and 68% unduplicated reach, and twice the online traffic of any other network. The company also has a number of original online content projects in the works including a Web novela from Televisa and two that are being produced by Univision in association with actor/director Kate del Castillo. All three are designed exclusively for air on UVideos. Company officials said that access will have some authentication elements, which were not detailed. At its upfront presentation Tuesday (May 15), the network will unveil the launch of a series of genre-specific broadband channels that are being developed with outside partners. Several reality shows will return next season, including a joint Univision-Endemol production, Look Who’s Dancing!3, as well as the seventh installment of Our Latin Beauty, which is produced in house. Parody and Little Giants, both from Televisa, return for a second season. The network also said it was expanding its news studios in New York, Miami and Los Angeles in time for its coverage of the presidential election campaign this fall. (Earlier this week it confirmed a cable news channel joint venture with ABC News.) As for the sales market, David Lawenda, president, advertising sales and marketing for the company, said that several more deals are near completion. He told reporters that the Starcom deal signaled the company’s intention to sell simultaneously with the major broadcast and cable networks. “This is huge,” he said. “Five years ago we were an afterthought.”
After producing significant sales lifts for Athenos hummus, curmudgeonly Greek grandma Yiayia is back to give her stamp of approval to Athenos feta cheese (while, of course, disapproving of everything else). Last year, a Yiayia TV spot for Athenos hummus that aired in about 40% of the country between March and July drove double-digit sales gains, reports Athenos brand manager Anne Field. (That spot featured Yiayia telling a young hostess in a not-terribly-revealing dress, who was serving Athenos hummus to her guests, that she looked like a prostitute.) For the two new spots for the feta products, the campaign is being taken national, Field says. In one of the new feta spots (which have 30- and 15-second versions), Yiayia takes a look at some young people gathered at a quiet pool party (and appropriately garbed in bathing suits) and pronounces that the scene looks like “pornography.” In the other ad, after observing a young woman video-chatting with her new husband, Yiayia concludes that the woman is “sick” because she’s “married a machine.” But Yiayia heartily approves of the protagonists eating Athenos feta on their salads during both spots’ scenarios, because (as a voiceover explains), it’s “made the Greek way, taking extra time and care for 'cremium' rich taste.” Voiceover tagline: “Athenos: Maybe the only thing approved by Yiayia.” The feta spots will begin airing on TV beginning May 28, on programs including “Chelsea Lately,” “Conan,” “The Bachelorette” and “Apartment 23.” Meanwhile, they’ll become accessible online starting May 14, both through Athenos’s Facebook page and as pre-rolls and banner videos on sites including TMZ, E!, Us Weekly, MSN and Sheknows.com. The feta phase of the campaign will also include an integration on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!.” Social media efforts supporting the “Approved By Yiayia” campaign for Athenos’s feta and other products, from the brand’s agency-of-record Droga5, include an app that allows Facebook fans (currently numbering nearly 210,000) to plug in their own pet peeves to create and share personalized “rants” on those topics delivered from the mouth of Yiayia herself. Athenos also frequently posts and tweets blunt commentaries from the brand mascot (“Yiayia-isms”) on its Facebook and Twitter accounts, notes Field. Also, timed for Mother’s Day, Athenos is currently encouraging Facebook fans to email the brand a picture of their mothers or Yiayia, indicate what she approves or disapproves of, and get their friends to vote for their favorite submissions. The submitter who generates the most ‘likes’ will be featured as the brand’s Facebook cover photo on Mother’s Day and for a week. The “Yiayia” campaign has won a North American Effie Award (although the specific award levels will not be known until the awards are presented on May 23). In March this year, Kraft Foods discontinued the Athenos Greek Yogurt line, which also employed the “Yiayia” campaign. In March 2011, Ace Metrix reported that the Athenos Greek Yogurt spots were significantly outperforming the TV ads of other Greek yogurt brands, including Greek yogurt category leader Chobani, in terms of persuasiveness, “watchability” and other factors that go into consumer response as measured by Ace scores. According to a Kraft statement, although Athenos Greek Yogurt -- introduced late in 2010 -- had a loyal following, the company decided to refocus its efforts on innovating other new products for the Athenos brand. BusinessInsider and other trade press have noted that Kraft’s decision seems sound -- given that Chobani, with its head-start in the Greek yogurt category, commands about 60% of that market in the U.S., and that its nearest competitor, Dannon’s Oikos brand, has only about a 17% share.
Samsung is more than just TVs, smartphones and consumer electronics. It makes the memory that goes inside many of those devices as well, and the company is looking to tell consumers about it for the first time with a new digital marketing campaign. Through a series of videos, the company stresses the importance of having high-quality memory in its PCs, smartphones and other devices. The videos highlight the “pain points” consumers might experience (such as poor battery operation, slow data loading and system freezes) with inferior memory. The videos introduce three characters (Loading Ball Larry, Fiona Freeze and Battery Brutus) who can create the problems that come with faulty or sub-par microprocessors and memory. In one video, for instance, Loading Ball Larry, a man wearing a turtleneck and plaid sport coat, hovers ominously in the background as people attempt to work on computers, use a tablet on a bus and give multimedia presentations to crowded rooms. As he comments that the work they’re doing looks important and interesting, Larry uses a rainbow-colored lapel button to cause the programs to pause as the programs load. Other videos show the other characters inflicting similar damage. The campaign is the first for the company to actively target consumers. Since 2009, the company has used the tagline, “Green Memory,” to educate the business market about the energy advantages of using Samsung semiconductors and memory. The new campaign is intended to de-commoditize the semiconductors, and increase their public perception among consumers. “We are looking to communicate with end users about the core benefits and the superiority of Samsung Memory, which can be found in most devices today,” said UnSoo Kim, vice president of memory strategic marketing for Device Solutions and Samsung, in a statement. The company has also launched a microsite, www.samsung.com/Memory, to further educate consumers about its memory product. The videos will run on Samsung Memory’s Facebook page (www.facebook.com/SamsungMemory) and on a dedicated YouTube channel. They will also appear on popular websites such as CNET, Wired and Forbes.com.
Content and marketing are connected at the hip. Content amplifies marketing, and marketing fuels content. Increasingly the line between the two is getting blurred, until some scandal or controversy brings back the adage that church and state ought to remain separate. Everything old is new again, right? But now, we’re on the “future of marketing is content” train ride, and we don’t know when we’re getting off. Part of this convergence stems from the so-called death of the 30-second spot. The reality is that television is doing quite well: advertising in the U.S. crossed the $70 billion mark for the first time ever, and paid TV companies added another 484,000 clients in Q1. Yes, viewers are moving online, but despite billions of connected devices out there, it’s unreasonable to think that in the slugfest between TV and the Internet, TV will lose. But the fact remains that with falling rates, the pre-roll isn’t enough to fund online content. For content to survive -- let alone thrive -- it needs to make economic sense. Someone left common sense back in the analog world On television, media companies fund the production, marketing and distribution of content, money they then recoup over time through advertising, sponsorship, subscription, licensing, theatrical and home purchases, and so forth. Occasionally, content loses money -- it is a “hits” business, after all. Online, we treat content as a profit center. Like advertising, content generally bears a negative ROI early on. Content isn’t a widget (in the economics/accounting sense), where producing it at X amount of money and selling at Y will yield a profit, provided Y is greater than X. It’s a new medium, but not one for the faint of heart Most of the new-media content businesses ceased producing content. Once it became clear that they could not produce content at a sustainable cost, they chose exclusive licensing deals over production. Next New Networks (acquired in 2011) and Revision3 (acquired in 2012) shifted to identifying existing programs and then bringing them in-house. Even though for traditional media companies (TMCs) online revenues are incremental in theory, in fact they cannibalize traditional sales -- so naturally TMCs have refrained from publishing aggressively online. This has led to piracy of their super premium content. But TMCs have also hesitated to produce premium Web programming. That hesitation stems partly from the expectation that content ought to fund itself from the get-go. Print-centric companies like Hearst, Conde Nast, or the New York Times could have led the way in online video production (since for them it’s incremental to print and doesn’t cannibalize TV revenues, since they’re not TV-centric media companies), but they haven’t. Enter Sponsorships While branded content remains the wild card that could make programming’s ROI skyrocket, it remains a promise. Sponsorships will drive video funding for years to come. While ad networks continue to focus on pre-rolls, this leaves the opportunity for other media companies to jump on the opportunity with their sales forces. What about e-commerce? Of course, focusing on multiple sources within advertising (be it pre-rolls, sponsorships or branded content) is still not a truly diversified strategy. Some might turn to e-commerce. I asked Ben Lerer, CEO of Thrillist, for his thoughts: “Many commerce companies talk about content but not actually invest into it properly. I think part of the reason for this might be that without directly monetizing content through advertising sales, content gets relegated to the cost side of the business rather than being seen as a profit center”. Thrillist and Sugar Media have positioned their companies to generate dual revenue streams from advertising and e-commerce. The “user propensity” to… If your site’s DNA is content, it’s very hard to introduce commerce as an afterthought (same way, perhaps, that Google can’t nail social or Facebook has challenges on mobile -- it’s not something one staples on). So if you plan on generating e-commerce revenues via video content, you have to seed it early on and foster it in your editorial strategy. Whatever your plan to recoup your investment in content, it’s worthwhile remembering that the company that produces the best content at the lowest cost will have an edge over time -- but a “low enough” cost is good enough; the focus ought to be on the revenue side of the equation.
The question for the traditional broadcast TV networks this upfront season is, how do you compete with 25 hours of original programming on YouTube’s Awesomeness TV, and Netflix’s ever-popular replays of entertainment, kids and even sports cable programs? While the typical upfront advertising market of predictable rivals is becoming a thing of the past, still the arsenal broadcast networks will rely on to retain viewer ratings and advertising revenues looks a lot like their old bag of tricks. Just how long can that go on while Google, Netflix, Microsoft, Yahoo and other new-media players aggressively take their case to Madison Avenue? While it may take years for digital and online media to make a sizable collective dent in broadcast and cable networks’ roughly $20 billion upfront spending patterns, the process is clearly underway. Martin Sorrell, CEO of WPP Group, indicated in a recent CNBC interview that the global advertising agency will likely spend more than $2 billion on Google this year, which could exceed the $2 billion of advertising it buys from News Corp. media properties annually. The situation in some ways parallels the early days of cable’s inroads on broadcast television’s then-dominance in advertising.This year cable’s upfront ad spend will eclipse last year’s upfront broadcast TV networks commitments, which ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox will be hard pressed to collectively top. But the new-media challenge is not a simple case of us versus them, according to data analysis by Bernstein analysts Todd Juenger and Carlos Kirjner. “We think the inevitable collision course between ubiquitous on demand, ad free content on Netflix, versus consumption of traditional linear TV, is starting to create fractures in the now infamous pay-TV ecosystem,” the analysts said in a recent note. For instance, original series programming on AMC, TNT, TBS and even FX has a more symbiotic relationship with audience introduction to or reinforcement by Netflix replays of popular series (“Mad Men,” “Walking Dead,” “Breaking Bad”) which reinforce and encourage more viewing on the cable networks. Netflix’s appeal to families with children doesn’t work the same way for kids’ and off-network syndicated programming on broadcast and cable networks which especially hurts Disney and Viacom (whose Nickelodeon is especially taking a beating). These companies have two options: pull their premium content off Netflix, depriving its 35 million domestic subscribers, or demand more money to compensate for their losses. Either way, Netflix imposes a David and Goliath dilemma on Disney and Viacom with an enduring economic impact. Exercising the only control they have by not renewing their Netflix licensing agreements could initially generate the loss of $75 million in revenues for both Disney and Viacom, since Netflix accounts for more than one quarter of average daily bandwidth consumption. But that could improve their children’s channel ratings and revenues by forcing viewers back to linear channels for programming, the Bernstein analysts contend. It’s a big deal considering that Disney and Viacom channels comprise about 80% of kids’ TV viewing. The challenge for broadcast and cable networks is to capture as much of the corresponding eyeballs and advertising dollars as they can, regardless of the platform or device where their programming appears. Although a slippery slope, the extended reach of their programs (whether it is a Netflix or Hulu.com share shift, or something else) is what the broadcast and cable networks are hustling to sell advertisers in the upfront in the face of changing fundamentals. An anticipated rise in advertising demand (broadcast upfront spending is expected to rise 4% to nearly $9.5 billion, cable by 6% to nearly $9.9 billion) coincides with a general decline in broadcast and cable TV network ratings. How will the affected broadcast and cable networks base upfront pricing on robust ratings, only to be exposed to hefty make-goods when they fail to deliver later in the season? Pricing more conservatively on the upfront market will prevent them from capitalizing on any ratings improvement. That familiar crapshoot is compounded by analyst forecasts that leading broadcast and cable TV networks will soon face rapidly declining fortunes, with ratings continuing to deteriorate, causing a decline in ad revenues, retransmission fees and global syndication value of content. The accelerated cost to develop replacement content will also squeeze the bottom line. The most vulnerable--and most likely to lead upfront volume sales--is CBS, with nearly its entire strong prime-time lineup returning. Any flux in how much or where advertisers spend could have a more extreme adverse impact on a pure-broadcaster such as CBS. While this cyclical dilemma is nothing new for the networks, it has yet to be tested at a time when online, mobile, social media and other competing platforms are intensifying their assault on $60 billion in annual advertising revenues. For the first time ever, digital media companies such as Google, AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft and Hulu are having their own upfront presentations with advertisers. Although most marketers with national budgets continue to prefer network TV advertising as a starting point for their media plans, many are increasingly shifting dollars to online and mobile which are affordable, low-risk and more strategically measurable. Major marketers such as Sears and Walmart are wrestling with radically changing circumstances forcing them to consider new ways to reach target consumers. Some experts predict the Internet and mobile connectivity will match or exceed broadcast spending before decade’s end. Online video ad spending will morph to $7 billion by 2015 from $2.16 billion last year, up 52%, according to eMarketer. That’s just two upfronts away.