Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, which has been unprofitable for eight of the last nine years, is turning to Web video to revitalize its fortunes. On Monday, the company announced nonexclusive distribution partnerships with Hulu and the AOL On Network, respectively, in addition to a video content management and optimization deal with Fullscreen, Inc. The deals mark a distinct strategy shift within MSLO, which in the past had always sought television distribution deals. However, the company's most recent deal with Hallmark TV expired in May 2012 and was not renewed. The shift to digital video is being led by Lisa Gersh, who assumed the role of CEO in July. “Viewers are consuming media on an increasing number of screens and that’s why we are tapping our strong competency for producing quality, how-to video content by expanding our presence across multiple platforms,” Gersh said. The deal with Hulu will see the online video giant launch three new MSLO channels: “Martha's Kitchen,” “Emeril's Table,” and “DIY Crafts,” with the option of adding more later in the year. The video hub will also host a curated catalog of archived MSLO video content. Under the AOL agreement, archived MSLO content will appear on the AOL On Network, AOL’s new video hub, with additional premium content to come following yesterday’s launch. The deal with Fullscreen will see the video services firm focus on enhancing MSLO’s video monetization while helping the company build a Martha Stewart Network on YouTube.
Live television viewing slipped again in the first quarter of this year, according to Nielsen.The average daily live TV viewing per person is now at 4 hours and 38 minutes -- down from 4:47 during the first quarter of 2011. Time-shifted viewing climbed to 24 minutes from 21 minutes. Gaming time stayed the same at 14 minutes a day, with DVD playback slipping to an average 12 minutes from 14 minutes.Nielsen Cross-Media report says on a weekly basis, U.S. viewers are watching nearly 35 hours per week of video across all screens, and spending five hours a week using the Internet. Gaming time now is one hour and 38 minutes per week on average. But among those who watch streaming video content on gaming devices, it is now 2 hours and 48 minutes.Nielsen says traditional TV viewing is slipping but shifting to other devices -- especially tablets. Currently, more than 15% of U.S. TV homes have one. Also factoring into all this media change -- nearly 36 million mobile phone owners in the U.S. watch video on their phones.TV home penetration is at nearly 96% and slowly declining. But Nielsen says "in homes that are not considered traditional TV homes," 75% own a TV set -- probably connected to a gaming device, over-the-top device, DVD player or the Internet directly.
Marketing Daily was at Cowboys Stadium in Dallas last weekend before the Michigan versus Alabama game to check out Nissan's new Sentra compact car, and to check out the automaker's NCAA football grassroots program, Heisman House, tied to its sponsorship of the Heisman Trophy. The program, a partnership with ESPN, Sports Illustrated and the Heisman Trophy Trust, saw its first expression during last year's NCAA season. This year, in addition to giving a spotlight to Nissan's 2013 Sentra, it also promotes both the Heisman and its charity efforts. The venue, which will travel to other NCAA games, is packed with different interactive areas for fans to do things like get their pictures taken with an actual Heisman trophy, and listen to former Heisman winners and NCAA stars talk about the upcoming game. The grassroots effort is supported by TV ads as well. And if the automaker was hoping to get around 15,000 people through the doors of the frat-house-themed venue, it probably succeeded last weekend, regardless of the brutal heat of a late summer day in Dallas. It might have been 100 degrees in the shade on Sept. 1, and there isn't much of that to be had on the blazing parking lot outside Cowboys Stadium. But Michigan and Alabama fans being what they are, they packed the lot and the (mercifully air-conditioned) stadium. At the link, reporter Karl Greenberg battles the heat to talk trophy with Jon Brancheau, VP marketing at Nashville-based Nissan North America. Grab a cold Shiner beer, drape a wet towel over your head and enjoy.
Beyond educating students (and generating football mascots), universities are the world's most powerful crucibles of invention and progress. But as universities nationwide are seeing their budgets get buried by fiscal undertakers, one state system is going on the offensive with an integrated campaign meant to remind people that work done by academic researchers and artists defines how we live, who we are, and how we'll survive. The University of California's Office of the President has launched its first digital video campaign, "Onward California," comprising viral content about six alumnae and professors across the system's 10 campuses. The films, the first branded digital content from UC, unspool over the next three months, with features about luminaries like astronomer Steve Vogt, who has done groundbreaking research on extra-solar planets. The first episode launches Sept. 11 with a feature on John Bowers, director of the Institute for Energy Efficiency at UC-Santa Barbara. Bowers created a project called Ignite to Light, a solar-powered system meant to give lighting to people in countries without reliable electricity. Others featured include astronomer Steven Vogt, co-discover of Gliese 581 g, the first potentially Earth-like extra-solar planet; Terrie Williams, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UC-Santa Cruz; Roger Bales, professor of Engineering, UC-Merced & director of the Sierra Nevada Research Institute; and artist Glenn Kaino. The trailer, which is running on UC's YouTube page, ends with Bales saying, "If California can't save the world, I don't know who can." Says Jason Simon, director of marketing at UC’s office of the president, "Within higher education as a whole, we are becoming much more marketing savvy. Branding is becoming more and more important for us. It's about growing broad-based support." He explains to Marketing Daily that the campaign is one of several ongoing efforts to make sure California's public understands the value of the state university system. "We are in midst of a fourth year of dramatic budgets cuts; we have seen $1 billion cut from state funding with a dramatic impact on tuition, so it's really transforming the face of a public institution. We are hoping to ignite what we know is a passive sense of support for the university. So this is not a recruitment effort, it's a brand effort: the real intent is to make sure people know what the university does and that the enterprise is beyond educating students." The effort includes a fall experiential tour making about 35 stops around the state, says Simon. "Athletics and culture are ways to engage alumnae and community, but there are other ways. And University of California research touches our lives on a daily basis." He says market research shows strong support for the university system. "Support for higher education and for UC is high both among voters and alumnae," he says. "They get the university's role as an economic driver. But where we fall short is in their understanding of how it touches their lives." The campaign will also involve each campus's social media fan base. "This is a really big and important problem for a really influential brand."
Halloween is a time of zombies (and perhaps some plants). As such, PopCap Games, maker of the popular game “Plants Vs. Zombies,” is teaming up with the American Dental Association to help cut down on tooth decay (and perhaps general postmortem decay) around the candy-filled holiday. Rather than giving out candy on Oct. 31, the company and the association are encouraging children and parents to “Stop Zombie Mouth” by giving out alternative treats in the form of PvZ-themed trading cards and even copies of the game. “We looked around at which of our games was most popular among the broadest audiences, and thought about what that game might be used for in a movement or campaign,” Garth Chouteau, senior director of worldwide public relations for PopCap, tells Marketing Daily. “We thought perhaps there was a way for video games to replace candy on Halloween. We’ve got this game that’s got Halloween themes, and we wondered if there was something we could do with the game that could change consumer behavior in a modest way.” Working with ADA dentists (and via an online site, www.stopzombiemouth.com), parents can download the materials, including coupons redeemable for a full PC/Mac Edition of the game. Further consumer outreach will include radio PSA’s and other public relations outreach. “By the end of this month it will have a lot of material and information so that consumers can celebrate Halloween in the context of this video game,” Chouteau says. “We’re modifying [the game] slightly to include language specific to this campaign.” While PopCap has supported charitable organizations in more traditional ways (such as donating a portion of sales to a particular cause), this is the first joint promotional effort the company has undertaken with game materials and giveaways in support of a specific organization. “We’ve done quite a few campaigns raising funds for charitable organizations and worthy causes, but those have been more traditional fundraising drives,” Chouteau says. “This is a much broader, more ambitious campaign.”
Before the Facebook IPO, a former-entrepreneur-turned-VC told me that Facebook was caught between a rock and a hard place, because its massive size was proving to be a double-edged sword: “How can it possibly ever increase revenues to match its user base?” From a basic economic standpoint, he was right, and I didn’t need any convincing: I’d always argued that Facebook was successful despite social media, not because of it. After all, Facebook had already grown to nearly 1 billion users (plus or minus 100 million fake accounts) and its revenues were a “relatively paltry” $3.7 billion (don’t get me wrong, I would take that kind of paltry any day). Its supply of pageviews and ad inventory was so staggering that its rate of revenue couldn’t sustain – let alone – match the growth. But, stranger things had happened, and seeing how Facebook was increasingly becoming the de facto Internet bellwether, I argued that it was possible that fund managers would feel compelled to own the stock no matter what, driving up prices. Obviously, in the short amount of time since the IPO, the VC was 100% correct, as Facebook is down 50%. This isn’t intended to kick Facebook when it’s down, but to ask: Is YouTube destined to experience a similar fate? Now don’t get me wrong: I’ve always been very bullish on YouTube, unlike Facebook, since after Facebook and Google YouTube is the third most popular site in the world. I also feel that unlike Facebook, YouTube could be the world’s best branding advertising platform if the company just got out of its own way (as in “it’s hard to manage that kind of growth and scale,” NOT “YouTube doesn’t know what to do with that growth and scale”). However, like Facebook, YouTube is growing so fast that I cannot envision how it will ever be able to match the amount of ad inventory it has. Bear in mind that the reason why print /as historically commanded such high revenue per user rates is precisely thanks to control of its ad inventory. Thankfully for YouTube, Google owns it, and its stock price is back at 2007 levels, which is just after it bought YouTube. For what it’s worth, despite the talk that Facebook (and social) would kill Google (and search), I think Google is really well positioned. Thanks to YouTube, it’s the number two search engine in the world -- and until Mark Zuckerberg is willing to focus on video and content (the way – you guessed it – Google did) that won’t change anytime soon. Newspapers, you are the 2.2% Despite all of the strides (read: falling print revenue and increasing digital revenues), only a measly 2.2% of newspaper revenue comes from digital. Honestly, sometimes I think that my company generates more revenue than the digital units of nine newspapers out of 10. I realize some are still betting on subscribers and what not, but let’s be honest: only 0.1% of “print brands” have the goodwill, content, and cachet to command subscriptions (New York T, The Economist, Financial Times – who else, really?) If that 2.2% stat isn’t enough to freak out newspapers, this will: Apparently, print revenues have been 25 times greater than digital revenues. That would be bad enough if I was referring to a period of say a decade. But no. That’s in one year. According to the Newspaper Association of America’s advertising statistics posted last week, $798 million in print losses for the first half of 2012 compared to the same period a year ago were only “offset” by a $32 million gain in digital. I used quotation marks because that’s not really being offset, is it? I think that while newspapers have been chasing sexy areas like mobile, social and local (all logical areas) they are missing out on the only real path to incremental revenues, which is video (even putting everything into text format online leads to cannibalized revenue). Video is the only brand-new revenue stream for newspapers -- and for reasons too long to list in today’s article, newspapers have shown both an unwillingness and an inability to charge ahead with it You’re not really comparing Facebook to newspapers, are you, Ash? Well, yes and no. Similarly, on the surface Facebook has been killing it in video, usurping the number-two slot from Yahoo, but that – like Facebook’s growth in general – is due to its sheer size. Similarly, newspapers will brag about things they’re “doing in video.” But neither is a strategy. Until Mark Zuckerberg formulates a clear strategy to capitalize from video, all he will see in the future is a declining share price. When it comes to newspapers, they are missing a key reality: If the Web has shrunk traditional media, then mobile will only shrink it further.
I have to admit that unless a link in another app or message kicked me over to it, I generally forgot that YouTube was on my iPhone. Once the iOS operating system introduced the folder, I tucked that old-timey TV screen icon into one of the folders containing unused programs just to get it off the home screen. The app always suffered from a half-hearted execution. The basic operations of YouTube were there (Favorites, Most Watched, Playlists, etc.), but the sharing tools were rudimentary at best. The search mechanism was downright raw (no suggestions or categorized results). Worse, the app barely evolved over the five years it had been on the iPhone. When early builds of iOS 6 emerged this summer, it became plain how serious the Apple vs. Google war had become, as apps like YouTube joined Google Maps in leaving the home screen. We expect that iOS 6 will roll out formally either tomorrow or within the next week as the iPhone 5 deploys. And Google has slipped in at the last minute to anticipate the change with its own new and much enhanced version of the YouTube app now available for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Early this morning, YouTube’s head of mobile Andrey Doronichev posted to the YouTube blog announcing the arrival of the new YouTube app. To their credit, YouTube has improved the experience considerably over the default configuration of the video hub we have lived with these many years. Of course, the bar was set pretty low. Most notably, the interface is designed to help highlight the channels structure that Google/YouTube has been promoting of late. The channels to which you are subscribed online show up automatically when you log into the account in a handy slide-in menu. One of the real advances in the YouTube app is discovery. The Add Channels feature is especially interesting. The default suggestions, including a channel for Mini Coopers and Penguin Books, seemed to be picking up my YouTube usage history to drive the channel selector. The search box is supercharged. It not only cascades down suggested results, but has a detailed filter that allows you to sort by multiple parameters: view count, relevance, date, even duration and presence of closed-captioning. These all can be set to default as well. The results also push the user toward the YouTube channel structure. You get results sorted both by direct video hits as well as a tab that directs you to relevant channels to which you can subscribe. The video viewing experience is also enhanced for discovery. In portrait orientation, half the screen is devoted to recommendations off of the choice. And the commenting feature is built in seamlessly so you can type comments directly into the interface as you watch. The sharing tools are especially strong. While Google+ is put at the top of the share list, it also enables you to send to the usual social media suspects as well as via text messaging. To be sure, there is a lot to handle here. One of the sacrifices of personalization is serendipity. The default YouTube experience on mobile in the old app was a mosh pit of most-watched clips. Now you default to your home feed and can look at a Popular channel to get tapped into the zeitgeist of video sharing. But the app is clearly pointing the way for YouTube to become a more polished experience that highlights more professional fare than piano-playing cats. In fact, in this mobile experience I happened upon relatively few rough-edged user-generated videos. For marketers, there may be less opportunity here for viral videos to find a mobile audience. There is less of a feeling of randomness here. YouTube says that over a billion videos are viewed via its mobile sites and apps each day. It is still unclear to me how video watching integrates into everyday use of mobile. Doronichev refers in his blog post to YouTube “diehards” who apparently simply tune in to YouTube habitually as a discrete experience. I am guessing there are a good number of mobilized media mavens who simply get a hankering for some “video,” and for them YouTube is a reflex. As a resource for video versions of topical search queries, I am not as sure that YouTube has become a resource as effectively as a standard mobile Google search. When you want to catch clips of that Clint Eastwood RNC speech to an empty chair, where do most of us go -- to Google search or to YouTube? My sense is that this app helps forge the distinction between the two resources. This app seems designed to encourage mobile moments of personalized lean-back media consumption. Curiously, YouTube only issued an iPhone app this week and promises an iPad version "in coming months."
In considering the future of media, attention must be paid to the much ballyhooed and often maligned concept of video convergence. Finally, it seems video convergence is becoming a reality. Surprisingly though, it is being driven as much by a growing cadre of Hollywood progressives as it is by anyone in Silicon Valley. “Hollywood?” you may ask skeptically. Truly, Tinsel Town is leading the revolution. One that allows for new forms of compelling content distributed in novel ways, which will surely mark the end of an era that has existed since the dawn of cinema, ushering in a new era with video convergence at its core. Not surprisingly, this revolution is being driven by artists -- directors, actors, writers -- as opposed to the studios and the distributors. Empowered by the past 25 years of technological advances, some of Hollywood’s top artists are finally breaking the shackles of the old content development, production and distribution models. Rather than navigate the slow, costly and prohibitive path of the traditional studio model to create content in bland and limited formats, these artists are using smaller budgets to create unique content in larger quantities, and taking it directly to consumers through the Internet. From there, viewers consume content on a variety of distribution platforms (YouTube, Vimeo, branded microsites, etc.) on myriad devices, and share/redistribute the content through social media. If that sounds a lot like video convergence, that’s because it is; it’s just not how we imagined we’d get there. Make no mistake -- we are there. Surprisingly, it’s not just struggling or young, innovative Hollywood artists embracing this model. It’s the enlightened old guard as well, from the likes of Ron Howard to Tom Hanks to Jerry Seinfeld. So what does this mean for the future of media in general? It’s tough to say definitively, but it does prove the truth behind one old cliché: content is king. And for those old media properties that have reinvented themselves over the past 10 to 15 years -- not just as distributors of content, but also as creators of compelling content (HBO, AMC, TNT etc.) -- the future looks bright indeed. Greg Smith, Chief Creative Officer of The VIA Agency, a full-service advertising agency based in Portland, Maine.
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: