Commentary

Reports From the Media Frontiers

  • by January 29, 2003
Cross-Media
Getting Media’s House in Order
by Steve Smith, popeyesmith@comcast.net

It is so refreshing to hear a made member of the media actually say that they, not the ad industry, need to get more coherent about cross-platform ad sales.

“Part of the difference has been that agencies and clients weren’t going to get behind it if they saw that the people selling it to them weren’t in agreement on it,” says Charles Tillinghast, MSNBC.com’s director of sales and marketing. When the combined sales forces of TV, print, and online came into the room together with a coordinated plan, the tide began to turn. “We have all sides of our house in order …we make a very persuasive case,” says Tillinghast.

Among the most compelling packages in this alliance is NBC’s Today Show franchise segments on weddings, books, and now kitchen-building projects, which Tillinghast and company sell effectively in on-air/online bundles. Likewise, travel clients such as Choice Hotels and Cruise Value Center are buying into the print/Web combo to extend their branding across dayparts.

Media buyers are starting to add the Web to TV and print buys not just to grab email addresses or push people to e-tail sites, but in order to extend brand exposure across day parts, says Tillinghast. One of the reasons NBC is getting squarely behind these bundles is that it has some eye-popping post-campaign studies of cross-platform placements during NBC’s Olympics coverage. Aided brand awareness for TV-only campaigns showed a 37% lift, while Web-only placements generally tested below that. But campaigns that tied together TV and Web showed an 82% aided brand awareness lift. No typo.

Online
Top of the Online Food Chain
by Masha Geller, masha@mediapost.com

The online advertising industry is not registering the overall revenue growth it had hoped for in 2002, with the Interactive Advertising Bureau reporting last month that revenues were down almost 21% during the first half of the year. But the top of the food chain is reporting strong numbers.

According to publicly filed documents and a recent survey of 18 Online Publishers Association (OPA) members, many leading online publishers reported strong third-quarter earnings results, and the interactive divisions of major media companies posted strong gains in advertising and total revenue for both the third quarter and year-to-date.

The poll of 18 Online Publishers Association member companies showed that third-quarter ad revenue grew an average of 35.7% over Q3 2001. Year-to-date ad revenue among this group was up an average of 23.8% over the same period last year. Compared to last year, for instance, ad sales at NYTimes.com have risen more than 30%, and jumped a whopping 50% at Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive. The survey also found that total revenue among this group grew an average of 47.4% in the third quarter of this year compared to the same quarter last year, while year-to-date revenue grew an average of 35.5 % over the first nine months of 2001.

What’s driving this shift? According to most of the companies surveyed, it’s both audience and research. OPA executive director Michael Zimbalist says, "The change is moving away from selling impressions towards moving audiences."

The OPA survey results confirm that high-quality-content sites are "continuing to capture an increasing share of online advertising dollars," and demonstrate that online divisions of established media companies are "emerging as engines of growth in an otherwise lackluster economy."

Streaming Media
A Political First
by Ken Liebeskind, kenl@mediapost.com

One of the highlights of this election year was the streaming TV–type commercial one candidate ran online, the first time it's been done in a political campaign.

Coca-Cola may be the best-known streamer of TV-type commercials, but the man with the milestone is Matt Salmon, a former congressman, whose campaign for governor of Arizona was aided by his use of streaming ads at www.eastvalleytribune.com, the website of the East Valley Tribune, the 2nd largest paper in Arizona. (Salmon lost in a very close vote).

The campaign, which began Oct. 25 and ran through Election Day, streamed a 30-second spot for Salmon at the top of the home page to everyone who visited the page. Sixty percent of visitors to the site watched the full spot and 2% clicked a link on the spot to go to the candidate's Web page, according to Bill Caspare, president of DB Associates, the Scottsdale, Ariz., firm that made the buy. "No station can tell me how many watch what percent of a commercial on TV," he says. "With this, I know the penetration level and the energy it's creating. Also, it reaches a profile of most likely people to vote who go online."

Caspare rotated three commercials so visitors could see a different one each time they came to the site.

John Allen, vice president of multimedia for Freedom Newspapers, which owns the East Valley Tribune, says the ad is emblematic of "the evolution of the Net and an opportunity for politicians to disseminate information."

iTV
Games — Best Bet to Hook Users?
by Lee Hall, leehall@reporters.net

Here’s a fascinating news item: Bet you didn’t know that 42% of the digital cable television subscribers in York, Pa., have become hooked on playing interactive TV trivia. Buzztime Entertainment, Inc., a developer of interactive TV programming, has been testing its trivia game service in York since mid-summer. Early results show that people not only like it, they are hanging on to their cable service longer.

The churn rate — that percentage of households that ditches cable for one reason or another — averaged 3.5% per month through September in households registered for the Buzztime service. That’s compared to a 5.6% churn rate in non-Buzztime household.

The fact that this interactive television niche is turning out to be so popular in one small Pennsylvania town belies a much graver scenario across the rest of the land. iTV, despite all its promises, remains very much a great idea in search of a market.

Beyond York, Pa., the potential global market is enormous. Only about 3% of the 1.5 billion televisions in use worldwide are connected to some kind of iTV service. Ovum Consulting, a British firm, once projected that pay TV worldwide would deliver $60 billion in revenue by 2005 — although Ovum has recently scaled back its rosy forecast.

“Interactivity sits like a coiled spring behind the media headlines,” industry guru Paul Kagan said recently. “Push the right button, and it has the potential to take off.”

That’s the real problem, isn’t it? What, exactly, is the magic button to which Mr. Kagan refers?

It is difficult to fathom that, given the promise of iTV, its users would find the greatest utility in playing interactive games. But however trivial that pursuit, it’s a start.

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