Week of September 17, 2007

TV Gets Aggressive

Friday, September 21, 2007

NBC has announced that it will be providing its top shows for free download this season via the NBC website. The shows will include ads. The move comes in the wake of NBC's decision to no longer offer its shows for sale via iTunes. The service will initially be Windows Media-only, but will eventually include Apple and other device support.

Fox, while not going as far as NBC, has also decided to provide free content. Fox has announced that the premiere episodes of its coming season will be available free on iTunes. The theory for them is that viewers will get hooked and come back and watch the later episodes on TV.

New TV Promo Strategies

Thursday, September 20, 2007

With the new fall season of TV programming starting to roll out, keep an eye out for the latest trends in network promos, shorter promos and product placement promos. According to Advertising Age, Fox's strategy of running 5-second promos for its own programming, buried in commercial breaks, is designed to break out of the pack of the usual 60-second, pre-show model of network promos.

NBC's approach is a creative mix of promos and advertising, featuring a fictitious couple in a Honda Accord talking about upcoming NBC programs. CBS is doing a its own sponsored campaign with Cadillac, called, "The Cadillac of Premieres."

Commercials vs. Programming

Wednesday, September 19, 2007

The most important trend in TV advertising is measurement of commercials, not programs. With that in mind, TiVo has released some striking facts. The most-watched prime time commercials in July, according to a random sample of TiVo users' viewing habits, did not come from the highest-rated TV programs. The most-watched ads came from NBC's "America's Got Talent," which finished 13th in total viewership, and the 37th ranked "48 Hours Mystery" from CBS.

According to TiVo's research department, placement is more important than creative. There's less time shifting and more live viewing with certain programs and time periods. For example, daytime programming has a much higher live viewing rate than prime time does.

This brings up a parallel with radio. Arbitron is already showing in its PPM data much higher radio listening rates for those who are employed full time. In the diary methodology, there was anecdotal evidence that there is less button-pushing during the day while people are at work than there is in drive time. It will be interesting to see if PPM data confirms this.

The Growth Of Free

Tuesday, September 18, 2007

You would think that with the Internet maturing and one bubble already behind us that the explosion of free services and sites would start to decline as lack of revenue killed off the less-funded competitors, but an odd thing is happening: The free ad-supported model is becoming even common.

On the content side, some observers are pointing to the elimination of the New York Times Select service and a similar decision expected for the Wall Street Journal. For all intents and purposes, paying for mass-appeal print content on the Internet has become near extinct. While it is too soon to make the same pronouncement for video and audio, the growth of ad-supported digital song services like Ruckus may point to a similar scenario for them.

On the application side, the open source movement shows no signs of slowing. In fact, huge companies like Dell, Sun, and IBM have jumped into the free application world. Two recent announcements show the seriousness of this for established powerhouse Microsoft. The first announcement is that Google is close to launching its online presentation application, which puts Google that much closer to Microsoft Office, with Gmail, Writely, Google Spreadsheets, Presently, and Google Calendar all now available. The price for this suite? Free. The second announcement came from IBM, which is launching a, you guessed it, free office suite based on the impressive openoffice code. Entitled Lotus Symphony, the suite will make the openoffice.org code that much more robust with IBM putting money into it.

With applications and content free, the question is: Who the heck will be selling anything digital in five years?

Yahoo cuts deal with Bebo

Monday, September 17, 2007

Yahoo! finally gets in on the lucrative social networking ad sales business thanks to the deal it cut with San Francisco-based Bebo. Yahoo! lost out to Google in selling ads on MySpace and to Microsoft for Facebook. Bebo may be more than just the consolation prize. Bebo is not as well-known in the US yet, but it's one of the fastest growing sites of any kind in the English-speaking world. It's the #1 social networking site in the UK according to comScore. And according to Alexa, Bebo is the #1 site overall in Ireland and it's in top 15 most-visited sites in Australia and New Zealand.