Tuesday, July 12, 2016

NBC's Steve Burke expects Olympics in Rio to be the 'most profitable' ever

Broadcast Industry News - Television , Cable, On-demand - TVNewsCheck.com

Stephen Battaglio

The Olympic Games in Rio are 25 days away but NBCUniversal Chief Executive Steve Burke believes his company has already won the gold in ad sales.

After a press preview on Monday of NBC’s Olympics coverage, Burke told the Los Angeles Times that the company has hit its sales target for the Rio Games, which he said will end up being be "the most profitable Olympics in history."

According to Seth Winter, executive vice president for ad sales for the NBC Sports Group, the ad revenue total for Rio is approaching $1.2 billion, with orders still being taken. 
“We have never hit our budget in sales three weeks before the Olympics begin,” Burke said.

When asked how profitable he expects the Games to be, he said: "You'll find out when we release our earnings, but we're way ahead of where we were in London, and London was profitable. Sochi was profitable” in 2014.

NBC said the 2012 Summer Games in London brought $1 billion in sales.
The Games will air on NBC and across its parent company’s cable properties and Spanish-language network Telemundo for 17 days starting Aug. 5.

Winter said the Games in Rio are guaranteed to deliver advertisers a household rating in the “high teens.” Presumably that’s around the 17.5 household rating that the Summer Games delivered in 2012. A household rating point represents 1% of the nation's TV households, currently equal to 1.164 million homes, according to Nielsen.

The guarantees are based on "live plus same day" viewing and do not include DVR playback or streaming. While NBC is selling advertising for its digital coverage, a majority of the sales are for commercials on prime-time telecasts over the broadcast network, Burke said. 
NBC expects its prime-time rating for the Olympics to be higher than 2012 as all of the events will be live as opposed to tape delayed. But it’s the overall fragmentation of the television landscape due to the vast number of choices viewers have today that is making the Olympics more attractive to advertisers, Burke said.

NBC paid $4.32 billion to the International Olympic Committee in 2011 for the rights to four sets of Games — outbidding its nearest rival by almost $1 billion — and another $7.75 billion to extend the deal through 2032.

Burke believes that investment is paying off as programming that reaches the kind of massive audiences that the Olympics deliver becomes more scarce. NBC was able to command steep double digit increases over its 2012 rates.

"If you think between today and when London took place — television audiences are down 30%," Burke said. "There is a good chance that Rio ratings will be around the same as London, maybe higher. For an advertiser that wants to change perceptions over a 17-day period, there is only one of these, so it becomes increasingly valuable." 

Burke and other NBCUniversal executives said there are no concerns about venues not being ready in time for the start of the Games. Only a handful of employees have declined to travel to Rio out of concerns over the Zika virus.

“We are having an experience in Rio that is probably as good as we’ll ever have,” said NBC Olympics President Gary Zenkel.

Lawmakers Question FTC About Ad Fraud

by Wendy Davis @wendyndavis, Yesterday, 3:30 PM

Citing concerns that online ad fraud will result in higher prices for consumers, two lawmakers are asking the Federal Trade Commission what steps it's taking to address fake traffic on the Web.

"Bots plague the digital advertising space by creating fake consumer traffic, artificially driving up the cost of advertising in the same way human fraudsters can manipulate the price of a stock by creating artificial trading volume," Sens. Mark Warner (D-Virginia) and Charles Schumer (D-New York) say in a letter to FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez.

The senators add that many bots are "advanced enough to analyze consumer web activity in order to retarget advertisements based on individual browsing preferences."

The letter cites a well-publicized study by White Ops and the Association of National Advertisers, which found that ad fraud will cost advertisers $7.2 billion globally this year.

"The cost of pervasive fraud in the digital advertising space will ultimately be paid by the American consumer in the form of higher prices for goods and services," they write. "Just as federal regulation has evolved to keep pace with the ever-growing sophistication of our financial markets, so must oversight of the digital advertising space."

The lawmakers ask the FTC numerous questions, including how to "reform opaque advertising exchanges" and what steps the agency is taking "to protect consumer data and mitigate fraud within the digital advertising industry."

Other queries include whether the FTC has observed trends in ad fraud, and what can be done "to more closely align the incentives of ad tech companies with publishers, advertisers and consumers."
Warner and Schumer acknowledge that the online ad industry's Trustworthy Accountability Group has taken steps aimed at combating ad fraud, but express doubt about whether the initiative will succeed. The letter specifically referenced TAG's "fraud threat list" -- which collects known sources of fraudulent traffic.

"It remains to be seen whether voluntary, market-based oversight is sufficient to protect consumers and advertisers from digital advertising fraud," the lawmakers write. "And in the interim, consumer confidence in digital advertising markets has eroded, as evidenced by user adoption of ad blocking tools."

Mike Zaneis, CEO of the Trustworthy Accountability Group, suggests that other agencies are better suited to deal with online ad fraud. Earlier this year the Trustworthy Accountability Group held a discussion with representatives from Homeland Security Investigations and the FBI. "We have seen it as imperative to partner with criminal law enforcement," Zaneis says.

Thursday, July 7, 2016

Be Very Afraid, Facebook And Google

by John Motavalli, Columnist, Yesterday, 12:00 PM

On May 18, this column opined that Facebook would soon dump its media partners from their newsfeed, as the value of news diminished, especially in the social media context. Late last month, Facebook announced that news and media content would be greatly diminished in users’ newsfeeds, and soon after, News Corp. CEO Robert Thomson counter-attacked, claiming that publishers would build “a powerful network” themselves.

The sound you just heard was my laughter. That has to be the most absurd statement we have heard all year. Moreover, it shows once again that despite all the water under the bridge since the Internet first reared its ugly head to media, powerful CEOs have learned nothing.
Let’s drill down.

First of all, we don’t blame Thomson for his remarks. What else can he say? In another column, we compared the current situation to the ’90s and media relationships with AOL. Ultimately AOL dumped its media partners also, or forced them to pay huge amounts to stay connected. Then, as now, media companies like The New York Times and Time Inc. simply didn’t know what to do next. A huge part of their current traffic has been coming from Facebook. How do they replace it? How do they explain when future comScore rankings show them plummeting?

In this current environment, even an Internet-spawned company like Yahoo! is at a distinct disadvantage. Why? Because unlike Google and Facebook, Yahoo! lacks a unique advertising edge, which Google and Facebook get from their huge traffic and targeted advertising opportunities. But Yahoo! is the No. 3 Web property. It still has value and, if Verizon combines it with AOL, it will have a lot more value.

Entertainment, Like News, Is A CommodityWhat does news and entertainment bring to the party? Less and less. What the story of Netflix and Amazon’s success in TV series shows is that entertainment, like news, is a commodity. Companies that had no experience in entertainment as of 10 years ago now have series that top those of Warner Bros. and Fox, which were both making movies more than 100 years ago. News became a fungible commodity back in the ’90s, when Reuters took advantage of the Associated Press’ conflicts. (Owned by a consortium of newspapers, AP was loathe to sell its product to potential competitors.)
Cut to 2016. Robert Thomson promises a “powerful network.” A network of what? If you can think of something, let us know in the commentary section below. On May 17, the New York Times published a typically clueless piece which stated, “The question of whether Facebook is saving or ruining journalism is not relevant here because, like it or not, Facebook is a media company.”

Another risible observation. Facebook is not a media company, does not want to be one, and is now taking steps to alleviate the confusion. It is a tech platform, and most importantly for its bottom line, an ad tech platform. As such, it can compete with Google by offering a highly targeted advertising environment, which only the two of them could do this well. How can media compete with that?
Does News Corp. have a killer app that will take the Internet by storm? Not likely. Nor is it likely that Time Inc., the New York Times, Hearst, Meredith, Viacom, or any other mainstream media property is likely to combine with News Corp. to build a rival to Facebook.

Frankly, media companies have not just a bad record, they have a non-existent record of achieving any tech breakthroughs online. And why should they? How many quality engineers do they employ? Oops, sorry, Google hired them all. Is entrepreneurship encouraged at Viacom? We doubt it.

Where Is The Go Network Now?Back in the ’90s, I spent quality time with Michael Eisner, then chairman of Disney, at the launch party for Disney’s online Go Network (remember that?), held at NYC’s Puck Building. In a rare moment of candor (for him), he blurted to me, “An 18-year-old in a garage in the Valley could build a bigger Web site than we could.” I swear he said this. And he was right. Where is the Go Network now? We’ll let Wikipedia summarize: “Go.com proved to be an expensive failure for its parent company, as Web users preferred to use search engines to access content directly, rather than start at a top-level corporate portal.”

And that, succinctly is the entire history of media companies online — expensive failures like Time Inc.’s Pathfinder, which a former top exec termed a “black hole.”

What happens now? Frankly, we fear the future. First, let’s say at the outset that if we were heading Facebook, we would do precisely what they did here. It was smart to use media brands to build theirs, and even smarter to jettison them when they’d outlived their usefulness.

But that doesn't mean this a good thing. Like children who refuse nutritious food and prefer junk, today’s young Facebook users are getting dumb and dumber. They don’t want news in their newsfeed. Even responsible adults often agree. I know I don’t want to hear about massacres in Bangladesh when I’m on Facebook.

Zuckerberg Is Not A MissionaryIf Facebook’s mission is to give its users what they want, then they’re doing that well. If Facebook’s mission is to educate young people, it’s misusing its power. But Facebook is a corporation; its mission is to maximize shareholder value. Mark Zuckerberg has done a great job of doing that. He is not a missionary, out to save media companies. He’s not even Jeff Bezos, who saw value in the Washington Post. One thing he has to know — the more Facebook is seen as a news outlet, the more it will be criticized by both liberals and conservatives for favoring one side or the other, as the recent contretemps over news algorithms proves. Far better to 1. Give users more personal fluff and 2. Avoid news controversy.

Let’s face it, News Corp. is not going to build a competitor to Facebook. When it bought MySpace, the social network was much bigger than Facebook, bigger than Google even, the No. 1 Web site. Under News Corp. tutelage, it deteriorated from a value of $12 billion to the point today when its value is negligible. MySpace’s former leader Chris DeWolfe has charged that the Fox Interactive unit forced MySpace to sacrifice usability for cumbersome ads that ruined the site’s functionality. If you’re on the edge of your seat, waiting for the Armageddon of a News Corp. vs. Facebook bakeoff, forget it.

(As a News Corp. and MCI employee in the mid-’90s, I was involved with a joint venture from those companies that sought to compete with the then-powerful AOL. It didn’t end well.)

Wednesday, June 29, 2016

Digital Impacting Station Sales Hiring, Tactics

Employment Special Report: Sales

Stations are finding that recruiting local sales talent at both the staff and management levels is more difficult because of competition from digital media. They can still compete for the best sales talent, the experts, say, but they can’t just sit back and wait for people to reply to a job posting. This is Part I of a three-part series on the challenges facing broadcasters in finding the right people for the rights jobs. Tomorrow, in Part II: It used to be a given that news managers would readily move it if meant a bigger market and a larger paycheck. Not anymore. And, In Part III, on Thursday, the military may become an even bigger source of talent for station IT and engineering departments.

By Adam Buckman

June 27, 2016 10:44 PM EDT

Raycom Media recruiter Ty Carver has become a frequent user of Linkedin.
“Looking for a new #broadcast #media #sales management opportunity?” he posted recently on the career-focused social media site. “I have current openings within Raycom … including top 50 markets! PM [private message] me.”

Why the Linkedin posts? Because Raycom, along with other station groups and individual stations are finding that recruiting and retaining local sales talent at both the staff and management levels to be tougher than ever.

“It’s a massive challenge,” says Henry Yates, Raycom VP of digital revenue, who oversees digital sales and staffing for the group’s 60-some stations.

“When I began in the industry, in radio sales, 22 years ago, the idea of a television AE [account executive], GSM [general sales manager] or LSM [local sales manager] was the pinnacle of sales in the [local] media world,” Yates says.

“You got into it on one of your local print pieces like a community newspaper, or, if you were lucky, on an AM radio station or third-tier FM,” he says. “And if you did that for a couple of years, you might get yourself to the UPN or the CW station and then in a few years, you might get the No. 5 list at the ABC, CBS or NBC [affiliate], and if you did, you never gave up that job.”

Nowadays, though, the digital revolution is disrupting the world of local media ad sales — competing with TV stations not only for dollars but also for talent. “Digital picks off a lot of good salespeople,” Yates says.

“There is high demand for talent," agrees media sales trainer and consultant Leslie Laredo, president of Davie, Fla.-based Academy of Digital Media.

“If you have a choice between working for WABC.com [or] WABC-TV, or getting a job with Google, you’re going to go to Google,” she says.

Laurie Kahn, CEO and founder of Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Media Staffing Network, a recruiting firm that works with all media including local TV, agrees that stations are no longer competing with just each other.

“All of a sudden, they’re competing with every single online entity, whether it be an online newspaper or online catering. It could be any kind of digital business," she says.
They “are facing problems just getting people to come and sell — traditional as well as digital,” she says.

And it's not like broadcast sales is getting any easier. In fact, it's getting tougher, the experts say, with many account executives required to sell all the media in a station's portfolio — broadcast and digital.
Sales managers have taken on additional responsibilities for staffing expanded sales departments and monitoring sales results on the ancillary platforms, they add.

Despite rival media and the increased complexity of station sales, Kahn says, TV stations can compete for the best sales talent, but they cannot just sit back and wait for people to reply to a job posting.

"That’s not going to get them," she says. "They have to be proactive and start targeting people and going after the people they want to hire. … They have to start treating recruitment like they treat the marketing of their stations.

“A lot of [stations] don’t have recruitment strategies. They’re not building a name for themselves locally. You have millennials coming into the workplace big time now. And they’re a totally different group and some of the things they’re very interested in is working for a company that gives back," Kahn adds.

Raycom is certainly not sitting back, Yates says. “Two years ago, we didn’t have a corporate recruiter. Today, we have three,” including Carver, who joined the company from Scripps in 2014.
“And we’re working constantly on keeping the pipeline [of candidates] full."

Sunshine suggests that some stations may be struggling to keep their pipeline flowing because they put too much emphasis on broadcast experience.

“Too many people are still just hiring based on experience. And by doing that, we’re just trading each other’s people. We’re not growing our business.

“I get the reason why: More and more, we have less financial patience with new hires, like we can’t wait for them to become good.

"We hire someone and we put them on a major league team from day one and, if they’re not ready to be superstars, we get frustrated 90 days in and we turn ’em [loose]. So therefore we go for experience."

Stations should make a greater effort to identify young prospects with raw ability and familiarity with the new media, Sunshine says. That, along with the proper training, will yield the effective multiplatform sales person.

“The millennials coming into the work force these days have an abundance of experience using the digital products that they sell," he says. "They don’t have to learn the digital product or the way a digital product is used by a consumer.

“What they lack though is the sophistication of being able to find needs and put together the right solutions [for clients] and they’re learning that."

Michael Guld of The Guld Resource Group, Raleigh, NC and Dr. Philip Jay LeNoble of Executive Decision Systems, Inc., Littleton, CO are presently leading the training of new and mature sales teams with their System 21©, a new revenue development system for the broadcasting industry to include mobile digital as another viable revenue tool for the industry. "LeNoble says, "The job is becoming more complex and stations need to invest in the proper training to prepare their investment for a successful career in television or radio."

Some broadcasters have changed their compensation to keep up with the times, says Sunshine, but others have not and that "could be something holding them back."

Yates says that some TV sales people are seduced by the promises of big money from digital media, but find the "actual opportunity" may be far less than it appears.

"It’s going to take years for you to develop the kinds of relationships that you've built over years and years and years in broadcasting," he says. "The reality is that your chances of selling those kinds of dollars on an unproven source [are] nowhere near what you would on a television station.”

As a result, he says, “We see people coming back because it didn’t quite pan out as well as they [thought] it would.”

How Brands And Retailers Can Stand Out From (And With) The Crowd

By Panos Bethanis, Columnist Tuesday, June 28, 2016

Retailers must adapt and change in order to survive. Take Walmart. The company’s new initiative to enhance delivery options through a partnership with Uber and Lyft demonstrates its commitment to improving customer service and to staving off the unrelenting competition from Amazon. It’s also a sign that Walmart (which is not exactly known for thinking on its feet) understands that brick-and-mortar retailers need to embrace technology and innovation in order to adapt to the changing ways that today’s customers shop.

Uber, of course, is a poster child for one of the most controversial aspects of the Gig Economy: crowdsourcing. Retailers, in particular, are known to flinch at the mere mention of this term. Store managers often assume that crowd-sourced or crowd-“vetted” representatives are less reliable than full-time staffers and that trusting these transient workers will lead to problems with quality control. Likewise, some CPG marketers worry about what will happen to their own futures if they entrust the “crowd” (i.e., consumers) with strategic decisions about their brands.

For the most part, marketers have been willing to experiment with crowd-vetted or open-sourced branding methods as a means of driving innovation. They recognize that allowing consumers to “own” a piece of the brand—say, by creating a new ice-cream flavor—is an authentic way to create buzz and excitement around a campaign without ceding control of an entire marketing operation.

Retailers, however, tend to focus too much on the potential pitfalls of crowd-vetting while ignoring the substantial benefits of this approach. When executing a merchandising strategy, for example, a retailer stands to gain in several ways if it possesses a stable of highly trained and well developed, crowd-vetted experts. Here are three of the most important of those benefits:

1. Going local. Crowd-vetted reps have their fingers on the pulse of the local community. They know what customers are looking for on the shelf, and they can help brands connect with their neighbors.

2. An emotional attachment. These reps are working in their neighborhood store—a place where they shop with their families—and not simply passing through on their way to the next account. Thus, they are naturally invested in the success of the store.

3. Expert data collection. They know the best times to grocery shop in order to avoid the crowds, and they recognize changes in displays and new promotions because they are in that store as a customer. This can help the agile retailer become even more flexible and adapt more quickly as product demands evolve and change.

All of these factors help build create a level of familiarity that improves relationships between store managers and brand teams—a key ingredient to success in today’s hyper-competitive store environment. These may be “temporary” reps, but their positive impact on business will be lasting and permanent.

What Makes A Bad Salesperson (Hint: See Below)?

Wednesday, June 29, 2016
By Cory Treffiletti, Featured Contributor

I have been an ad and marketing guy for a while now, and I’ve been sold by some of the best and some of the worst salespeople across the industry. Many of the best I’ve maintained strong relationships with for many years, but the bad ones? Eh… not so much.

What makes a bad salesperson? It’s actually very easy to point out:
A bad salesperson sends me an email that starts with [name] in the first sentence and then proceeds to tell me how they did some research on my company and felt we should schedule some time to speak about how their service could be of value to me. And by the way, that was not a typo -- I actually received an email last week that was sent to [name], which I can only assume was supposed to have said “Cory.”

A bad salesperson sends me an email that starts with the sentence, “I am following up on the voicemail I left you earlier today” -- when it is very clear he never left me a voicemail. My work phone is a cell phone, so if you called and left me a voicemail, I can pretty much guarantee I would know about it. You’re not fooling anyone with that line.

A bad salesperson sends me emails that begin with, “I was researching your company and I thought Oracle would be a great fit for our SaaS marketing platform – can we schedule a time to discuss?” If you did a little homework, you would likely know that we sell some of the bigger marketing platforms in the industry -- just ask Forrester and Gartner, etc. A bad salesperson doesn’t do his homework and is simply trying to use email as a means to scatter shoot across the landscape.

As a matter of fact, a bad salesperson will keep sending me email every three days that copies and pastes the previous email with a note saying, “I just wanted to get this back to the top of your inbox” (because that is definitely going to work).

In reality, a bad salesperson will simply keep sending emails without making a call or trying to network to me through a mutual connection. A bad salesperson will not go the extra mile to find out something about me before reaching out.

A bad salesperson calls me every day at the same time of day, for two weeks straight, even though I have yet to answer the phone when he calls. I would say it’s safe to assume I am not always busy at that time -- I simply don’t want to speak to him.

A good salesperson will take the time to do some homework. A good salesperson will try to find a mutual connection or a shared interest that warrants a response. A good salesperson will ask questions about my business and my goals or objectives before assuming what he’s selling is going to be of immediate interest to me. A good salesperson is going to leverage some data to understand my interests and behaviors before reaching out, and gather that data through discovery or technology.

A good salesperson is going to engage me as a person first and a potential customer second in order to build a rapport that will hopefully lead to some business. A good salesperson will treat me as a client and not a goal in his call quota. A good salesperson knows this is still a business built on a foundation of relationships.

Don’t be a bad salesperson. Be a good one. Please.

Researcher Finds Programmatic TV Spending Will More Than Double This Year

by Tobi Elkin, Staff Writer @tobielkin, 10 hours ago

Spending on programmatic TV is expected to more than double to $2.16 billion in 2017 and continue increasing to $4.4 billion by 2018, according to a new forecast by eMarketer.

Programmatic spending on TV ads will represent a small but growing sharing of overall TV ad spending, according to the researcher. In its first forecast on the topic, eMarketer projects that programmatic TV (PTV) spending will increase 127.8% to $710 million this year. While programmatic will represent a small share of overall TV spending this year, just 1.0% of the total, that figure is expected to rise to 6.0% by 2018.

Of course programmatic ad spending on TV lags well behind outlays on digital video. This year, programmatic spending on digital video ads is expected to reach $5.51 billion, representing 56% of all digital video ad spending, according to eMarketer.

The researcher defines programmatic TV spend as the automated process for buying television ads through cable, satellite, or broadcast networks.

“There are several things driving the growth of programmatic TV, including ease of transactions and the ability to target ads,” stated eMarketer senior forecasting analyst Martín Utreras. “We expect national and local players to take a conservative approach at releasing inventories programmatically, amid fears they could cannibalize their inventory. At the same time, they’re working to become more adept at leveraging data for both ROI measurement and targeting.”

The market for addressable and programmatic TV remains challenging to quantify because it’s still new.

One ongoing challenge in distinguishing between addressable and PTV is that buyers and media companies each classify their buys differently. Often programmatic video and PTV teams are the same. While some agency buyers consider over-the-top buys within their traditional or linear TV conversations, some have dedicated advanced TV units. It might be a question of semantics but it's confusing, nonetheless.

Meanwhile, eMarketer plans to continue breaking out addressable TV ad spend separately from programmatic -- the two don’t currently overlap. Streaming video (or digital video, as eMarketer defines it) is a separate category as well.

Contrast eMarketer’s new forecast for PTV against one from IPG Mediabrands Magna Global. That forecast was issued in June 2015 and projected that $10 billion in TV ad budgets will run through programmatic platforms by 2019. Magna Global expects programmatic to represent 17% -- $10 billion -- of TV budgets by 2019, up from 4% and $2.5 billion of U.S. TV budgets in 2015. Magna defined programmatic TV buys as those going across a technology platform, including digital devices, set-top boxes and other platforms.

Frank Foster, a consultant who most recently served as SVP, general manager for TiVo Research and Analytics, offered some thoughts on PTV in an interview with Audience Buying Insider. Foster maintained that ensuring high quality inventory and data, transparency, operational efficiencies, and decent metrics will be keys to the growth of PTV spend

LeNoble's Media Sales Insights