Local TV, Digital An Unbeatable Combination

TVNewsCheck am

Open Mike by Joel Myers

The new digital-savvy audience with smartphones and tablets is expecting big changes from TV stations, their leading and most trusted news source. It's up to broadcasters to meet those expectations by integrating into their newscasts social media, real-time polling, user-generated content, street-level traffic and weather and hyper-local crime reporting.

By Joel Myers

    

TVNewsCheck, April 7, 2015 5:50 AM EDT 

      

With NAB approaching, it's a good time to acknowledge that local TV news is still indispensable to 87% of American viewers who choose it over any other way of accessing news, according to the American Press Institute.
Your station, with your local TV competitors, is the most relevant news media outlet in your market, providing a known brand, star talent and a strong relationship to your audience.

 

Nonetheless, we have entered into an age of transformative innovation that is urgently calling upon all of us to improve and adapt or lose revenue and audience.

 

Fewer than 20 years ago, the Internet became available to everyone. About 10 years ago, mobile phones began to transmit text, data and pictures, which potentially connect every person on the planet. The quantity of information available to people is doubling every four months, so every week we are expanding by 4% all that humans knew and recorded in the past 100,000 years.
The availability of all of this data and information has transformed our audience. Viewers are consuming more content than ever before — through their televisions, but also through smartphones and tablets. This new digital-savvy audience is also expecting transformations from you, their leading and most trusted news source. Your news presentations must evolve to keep pace with your changing audience.
To seize the opportunity before us and successfully ride the wave of inevitable change, a complete but proper transformation of the TV newsroom is required.

Brand Connections

Here are five ways to add digital relevancy to your newscasts:

1. Social media is used by 73% of the people in the U.S. Bringing properly selected content from social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter into your broadcast lets your viewers give timely feedback, commentary and opinions thereby enhancing breaking stories and engaging users.
2. Real-time polling is another way to involve your audience. Viewers want to see their opinions count and where others stand on the same issues.
3. User-generated content turns your audience into an army of on-the-scene reporters and highly involved viewers.
4. Street-level traffic and weather overlays like those provided by Radiate Media and AccuWeather make every day events such as snow storms and traffic jams must-watch events that allow you to compete with continuously updated online and mobile sources.
5. Hyper-local crime reporting solutions, provided by companies such as AlertID, reference more than 170 types of local crime-related data and allow you to report as soon as a crime becomes news.

The immediacy, interactivity and visual impact of digital media has set a new standard for viewer expectations. We should not think of the Web, mobile, blogs and apps as “add ons” separate from traditional broadcasts, but see all combined into one on-air user experience with a new set of expectations.

For more than 30 years, AccuWeather has worked with TV stations and currently serves more than 200 stations. We are known for our weather forecasts, but with the introduction of our StoryTeller, we allow stations to provide all of the types of content mentioned above and much more.

When your TV broadcasts and digital properties combine the strength of your known brand, star power and visual quality with the immediacy, interactivity and audience involvement of new media, you will have achieved the true promise of the transformative change underway in the TV business.

This will create a significant advantage for your station over the new Web-only brands, as well as competing stations that are not taking the leap to respond to the increasingly digital-savvy audience as seriously as you. Further, display systems like StoryTeller allow your talent to project an image of technical sophistication.

We are in a time of rapid transformative change. Do not look to your audience to slow their accelerating move to embrace new technologies, but rather embrace the challenge and gain a commanding lead in your market by creating a seamless, exciting and engaging experience on all devices.

Lookout Advertisers: The FCC is coming.

INSIDERADIO
April 7, 2015



Radio and other media which carry the commercials, not marketers, have long received scrutiny over advertising-related issues. But the Association of National Advertisers sees that changing as the Federal Communications Commission has moved into mobile and internet-related issues. "Advertisers and others may be susceptible to FCC regulation without a clear roadmap as to what is or is not permitted or expected," ANA executive Dan Jaffe tells members. He believes the agency’s recently approved net.......
neutrality regulations signal it intends to be an "extremely active player" in how messages are sent to consumers online. The lines of the advertising road have largely been drawn by the Federal Trade Commission in the past, when it looked at unfairness and ad deception complaints. But Jaffe thinks the FTC and FCC will increasingly work in tandem to regulate media and marketers and there is no clear roadmap as to what is permitted. "The exact lines of demarcation between the two agencies are very unclear at this point [so] marketers must be vigilant in keeping track of what is being done at the FCC," he warns. Jaffe thinks it’s possible the FCC may preempt the FTC and marketers may eventually find themselves "under very different regulatory standards." His comments follow an appearance last week by commissioner Michael O’Rielly at an ANA conference warning that several advertising issues now "closely intersect" with the activities at the FCC. "These days that can be a very dangerous thing," he said.

Is PPM technology inherently flawed? The arrival of audio processing gear that makes the PPM more likely to detect embedded audio watermarks raises an important question: Is the PPM system inherently flawed? "If a box can tweak the system, it certainly suggests there’s a problem, and one only the companies with deep pockets can address," says one programmer. While its rocky rollout wasn’t completed until late 2010, Arbitron began developing the PPM 20 years ago and it apparently hasn’t had any significant technology update since. Audio processing, on the other hand, has evolved

considerably. Nielsen declined to comment on Voltair and whether it reveals any PPM shortcomings. A November 2004 trial conducted in the U.K. by RAJAR that tested PPM in a variety of listening environments found the meters identified just 59% of listening sessions in test environments that ranged from "easiest" (normal station volume, low background noise, the wearer stationery) to "hardest" (low station volume, high background noise, the wearer engaged in vigorous activity). Critics (or those without it) say Voltair creates an un-level playing field. It’s unclear what the impact, if any, Nielsen taking a position on Voltair may have on efforts to gain PPM accreditation in more markets from the Media Rating Council. But the bottom line on the coveted box is it may be good for radio. "This technology is showing that there are more people at any given time using radio," says one programmer. "This is good for the whole industry."

 

A Practical Definition Of Programmatic TV

 

• by Joel Melby , March 27, 2015, 1:58 PM

Editor's Note: This post was previously published last August, but is still relevant today:
Programmatic TV advertising has become a hot topic recently, but what does it really mean? The digital advertising players have been developing a programmatic ecosystem for some time, yet they define programmatic in what amounts to a “I’ll know it when I see it” manner. So how might we map such a loosely formed concept to the TV advertising industry?

Why Isn’t TV “Just Like” Online Video?
Before we jump on the programmatic bandwagon, let’s understand how digital and TV advertising fundamentally differ:

Supply vs. Demand
Like any market, advertising follows basic microeconomic principles. In the case of digital ads, the supply of advertising opportunities is essentially unlimited. Even with $50 billion in play, the demand for those opportunities is still bounded; publishers are always looking for buyers, and buyers can typically expect to find whatever audiences they need. TV on the other hand, is a seller’s market, with buyers looking for future commitments and deals amongst its relatively fixed supply of inventory.

Addressability
Traditionally, TV content has been delivered via broadcast, making it impossible to exclusively target or address a specific set of viewers – today, the majority of TV impressions are still delivered this way. Instead of the highly specific impression-level targeting possible with digital advertising, TV audiences are usually indirectly addressed as blocks of impressions, using specific programs or networks as proxies for the actual audiences.
Increasingly, distributors/operators are deploying technologies that allow household targeting within broadcast and on-demand programming, but the scale of impressions available through these mechanisms is still relatively small.
And because of the nature of the technologies and the television ecosystem, TV impressions are difficult to compare with digital impressions.

Measurement Mechanisms
In the digital ecosystem, impressions are measured primarily by tracking pixels fired by each user’s browser or app at the time of delivery. On the other hand, TV audience measurement is tied up in a thicket of legacy business constraints, Congress-mandated privacy restrictions, and technological limitations. As a result, audience size and composition is statistically derived for blocks of impressions at the national and market-level from sampled tuning data, typically provided days after the impressions occurred.

Lead and Lag Times
Programmatic digital advertising is a nearly instant kind of business; load your campaign into Demand-Side Platform (DSP) of your choice, upload the creative to the Content Delivery Network (CDN) of your choice, and wait for comScore or Nielsen to tell you how you’re doing.
Not so for television. The majority of TV impressions are bought months in advance, and every supplier requires a traffic lead time (from hours to days in advance). TV creatives generally must be approved before airing. Occasionally, some measurement data can be made available overnight, but final reporting won’t be available until two or three weeks after airing.

What Is Programmatic TV?
Given these fundamental differences between the TV and digital worlds, programmatic television advertising requires a different definition. For programmatic TV, the definition needs to be pared down. It is the automation of data-driven, audience-based advertising transactions.
When we say automation, this refers to the automation of the end-to-end (advertiser to supplier), round-trip (media planning through affidavit and invoice), transactional workflow. Inventory selection is driven by quantitative data and audience targeting goals, rather than by qualitative spot buying.

You’ll note that the definition above does not use words like “real-time bidding” or “auction.” These are semantics that can be layered on top of programmatic transactions, not the essential ingredients. Auctions are just one means of buyers and sellers agreeing on a price; just as in digital advertising, such pricing also can be fixed via separate negotiations. Likewise, these transactions can be done in real-time or on a reserved/futures basis — to be clear, it is unlikely that any TV advertising will be transacted in real-time due to technological and business reasons.

Where Are We Headed?
TV advertising systems are complicated, balkanized, and extremely busy running a $70 billion business. We won’t get to a true programmatic ecosystem overnight. Instead, we see a staged slither-crawl-walk-run transition playing out over the next several years. The goal of this process will be collaboration within the industry to create standards and increase the chance of success for all players. There will be slow adopters, who fear devaluating their hit show inventory, for example; but over time, we hope the simplicity of automation, plus the immediacy of data, will prevail in uniting the supply-side and demand-side economics of TV.

Buyers and suppliers have been electronically distributing insertion orders and invoices for some time (a precursor to programmatic), but it’s only now that the various ecosystem players have started the arduous process of building workflow automation and developing the predictive audience models needed to translate between buyers’ audience goals and supplier avail inventory. That process must include the adoption of an industry standard suite of application programming interfaces (APIs) that allows buyers’ and sellers’ systems to interact.

TV Binge Viewing Is The New Normal Among Hispanic Consumers

 

• by Mario Carrasco, March 26, 2015, 10:00 AM

This past winter was brutal. With cities like Boston buried under 108 inches of record-breaking snowfall and a couple cold snaps still to come, what better way to past the time then catching up on the latest season of your favorite TV show. And the timing couldn’t be better.

 

We are now in one of the most prolific content years for major streaming services. Amazon, for example, recently picked up two Golden Globes for “Transparent” and Netflix just released the third season of the hit show “House of Cards.” 

 

And while we may have cringed at the addition of yet another buzzword, turns out “binge viewing” really does exist and now describes how many Americans consume TV. 

Taking a closer look at those viewers, you’ll find that one of the earliest adopters of the binge-viewing phenomenon has been U.S. Hispanics. 

 

The New Normal?

Perhaps, but it really depends on what age group you’re looking at. Recent studies show that on average, binge viewing is clearly becoming the preferred method for watching TV shows compared to traditional methods.  

 

The driving force? Millennials. The coveted 18 - 34-year-old segment is leading the charge. When Hispanics 18+ were asked how they preferred to watch their favorite show, 40% said “three or more episodes back to back.”  

 

But when you look exclusively at 18 - 34 year olds, this number climbs to nearly half (48%). This is much higher compared to 35 - 65 year olds who are still more likely to prefer watching their favorite shows when they air on broadcast TV (46%).

 

Hispanics are also more likely to binge view compared to non-Hispanics. The majority of Hispanics reported watching an entire season of a TV show over one weekend compared to about half of non-Hispanics (60% vs. 49%). Again, this is much more common among 18 - 34 year olds (68%).

 

How They Watch

When asked about the way in which they watch TV, less than 40% of 18 - 34 year olds reported watching live TV (the anti-binge viewing method). They were far more likely to watch programming via Netflix, YouTube, Hulu, and others when compared to 35 - 65 year olds.  

 

Who They Watch With

The hallmark of Hispanic culture is a deep “sense of community.” And this sentiment spills over into their binge viewing behavior.

When asked, “When you watch three or more episodes of a TV show back-to-back, are you usually watching TV by yourself or with someone else?” 45% said “with someone else.”

 

Why Does All This Matter?

It’s simple. There is a tug of war going on right now between streaming services and traditional networks.  Binge viewing has become mainstream and the desire to consume shows in rapid succession is becoming increasingly common, particularly among younger viewers. 

Live TV will have to continue to up their game in order to compete with internet TV, which now offers new streaming services like YaVeo and online content like MiTu aimed at Hispanic audiences.  

And networks are doing just that. Since 2013, they have been coming out with strong content aimed at Hispanic and total market audiences such as “Jane the Virgin” and major hits like “Empire” and “Blackish.” 

 

Ultimately, the biggest winners are viewers. They are treated to great content that’s relevant to them on their own terms. Amazon, and other streaming services, are rewarded with more subscribers and market share.  And advertisers? Well, the prize will go those who innovate.

 

"The bottom line says national media consultant Dr. Philip Jay LeNoble, is that local commercials will have a better frequency potential for purchase affect on consumers during 'binge viewership.'

• by Wayne Friedman, March 26, 2015, 4:15 PM

 

Sinclair Broadcast Group, one of the largest U.S. TV station groups, is starting up a new digital division -- Sinclair Digital Ventures. The unit will invest in emerging digital technologies and digital content companies, focusing on companies with products or services that support and expand Sinclair’s digital capabilities and non-linear platform.

The division will be overseen by three Sinclair executives: David Amy, Sinclair’s COO; Chris Ripley, Sinclair’s CFO; and Rob Weisbord, Sinclair Digital Group’s COO.

David Smith, president/chief executive officer of Sinclair Broadcast Group, stated: “We currently have several potential investments in the Digital Ventures pipeline whose emphases are on advancing advertiser reach, enhancing the users’ digital experience, and/or improving our digital content.”
He adds: “Expansion of our digital footprint is integral to our longer-term growth plan, especially as viewing consumption trends evolve.”

Sinclair owns and operates, programs or provides sales services to 162 TV stations in 79 markets. Sinclair's television group reaches approximately 37.5% of U.S. TV homes.
The company says in its 2014 fourth quarter, digital revenue grew 71%. Last year, Sinclair closed major TV station acquisitions including outlets from Allbritton Communications.

ESPN To Launch TV DMP: Will Enable Brands To Target Audiences, Not Ratings

by Tyler Loechner @mp_tyler, Joe Mandese @mp_joemandese,

  March 26, 2015, 9:36 AM

	This window will close after 1 seconds.                        Close [X]

 

PHOENIX -- In an important milestone for the burgeoning programmatic TV marketplace, ESPN will become the first major television network to provide a proprietary data management platform (DMP) enabling advertisers and agencies to plan and buy its programming based not on traditional sample-based TV ratings, but in a way that is akin to how agencies and trading desks buy audiences online.

 

Speaking on a panel Wednesday morning at MediaPost’s Programmatic Insider Summit here, ESPN Vice President of Digital and Publishing Sales Zachary Chapman said ESPN will officially unveil the DMP within the next three weeks, and that it would be introduced in phases, with the first one being “figuring out how to integrate with any set-top data out there.”

 

This is significant because the data from TV set-top devices serves the equivalent role that data from a user’s browser plays in Web, social and mobile audience targeting, and is the integral building block to append all other data -- so-called “first-” and “third-party” data -- about the user.

 

ESPN’s move comes as the role of data platforms is gaining interest in the TV business. Recently, TV ratings giant Nielsen acquired one of the last significant independent digital DMPs, eXelate, for $200 million -- and is in the process of figuring out how to integrate it with its online, TV and so-called cross-platform audience data. Some observers saw Nielsen’s move into the DMP space as a logical line extension, while others deemed it a hedge for a day when advertisers and agencies might abandon sample-based ratings in favor of data on empirical user behavior.

 

A number of companies have been effectively serving as DMP proxies for targeting TV audiences on a similar basis -- most notably Simulmedia, which uses data and technology to make an arbitrage market out of buying undervalued TV inventory, enhancing it with audience data and reselling it to advertisers looking to reach those audiences.

 

Other TV inventory middlemen, including Visible World’s AudienceXpress have been developing proprietary DMPs in an effort to enhance the audience value of unsold local cable inventory that it repackages into so-called unwired network buys for national advertisers.

 

But the move by ESPN, arguably one of the most valuable and desirable suppliers of TV and digital audiences to Madison Avenue, is the most aggressive move yet by a direct programmer.

One big question for ESPN is why advertisers and agencies should trust the data it generates via its proprietary DMP when its goal is to find better ways of generating revenue from its audiences. In the digital world, DMPs generally operate as independent, neutral players between the so-called “demand-side” (advertisers, agencies and trading desks) and the “supply-side” (publishers, ad networks and exchanges).

 

“I don’t know why anyone would trust us,” acknowledged ESPN’s Chapman during the question-and-answer session that followed his panel, adding a rhetorical answer: “Why does anyone trust Facebook? Why does anyone trust Google? They trust them because they created a marketplace.”

Chapman added that ESPN hopes to create a “level of transparency” with its DMP, then give advertisers the confidence to rely on its data to target consumers more effectively. He said ESPN’s goal is to create a “clean, well-lit environment” where both the buy- and the sell-side can look at the value of the audiences that ESPN delivers in new and presumably more valuable ways.

 

He gave an example of ESPN inventory that currently might be undervalued -- spots running in the wee hours of the morning that would normally be sold as “remnant” time to direct-response marketers at a fraction of the rate a brand marketer would pay. Chapman’s example was that by using a DMP, ESPN might be able to uncover the fact that instead of being simple insomniacs, the audience is actually a group of young men with the munchies looking to order a pizza.

 

“Why is that a DR play?,” he asked the summit attendees, adding: “Four guys sitting around a room wanting to order a pizza?” He said it was actually the “ultimate Dominoes audience,” and that the pizza marketer should look at that inventory as being some of ESPN’s most valuable.

ESPN has already been a leader in the fledgling programmatic TV industry, and the DMP rollout seems to be the next logical extension for it to leverage the value of its audiences in a more sophisticated way that is consistent with the way the digital programmatic marketplace works.

The sports network made waves earlier this year in the data-driven TV targeting space when it ran a programmatically sold ad during "SportsCenter," the network's flagship show.

The Power of Radio: ‘souper’ results for fast casual restaurant chain.

INSIDERADIO
March 30, 2015


The parent company of the Souplantation and Sweet Tomatoes restaurant chains is on the air with a fresh ad campaign and a new voice. Patrick Warburton, former star of "Seinfeld" and "Rules of Engagement," is voicing the spots that are now airing in the Los Angeles, Orange County, Inland Empire and San Diego markets. In a spot entitled "Once Upon a Tomato," he tells a tale of the brief life and "sacrificial death" of a fresh tomato. In his signature distinctive deep voice, the ad ends, "If a chopped up, pureed and simmered Tomato could smile — he would." Up next: broccoli is the star. The root (pun intended) of the ads are the longtime friendship of Garden Fresh Restaurant Corp.’s new CEO John Morberg and Warburton, who were classmates in elementary school.

So far, Souplantation/Sweet Tomatoes says in the markets where the spots have run, sales have risen nearly 5%. San Diego-based Garden Fresh operates 128 restaurants in 15 states.

Midwest department store shifts dollars to radio. The Middle America department store chain Gordmans Stores is the latest retailer to say it is shifting dollars out of print as it weans itself from Sunday circular inserts. CEO Andy Hall told investors last week the retailer has just hired a new advertising agency and, as a result, won’t spend as much on newspaper space. Instead, he said it will shift dollars to radio and television. Print will still be on the buy, but to a lesser degree. "We probably won’t kickoff a new campaign until midyear, but I think that’s an exciting opportunity for us," he said on a conference call. Gordmans has 99 locations in 22 states, with plans to open six more this year while exiting the Chicago market. Hall said the new ad agency has begun doing research and interviewing customers as it fine-tunes the marketing strategy. One decision that has already been made is to put more focus on what Hall said are "specific natural shopping periods" for a department store, such as Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, and back-to-school. But at the same time it will continue marketing through the year. "Our everyday value price is the cornerstone of our business model," Hall said. "And I think we got a little astray from that model in the past and I think we will get back on board this year."