Discovery Channel upstaged by murderers, stalkers
If the low ratings at Oprah Winfrey’s OWN weren’t evidence enough of viewer disinterest in programming that inspires, then perhaps the massive ratings growth at Investigation Discovery, a network whose shows are almost exclusively populated by murderers and stalkers, can provide convincing.
Investigation Discovery, the crime-themed cable channel that launched in January 2008, is not just getting better ratings than OWN, it is also doing better than the Discovery Channel itself. Over the last two weeks, ID averaged 275,000 total viewers, or 8,000 more than the 267,000 viewers that Discovery averaged, according to Nielsen. OWN, which launched in January 2011, only averaged 180,000 total daily viewers during the fourth quarter.
Given those ratings, who needs to spend millions on shows like “Planet Earth” when you can just air cheesy non-fiction crime programming like “I (Almost) Got Away With It” and “Who The (Bleep) Did I Marry. Those kind of shows have the fingerprints of ID president Henry Schleiff all over them. After all, Schleiff built Court TV into a cable network powerhouse on the back of similar programming.
According to a report from investment bank Barclays, the momentum behind ID could give parent company Discovery Communications “substantial leverage” when it negotiates new distribution agreements with cable and satellite operators next year. Currently, analysts estimate that ID only earns 8 cent per subscriber in carriage fees while Discovery commands 36 cents per subscriber.
As the flagship network, however, the fact that Discovery Channel is losing steam could spell trouble for its parent company, which is not only seeing poor results from OWN, but also was forced to recently rebrand the struggling environmental focused network “Planet Green” as “Destination America.”
CBS: Get used to growth
CBS put on a big show in yesterday’s quarterly report, blowing out estimates on both profit and revenue. On the call that followed, Sumner Redstone called Les Moonves a “genius,” and Moonves called broadcast TV “the best game in town.”
Here are some notes from last night’s call:
- CBS, which said it would double its dividend, also plans to repurchase $250 million in stock this quarter. A nice bonus for shareholders who have already seen the stock rise by about 35 percent this year.
- Scatter rates, or prices for last-minute commercial buys, are up more than 40 percent in some cases for CBS. That’s a stunning number. Given those sorts of prices, Moonves is talking about “solid” double digit increases in upfront ad market next month.
- CBS is putting together six or seven fewer pilots than normal this year, showing that it’s pretty happy with its schedule right now (So far this season, CBS has declined the least of the big four broadcast networks in total household audience)
- Basically, investors and analysts should get used to these sorts of results, CBS suggested. Moonves said he was “confident” the first quarter’s performance would be “sustainable.”
Super Bowl Monday: The view from armchair copywriters
Ahhh, Super Bowl Monday. The hangovers. The salsa stains on the sofa. The dreams of winning your office betting pool crushed. And the ad reviews. Yes, today is the day when everyone — many with little or no connection to advertising, football or tastemaking — puts out a list of the top Super Bowl commercials. Some are better than others. USA Today’s Super Bowl Ad Meter is probably the best known (and this morning had Bud Light’s Dog Sitter ad ranked tops). But two others that are very good gauges of the winners/losers of the Ad Bowl are TiVo and the Kellogg Super Bowl Advertising Review.
They take very different approaches to rankings. TiVo ranks the most engaging moments “using aggregated, anonymous, second-by-second audience measurement data” while Kellogg goes with the panel approach that asks viewers to grade ads based on “Attention, Distinction, Positioning, Linkage, Amplification and Net equity.”
Three ads/brands were ranked highly by both TiVo and Kellogg:
But there were also some glaring differences in the two polls. For instance, the top spot in Tivo went to Snickers, followed by Best Buy and Pepsi Max. Kellogg gave all three of those middle-of-the-road rankings (Snickers and Best Buy each a received B, while Pepsi Max took a C.
The best Superbowl Ad? Easy, all the ones we did not see during Super Bowl 40 when in Australia in 2006. There were none on Aussie Tellie that I recall on the live feed on a Monday afternoon. So we saw the whole game commercial free except for a few brief station breaks. It was marvelous to See all of the nuances that occur on and off the field De Combat.(Steelers 21, Seahawks 10).
Five marketers who better bring it big on Super Bowl Sunday
Call it the Ad Bowl. Or the Buzz Bowl. Or the BS Bowl. Doesn’t matter, it all boils down to this: Sunday’s Super Bowl is the biggest day of the year for advertisers, some of which dished out $3 million for the chance to reach an audience of 100 million consumers for 30 seconds. At that price — $100,000 a second — the stakes are high. A good commercial can be a triumph, creating just the kind of water-cooler talk that propels a brand to a new level with consumers. A bad commercial? Well, those behind it better start dusting off the old resume.
Still, like anything else, the risks are greater for some more than others. So here is our list of… Five Marketers Who Better Bring It Big On Sunday.
1). General Motors. Almost the entire auto industrycould be included in this one, since Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Hyundai, Kia, Volkswagen and Audi are among those who will help the category account for roughly a quarter of all the commercial time during the game. It’s a turnout that reflects the improving fortunes of the U.S. auto industry, which snapped a four-year sales decline in 2010. GM, however, stands out because of the sheer number of ads it bought, five in all, after a two year absence. Can it strike the right tone with consumers? Can it differentiate its lineup? Will it play it safe — flags waving, trucks pulling 100 million tons of load, some catchy tune from an All-American rocker? Or will it try to liven things up, like Audi and Volkswagen have sought to do? (see below)
2). Groupon. Admit it, you were a little taken aback by reports that Google tried to take over Groupon with a $6 billion bid. “You mean that coupon site? $6 billion?” Since then, Groupon has become a big buzz wordin the world of finance and media. And sure, it’s got 50 million users, so it’s not exactly coming out of nowhere. But the Super Bowl is a heckuva big stage. Can Groupon pull off what would be a huge brand building exercise? Can they take a page fromHulu, which aired a very well-received spot two years ago?
3). Motorola Mobility. The company split in two in January, and since then has already posted disappointing smartphone sales for the fourth quarter and warned that sales would suffer an unusually steep drop in the first quarter. The problem is that Motorola’s biggest customer, Verizon Wireless, is starting to sell an iPhone. And who really wants to compete for shelf space with Apple these days? So now it’s bought a 60-second spot in the Super Bowl to trumpet XOOM, its effort to break into the tablet market. It has even called the ad “Goodbye 1984″ (talk about setting the bar high).
NBC Universal creates new sports marketing agency
It’s no secret that sports has been the brightest star of broadcast television lately. It pulls big audiences, and those viewers watch live — a combination that advertisers drool over. So NBC Universal figured it was high time to make the most of its sports assets — soon to be coupled with those of Comcast – and today announced the creation of “NBC Sports Agency.”
The purpose of the group is to market NBC Sports, whether it’s their coverage of hockey, football, horse racing or the Olympics, and produce campaigns for advertisers or league partners like the NFL or the NHL. John Miller, credited for coming up with the “Must See TV” campaign for NBC’s primetime, will head up the effort. Many industry watchers had predicted that Comcast’s take over of NBC would see a push for more competition for sports rights with Disney’s ESPN powerhouse. Let the battle commence.
Here’s a video of Miller on his new role.
Super Bowl ads: What’s $600 million between friends?
It’s almost time again for the Super Bowl, which means this is when all the talk starts about those famous, and famously expensive, commercials. Just how expensive? Kantar Media came out with a study today that shows Anheuser-Busch InBev, Pepsi, Walt Disney, General Motors, Coca-Cola have combined to spend nearly $600 million on Super Bowl ads over the last 10 years. For those of you bad with numbers, that’s more than half-a-billion dollars. Keep in mind, General Motors wasn’t even part of the game for 2009 or 2010.
This year, however, General Motors is back in a big way – leading a pack of auto makers who, as we pointed out in a story last week, will dominate this year’s game. Up to nine different auto manufacturers are expected to run spots this year. Kantar points out that five years ago only four car companies ran spots. Ten years ago only one car company bought time.
Kantar digs ups a few other interesting tidbits as well. Of course, everyone knows that prices have climbed over the last decade. But the amount of commercials running during the broadcast is also rising. Last year, the CBS broadcast contained a record 47 minutes 50 seconds of commercial time. A total of 104 individual messages aired. Who has time for a football game with all those advertisements?
It’s not just the big boys who are responsible for this ad bonanza. Kantar says that first-time advertisers account for about 20-25 percent of the ad roster. And some of these are relatively small organizations, at least when it comes to ad spending. One-third of Super Bowl advertisers put more than 10 percent of their full-year media budgets into the game.
With that as an appetizer, let the countdown to this year’s game begin.
Relief in Philadelpia? NBCU profit up 13 percent
NBC Universal’s quarterly results — still wrapped into the General Electric numbers — should have some of the folks down in Philadelphia smiling this weekend. The numbers didn’t set the world on fire, but both profit and revenue showed improvement thanks to (what else) the cable division.
Overall, NBCU’s quarterly profit rose 13 percent to $607 million. Revenue climbed 5 percent to $3.75 billion.
Keith Sherin, GE’s finance chief, credited Jeff Zucker with delivering what he called “a strong performance” and said the regulatory review of the sale to Comcast “is progressing as expected.”
A closer look at NBCU’s numbers showed cable revenue rose 7 percent, fueled by USA, Bravo, Oxygen and CNBC, compared to broadcast revenue that was only up by 1 percent (hardly a surprise to Comcast, one would imagine).
“You know, the ratings are down in the summer for all the networks, but we were off to a pretty good start,” Sherin said on a conference call with analysts. “We’ve got the number-one show with ‘America’s Got Talent.’ The development that we have invested in was well received and probably one of the biggest highlights in the quarter was the upfront.”
Oh, and as for Jay Leno — the leading man in a drama that both GE and Comcast would rather forget — Sherin noted his late-night show is once more leading the pack, “so that feels pretty good.”
Here comes Windows Unicorn
Thousands of Microsofties yucked it up at the expense of rival Apple at their annual get-together at Seattle’s Safeco field on Thursday.
Saturday Night Live star Seth Meyers set about the old foe, which had its own festival of self-congratulation yesterday.
“Who at Apple let an 8-year-old girl name their new operating system Snow Leopard?,” Meyers asked, according to one employee spreading the good word on Facebook. “What, was Unicorn taken? Was Pony not available?”
Fair point, perhaps. But what’s this? A preview of the first TV ad for Microsoft’s new Windows 7 operating system, airing on prime time tonight. It features a young girl and a — admittedly kitsch — unicorn.
Couldn’t pay me enough to go back to Windows and its Worms and Viruses…Just put em out to pasture.
Google makes a TV ad
Google built its business on the advertising shift from traditional media, like TV and newspapers, to the Internet.
But as Google strives to jump-start its fledgling Chrome Web browser, the company apparently still sees value in good old-fashioned mediums like broadcast television.
Google said it would begin advertising Chrome on various TV networks beginning this weekend.
The TV spot will raise awareness of its browser, Google explained in a posting on its blog on Friday, “and also help us better understand how television can supplement our other online media campaigns.”
The Chrome browser, which Google released last year, is a distant No.4 among Web browsers with a scant 1.4 percent market share in April, according to Net Applications. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer rules the roost with a 66.1 percent share, followed by the Firefox browser and Apple’s Safari browser, respectively.
The Chrome TV ad, which Google said was made by a team of its employees in Japan, is a whimsical stop-motion-like animation in which the Chrome logo bounces around a box of woodblocks.
The 30-second ad, which has music but no spoken words, finishes with the simple message “Install Google Chrome.”
I didn’t get it. Stick to an ad on http://www.google.com. That I got and installed it.
