By Dan HirschhornAdvertising AgeWith the basketball lockout dragging into Thanksgiving and even a partial season increasingly in doubt, networks that don’t carry the NBA are trying to poach advertisers from networks that normally do.Their sales pitches are focusing on sports programming and other entertainment options that cater to young men, according to interviews with multiple industry insiders, as well as integrated digital and social-media marketing opportunities that networks are painting as very much on the rise."I have three young male brands that can be a great alternative to the NBA," said Jeff Lucas, head of sales for Viacom Media Networks Music and Entertainment Group, confirming that his sales team is pitching NBA advertisers. "Business has to go on. Advertisers have to sell product. They can’t just sit on the sidelines and wait."Viacom has already "seen some ad dollars flow our way," Mr. Lucas said, though he wouldn’t name specific marketers making the jump."Every sales team on the street has an NBA alternative plan they’re pitching to advertisers," said Jeff Siegel, senior VP for global media sales at digital technology company Rovi and a former sales executive at ESPN. "I think people were holding on to money in the hope that the season would be saved. But people are more pessimistic now, and you’ll start hearing more about money shifting because people have to make plans."The lowest-hanging fruit for would-be poachers: brands that specifically need sports ratings points to market new product launches. Adidas, for example, had been slated to air an ad during NBA games of Chicago Bulls star Derrick Rose evading bull fighters for the launch of its new adiZero Rose 2 shoe. But with the NBA off the air, Adidas moved that money to pro football broadcasts, according to people familiar with the shift.Whether the poaching efforts resonate with marketers, however, remains to be seen. ESPN, which said it’s working closely with advertisers and is "prepared to re-express dollars currently committed to the NBA to other properties," is protected by a deep menu of sports programming options. Turner, whose TNT network airs NBA games, said it’s moving ad dollars to platforms like TBS and Adult Swim, and will be bolstered by its share of NCAA men’s college basketball tournament games in March.But missing the start of an NBA season is one thing. NBA advertising dollars are heavily backloaded toward the second half of the season and the playoffs, so if the lockout stretches past into next year, holding on to that money will become a taller order."To date [ESPN and Turner] have been fairly successful in maintaining some of the spend level they would have had in NBA programming," said Bryce Townsend, CEO of Group M ESP, Group M’s entertainment and sports marketing arm. "For both ESPN and Turner, as we get later into this year and into next year, it definitely becomes more challenging. You have brands that will exercise options to pull back their commitments."Among the most likely successful poachers could be CBS, Fox and its portfolio of sports programming, NBC and its soon-to-be relaunched sports network, and Viacom Media Networks Music and Entertainment Group, which includes Spike TV, Comedy Central and MTV2.By no means are the bottom lines of either network in peril yet, and there’s no indication of an impending mass exodus of NBA advertisers. But the sales pitches are sure to continue and intensify as time goes on."They know there are ad dollars in play," said a top sports marketing executive who used to work with the NBA. "Right now, it’s a buyers’ market. The other networks have to be creative in how they’re trying to provide opportunities to swing advertisers in their direction. Keep in mind that a lot of this is about trying to reach a male demographic, and there’s a significant amount of content that’s no longer available."It makes the scatter marketplace more robust, because you’ve got a billion dollars of inventory now floating around," this executive added. The "scatter" market is where marketers buy ad time close to air date, as opposed to the annual "upfront" market where they make commitments ahead of time.Christmas Day, when the NBA usually airs a full slate of big matchups on national TV, could become a turning point for advertisers and networks if it passes with no basketball, according to Mr. Townsend. "That would be a big loss," he said.
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By Brian SteinbergAdvertising AgeOnce content simply to run 30- and 60-second commercials alongside your favorite TV programs, marketers have long since realized they need to develop a few new weapons for their arsenal. Product placement, which has become the tactic of choice in recent years, is fast becoming passe. The fear is that the placements show up for just seconds during a program and can easily be washed away by a glut of other action, including regular commercials, or even just dialogue and plot.One solution? Playing with bugs.Yes, "bugs," those TV-network logos that rest quietly in one of the bottom corners of the boob tube, are becoming ripe for promoting more than just the CW logo or the CBS "eye."This season, both the CW and Fox have allowed sponsors to post messages around and even in their logos. On Fox, DirecTV has informed viewers during the first few seconds of dinosaur-drama "Terra Nova" through a display in the bottom right corner of the screen that the company helps to bring the program to viewers in "Fox High Def" (no telling whether a current squabble between News Corp. and DirecTV has affected the strategy). The CW, meanwhile, allowed Microsoft to physically take over its logo, letting the company tell CW viewers that CW TV shows were something to "Bing About," a play on CW’s usual "TV To Talk About" and "TV To Text About" sloganeering.Time Warner’s Turner cable unit has put some of this kind of stuff in place at its entertainment networks, and CBS, according to a person familiar with the situation, has been approached by advertisers in the past but has as of yet not allowed such marketing on the network.Rising interest in the smallest corners of TV-screen real estate suggests advertisers believe viewers are growing even more resistant to their normal commercials. "There are advertisers who are concerned about losing ratings to growing DVR playback and who want the networks to provide reach that cannot by skipped ," said Christopher Vollmer, partner and leader-global media and entertainment at Booz & Co. "There is no doubt advertisers and their agencies are pushing for more innovation — and as there is a continued shift of budgets from print and other media to TV and digital, the TV networks do want to take as much share of spending as they can."Broadcast networks would likely never have embraced such stuff a decade or more ago, but their stance on keeping the TV screen relatively uncluttered during program segments appears to be crumbling. Tech-savvy viewers are more accustomed to seeing multiple on-screen elements on digital tablets, smartphones and computer screens, and may be more tolerant of such intrusions on TV. And the networks may have to be more flexible as their ratings power is siphoned away by the availability of their most popular programs on other devices."Not all the networks are willing to do it," said Brent Poer, exec VP-managing director at Publicis Groupe’ MediaVest, which helped orchestrate the Bing-CW pairing. Even so, he thinks more will embrace the ideas over time. "A lot of this speaks to audience fragmentation and ratings declines. When you don’t have the [ratings] inventory typically available for some of these partnerships, what you’ve got to do is say, "What do we have?’" The answer may come in the form of allowing ad messages in different parts of the network’s broadcast.At the CW, executives have begun to sense a desire from marketers to do more than simple product integrations. "There is a lot of momentum in developing opportunities that run outside of the show," said Alison Tarrant, exec VP-integrated sales and marketing at the CW, in a September interview. Rather than "just run one time in the body of the show," knitting an ad into the very fabric of a particular network can have a longer shelf life than a sneaker or phone that shows up in a character’s hands for a few seconds. For one thing, the TV "bugs" stay on screen the entire time a piece of content is on air.Indeed, executives at Bing were keen to avoid relying on a method that may be in danger of overuse. "Integrations today have basically started to become like commercials were five or 10 years ago," said Sean Carver, a director of marketing at Bing, in a September interview. "It is more difficult to catch people’s attention" using them.TV networks aren’t likely to make their bugs available without a substantial ad buy already in place. Bing had signed up for an extensive package that included the CW producing individual videos featuring actors and behind-the-scenes talent from its prime-time lineup to air during commercial breaks.DirecTV’s placement in Fox’s "Terra Nova" comes as a result of a broader arrangement between the two companies, according to a person familiar with the situation, and DirecTV has enjoyed similar placements in prime time and sports programming for some time. DirecTV spokesman Robert Mercer said via email that the company’s shout-out in the lower right-hand corner during the opening moments of "Terra Nova" came about as "one of the benefits due to our good relationship with Fox." Fox could not make executives available for comment.
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By Brian SteinbergAdvertising AgeCBS Corp.’s flagship network has completed upfront negotiations, securing an estimated .5 billion to .75 billion in ad commitments for the new fall season, according to a person familiar with negotiations.CBS sold approximately 80% of its inventory during the upfront, this person suggested, in line with how rival networks have managed their ad time in this year’s bargaining session, during which the nation’s TV networks sell the bulk of their ad time for the coming TV season.According to ad buyers and other people familiar with the network’s negotiations, CBS was securing deals that called for an increase in the cost of reaching 1,000 viewers, or a CPM, in the range of 13% to 15%.CBS pressed for more substantial price hikes than other networks this year, even though many ad buyers felt News Corp.’s Fox, which enjoys the highest ratings among viewers aged 18 to 49 — a demographic coveted by advertisers — set the tone of the market by opting for a smaller percentage increase. The network has touted its status as the nation’s most broadly watched TV network as well as the relative stability of its prime-time lineup.
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In this very insightful piece by Michael Learmonth, the Digital Editor at our sibling publication, Advertising Age, we learn the very real business reason that the networks are blocking Goggle TV. A must-read.By Michael LearmonthAdvertising AgeThe Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, Oct. 22, 2010, that the nation’s big broadcast networks are blocking Google TV, triggering quite a bit of speculation over why this might be the case.These are the same networks, after all, distributing shows on the web and through distributors like Hulu, right? Google is not, as Searchengineland pointed out, "knocking down firewalls, eating small children nor sacrificing animals." They’re not stripping out the ads, after all, just packaging shows — which are already being made available online — in Google’s handy TV interface.But that’s the problem. The networks aren’t blocking Google TV because it’s Google.They are blocking Google TV because it is putting a web TV show, with web TV show economics, on a TV, which would be incredibly disruptive to their business. The reason the networks are blocking Google TV and Boxee (and Hulu is still PC-only) is about ad revenue: they don’t get enough of it from the web. And letting you watch "Glee" on your TV, but via the web and Google TV, means substituting high broadcast revenue for lower digital revenue.Let me explain: today all the broadcast networks and a good many cable networks distribute shows and clips on the web. Those shows and clips have a fraction of the advertising that they would have on television. Until recently, a typical hour-long show on Hulu would have two minutes of advertising, compared to 12 to 14 minutes on TV.While all the networks would like to raise that to parity, there are not enough advertisers willing to pay for the comparatively small web audiences and the networks are wary of turning off viewers who can easily click away.Right now the web allows the networks to make those ads unskippable, but once they become a burden, and the free content-for-ads trade-off goes out of balance, ad-skipping software will proliferate.Ultimately, the networks would like to either normalize the number of ads on the web and TV or increase the revenue per viewer-minute on the web through new, targeted or interactive ads. So far, networks like ABC, CBS and The CW have been increasing ad loads slowly, as the market and viewers will support it. Nielsen and others have systems in the works where the networks could measure or sell audiences across both TV and the web — if the ad loads were the same. Once there is parity on the revenue per viewer per minute, then you will see web shows on Google TV or Boxee, and Hulu on your TV set.Until then, though, the networks will do everything in their power to keep TV shows distributed on the web on PCs and TV shows sold for TV on the big screen. No conspiracy of old media to stop technology or thwart user choice here; it’s a rational business strategy, pure and simple.#
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