I recently attended Advertising Week in New York City and had a lot to hear from some very eloquent speakers. Here are the top 10 moments that I found to be inspiring, provocative or at least original.

(10) Changing Roles: It seemed to me that change was a prevalent theme at the conference and that all participants expressed a willingness to reconsider what roles their companies should be playing.

• Given the freedom of digital distribution, marketers are beginning to produce their own content.
• Given commercial skipping and other market pressures, media companies are beginning to integrate marketing messages into their programming.
• Given the economic demands and their talented personnel, agencies are beginning to develop their own products or services, similar to “private labels” at department stores.

Everywhere the status quo is being questioned and resources are being redirected. Still, the norm is established for a reason and as Rob Norman CEO of GroupM put it, agencies exist for the creation, distribution and measurement of brands and messages across various media, and it seems to me that this is value that marketers will need for some time to come.

(9) Ad Spending: Subsequently, despite the economic downturn and cuts in certain media overall ad spending can still be expected to grow roughly along with the GDP at 1 to 2% per year. Ad spending will fragment however among more media platforms and channels, and this increased competition will yield a greater “purchasing power” for advertisers; a “bigger bang for their buck” in other words.

Continue reading Top 10 Moments at Advertising Week

For the past few years the home video industry has been undergoing some traumatic changes. Although there was an almost seamless transition from the VHS to the DVD format, the shift to a high definition disc format has been stifled as a result of the format battle between HD and Blue-Ray. It’s also possible that consumers haven’t been convinced by a high-definition format will bring significant new benefits. In any case, it seems that the overall market has several challenges ahead.

Continue reading Redbox Rising

NOTE: This posting has been updated with the slightly higher final ratings results for the premiere show of The Jay Leno Show.

After a long wait and even more publicity The Jay Leno Show premiered last night, attracting a considerable audience of 18.42 million viewers and  nabbing a respectable 5.3 rating in the 18-49 demographic. Of course the question remains about how the show will perform in the long term.

The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien had a premiere night audience of 7.1 million viewers. The premiere week average was 6.1 million and the season-to-date average for Conan’s two month tenure is around 1.2 million (60.6% less than the premiere night). Based on these relative drop-offs The Jay Leno Show can be expected to averaging just over 7 million viewers within two months.

Continue reading Predicting Jay Leno’s Success

Last week Nielsen released the most recent version of its Three Screen Report, which measures consumption of television, internet and mobile media. As in releases since 2007 the study demonstrates television’s dominance in terms of time spent with the medium. On average a consumer will watch 278 minutes (4.6 hours) of “traditional” (non time-shifted) television per day.

Continue reading TV’s Steady Appeal

Last week Nielsen announced the number of Hispanic TV households had increased by 2.3% to a current total of 12.95 million. Among the top 10 Designated Market Areas (DMAs) the average growth was 1.7%. The big standout was the Dallas-Fort Worth market (#5 Hispanic  and overall DMA) which grew an incredible 3.7% to 506,020 households.

Continue reading Hispanic Households outgrow overall market

The summer ended today and it seems to have been a mediocre season for Hollywood. The total U.S. box office gross between Memorial Day and Labor Day was $4.3 billion, which is 1.4% less than 2008 but 4% above 2007 per Variety. At the beginning of the summer the box office was 24% above last year but it now stands less than a third.

Continue reading Hollywood’s Lackluster Summer

Following yesterday’s post regarding the rising in the overall online video market I wanted to focus today on individual site performance. However, I ran into a small problem regarding information availability. Usually online video press releases just delve into unique users or total video streams. These dimensions can be attractive for their simplicity but they don’t paint the whole picture.

To truly see how much video activity a site is attracting, three dimensions have to combined:

1. Amount of unique viewers
2. Amount of streams viewed
3. Video time being viewed (per stream or per viewer)

Continue reading Sizing the Online Video Market

Perhaps owing to similar reasons that have led to a strong summer for cable network ratings, according to both Nielsen Online and comScore new highs have recently been set in the online video market. According to Nielsen, a record audience of almost 136 million viewers watched video online during the month of July, up 14.2% year-over-year. ComScore measured a larger audience of 158.4 million viewers for the month of July, an increase of 11.8 % over comScore’s measurement in May 2008.

Continue reading Different views of the Online Video Market

Back in May I published a post, Fall 2009 TV Lineup, which showed the new Fall lineups for ABC, CBS, Fox and the CW. During the past week the post has risen in popularity since the new Fall season is just around the corner. It actually begins this Saturday with the season start for Saturday Night Football on ABC, and then continues on Tuesday with the CW’s premieres of 90210 and Melrose Place.

Instead of writing out a long, tedious list of the shows’ premiere dates I’ve decided to publish an online calendar with all the information.

This calendar is an iCalendar Calendar Data file (.ics)  and can be easily subscribed to, turned off and managed in iCalendar, Google Calendar or Outlook. Here is the link to subscribe to:

http://betweenthescreens.com/calendars/Fall_2009_TV.ics

The calendar is currently updated with all the series debuts and season premieres for the five broadcast networks I mentioned before. The biggest clashes seems to be occurring during the third week of September when 33 new or returning shows will premiere during the span of five days.

I will be adding more networks in the near future; all updates will automatically be sent to subscribed users.

Today it was confirmed that Apple will be hosting an event on September 9 in San Francisco. The wording and design of the invitation indicate that the event will focus on music, most likely the iPod line and iTunes.

Last year’s invite clearly showed a thin iPod, hinting at the return to the “narrow form factor” in the fourth generation Nano, which was indeed presented at this event. The rumored announcements for this year’s event include:

• The Beatles library will be added to iTunes Store. This has been widely speculated since The Beatles remastered catalog is being released the the same day, but the event’s invitation mimics a song from The Rolling Stones; could this be a smokescreen?
• There will be adjustments to the iPod product line including an video camera functionality to the iTouch. Capacity upgrades are expected as always.
• Similarly, there will be price adjustments across the lineup.
• Finally, iTunes version 9.0 will be introduced. It may include new music bundling options and social features. A less likely subscription music service has also been rumored.

Continue reading Apple’s September Event, and Beyond