Archive for June 6th, 2008

ynthia Sexton, former senior VP, strategic marketing and licensing for EMI Music
North America, has been upped to executive VP, global brand partnership, licensing, synchronization for EMI Music, a newly created position.

Sexton, who will continue to be based in Los Angeles, will report to Ronn Werre, president, EMI Music Commercial Development.

The promotion, effective immediately, means that Sexton will add worldwide responsibility for licensing of EMI content to film, TV and branded entertainment efforts to her current duties.

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Online television network Revision3 has picked up the popular Web series “Epic Fu” in a licensing and distribution partnership that begins Thursday. Under the deal, the pop culture show will air twice a week across Revision3’s distribution partners.

The deal is significant because it’s one of the most high-profile examples to date in the Web video business of a show jumping from one online network to another. That move mirrors the on-air TV business when shows switch networks, such as “Project Runway” moving from Bravo to Lifetime, or “Scrubs” shifting from NBC to ABC.

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Buoyed by a TV marketplace that has more advertiser dollars in play than many had predicted, The CW network is expected to finish its upfront negotiations garnering cost-per-thousand increases of an average 8 percent, and take in the same ratio of total prime-time dollars as it did last year if Sunday night, which it no longer programs, is factored out.

Sources familiar with The CW negotiations estimate that the network, which is expected to complete its upfront deals by Friday night (June 6), will take in about $370 million for its 10 hours of weekly prime-time programming, compared to $570 million last year for 15 hours.

The CW recently announced it was giving up its Sunday night programming block to Media Rights Capital, eliminating one-third of the network’s weekly prime time programming. The CW had programmed its Sunday nights nationally from 5-10 p.m.

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Move over, UPS. Big Brown, the horse that is favored to win the Belmont Stakes on Saturday and become the first horse in 30 years to win the Triple Crown, now has another sponsor: Hooters of America.

The Atlanta-based restaurant chain, best known for its chicken wings and comely waitresses, confirmed today that it has signed a deal to have its logo—an owl whose eyes are seen in the word Hooters—on the racing silks of jockey Kent Desormeaux. UPS had been Big Brown’s sole sponsor to this point.

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The relationship between the viewer and the network is one that requires a delicate balance. As the numbers for DVR penetration continue to climb, it’s pretty clear that a great many of us are successfully dodging more and more commercial breaks. And the networks continue to push back, trying different things to get eyeballs on ads. Some are merely annoying. For instance, as much as I like both Kyra Sedgwick and The Closer, I’m annoyed every time Brenda walks out of the corner of my screen while I’m watching another show on TNT.

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…Whereas what’s maddening about Living Lohan and Denise Richards: It’s Complicated, two shows launched recently as part of E’s “Summer Funplex,” is that both Mama Bear Dina and farm girl Denise claim they are participating to disprove the tabloids that continue to “trash” them and prove that their lives are, as Richards puts it, “all about family.” And as Dina Lohan says, “I want people to know we’re, like, normal…”

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CBS Outernet, CBS’ growing digital video networks division, announced Thursday a deal to build out a new in-store digital video network to more than 4,000 GameStop retail locations. Rollout of the new network, called GameStop TV, will be completed during 2009.

CBS has adopted an aggressive strategy to build out digital video networks to reach consumers outside the home, including SignStorey, a network in more than 1,300 grocery stores. With GameStop TV, CBS Outernet’s portfolio of digital media networks will grow to more than 5,500 retail locations reaching more than 150 million shoppers.

“This deal gives our national and local advertisers access to the very attractive and hard to reach 18 to 34 male demographic,” said Virginia Cargill, president of CBS Outernet. GameStop has about 73 million monthly shoppers.

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CBS and other players in the online video space are experimenting with a series of new video ad formats, called bugs, tickers and skin. “Skin” ads appear in an image surrounding the video player window and will be the primary ad format for CBS’ latest addition, “The Burly Sports Show”, which is produced by Heavy and will appear on CBSSports.com. “Bugs” are logos that appear in text or graphics on or next to a video, and “tickers” are horizontal bars that usually run at the bottom of a video.

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Since the birth of traditional advertising up until around 10 years ago, just about every venue was historically a passive one: Audiences passively absorbed ads via newspapers, magazines, radios and TV.

As the Internet evolved past its techno-geek beginnings and entered its mass market phase, advertisers and agencies got their first real crack at creating truly interactive ad experiences. For the first time on a major scale, online advertising broke through the interactive barrier with video, audio, games, viral and other features that invited users to actively participate in the ad experience. A quiet revolution began taking place. Audiences of former couch potatoes started leading far more interactive lives online than they ever did in front of their TV sets, and advertisers were offered the potential to create more meaningful ‘dialogues’ with consumers.

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The average TV household receives more channels, but watches about the same number of channels weekly, according to Nielsen’s annual report on TV trends released Friday, June 4.

In 2007 the average U.S. home received 118.6 channels, an all time high, up from 104.2 channels in 2006. The average household tuned-in to 16 or 13 percent of the 118.6 channels at least 10 minutes per week compared to 2006 when the average household tuned-in 15.7 channel, or 15 percent of the receivable channels.
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