Cable TV boosts ad sales and gets serious about interactive advertising

Good news from Cablevision last week with COO Tom Rutledge talking about an increase in advertising revenues for the quarter.  His comments pointed to an uplift in the economy and the introduction of interactive advertising into the revenue mix.   The company said Tuesday that ad revenue rose by 18 percent in the third quarter from a year ago, with strength seen in its cable networks AMC, IFC and WE tv.

Its new interactive ads, where viewers use their remote to order free product samples, coupons and others from advertisers, are doing well. Cablevision said a two-week Gillette ad campaign offering a free sample ran out of freebies after the first week.

The key message I took away from the announcement was his comment relating to interactive advertising pricing, “the interesting thing about what we have from a technological perspective is that we can actually determine the effectiveness of advertising and price it accordingly.”

Wow cable is really coming into the digital and interactive arena!

Google – from science to creative

A recent WSJ article by Jessica Vascellaro highlights a major shift for Google from the science of search into creative for online ads and new tools for advertisers.

Big advertisers such as Hewlett Packard and Ford Motor Co along with JC Penney and PepsiCo are all actively working with Google on new online ad initiatives.  David Roman, a marketing vice president for H-P’s personal systems group, says Google recently helped it with a new Internet ad campaign.  As part of the campaign, Google engineers built a tool that allowed people to upload and edit their own video clips.  Mr. Roman declined to comment on the cost of H-P’s ad campaign, but says it was the most the personal systems group has spent with Google on a campaign. H-P shelled out nearly $58 million on Internet display ads in the U.S. in 2008, according to TNS Media Intelligence.

With the acquisitions of YouTube and DoubleClick, Google has huge space for non-search ads and it looks like Google is installing a team that can develop and run campaigns working directly with the client or via their agencies.

Accenture enters the digital marketing world

Accenture announced their Intelligent Digital Platform offering which includes the technical infrastructure (hardware, software, support) and the design and development services needed to create a fully outsourced web marketing operation.  P&G has decided to work with Accenture.  The latter two sentences put all agencies on notice.  If marketing cannot handle technology – technology will handle marketing.  We saw it with Google – who would have thought no creative and search would have such an impact on the world of advertising.  Now we are seeing major players like Accenture and Deloitte getting into marketing services under the banner of digital.  Time to stop paying lip service to new media and rolling up our marketing sleeves to make technology and creative and analytics work as a team!

Consumers warm to interactive TV

A new Ernst & Young report says that consumers like the concept of widgets (mini-applications docked at the bottom or side of the TV screen) and web-enabled TVs.  A Diffusion Group survey found 76% of consumers believe having a widget dock on their primary TV set would be valuable.  The main reason for the widget was to find specific TV content (a feature that has been available on DVRs for some time) and content that is no longer readily available.  There are some business model challenges to contend with here.  The widget could potentially be running competitive ads at the same time as the live TV program but I believe some decent scheduling software would address these concerns.  Samsung, LG and Sony have all started building TV sets with Yahoo’s widget software already installed.

Verizon working with Ad Council to deploy cross-platform advertising

Congratulations to John Harrobin at Verizon for taking the initiative to approach the Ad Council.  The two organizations have worked together to expand the reach of a public service message to teens.  The informational campaign is running across FiOS TV, Verizon mobile and FiOS Internet.  At last we are actually seeing some innovative thinking and pushing the envelope!  I am looking forward to hearing the results and challenges if Verizon and the Ad Council choose to share them.

Cable is moving in interactive – are there paddles in Canoe?

Cablevision announced cautious roll out of interactive services in New York area and Comcast is dipping its feet in the water in Chicago. Time Warner has several initiatives and then there is Canoe. The latest news on Canoe Ventures is an alliance with a graduate advertising program. While this is forward thinking and a way to nurture new applications and innovations, will Canoe start to take a lead on new interactive applications or be a lumbering body that plays catch-up as the industry forges ahead?

TV explores new interactive applications

Saul Hansell in the New York Times discusses the new approaches TV is making into the interactive age. DirecTV and Fios have both announced app stores modeled on Apple’s App Store. Pilots proved out that the user wants to interact at certain times when in front of the TV – so its not totally lean back, lean forward…. right! Now we have the potential for real traction in interactive with the cable companies backing a standard to enable applications nationally and the telcos launching TV services. The key challenges are still – what does the user want and how do we make money from new applications? It looks like revenue share is up for grabs again and both sides on slowly moving into interaction. 2010 – the year the TV goes interactive? comments welcome.

Let the games begin – cable start charging for web content

Time Warner and Comcast – two industry cable giants have announced an ambitious pilot program to charge subscribers for viewing TV content on the web.  Not sure where this leaves the Hulu business model – maybe it becomes a primer and short form video place to visit.  The words walled garden creep into mind again with cable looking to keep control of its subscribers wherever they view programming.  Looking forward to watching this space emerge.

Interactive Ads are coming….

Recent announcements by MySpace and and Socialmedia.com on collaboration to make ads more personalized to the user as well as the Tremor Media  in-stream interactive ad formats announcement seem to be showing progress from basic re-purposing of old ad formats into something new and meaningful for the Internet age.  Heavy hitters like Procter & Gamble, Universal Pictures and Microsoft evidently all participated in the beta test of the new formats.  The new formats showed triple digit increases in video completion rates, time spent and click-through rates.  This all sounds very exciting but Real Time Content already has a system that can perform these sorts of functions on the fly and be more highly personalized.  My experience with templates and ad formats was that they were only good at to start with and then (like windows) you wanted to break out of the formats and do more exciting creative.  Comments welcomed

Online video grew at 24% and Forrester forecasts 11% growth in interactive marketing in 2009

Hulu is growing at a phenomenal rate but is still only 4% of the online video  marketplace.  The biggest site, YouTube, owns over 58% of the market and continues to grow at 36% but the comapny is still trying to work out the business model.  Overall online video usage grew by 24% to an average 9.5 billion streams a month with 35 to 49 year olds watching the most video online every month.

The latest Forrester research reported an 11% growth in interactive marketing for 2009 taking the spending to $25.6 billion.  Interactive marketing includes search, email, social media and mobile marketing dollars and although mobile shows some 70% growth, the size of mobile advertising is still very small – forecast to reach only $391 million this year (and this is larger than some other leading research companies have forecast).   The interactive marketing growth was seen as a result of marketers seeking lower cost and more accountable channels.