Cable Advertising

Comcast will acquire a 51% interest in NBC Universal from General Electric in a deal valued at $30 billion.

As part of the deal, the French media company Vivendi will sell its 20% stake for $5.8 billion, leaving GE with a 49% stake.

This deal creates a massive media giant with assets spanning broadcast, cable advertising, telephone, internet, and movie and television advertising, as well as theme parks. NBC, the network in the middle of it all, will be just a small part of it.

NBCU's cable presence will be much more prominent with the addition of Comcast's Versus, the Golf Channel and E! Entertainment to its portfolio, which includes CNBC, MSNBC, USA, Bravo and SyFy.

However, integrating it all while winning regulatory approval could take well over a year.

What it will mean for media buyers and any full service ad agency is hard to say at this point. The upside for marketing companies is the ability to place clients across a wider range of media outlets. However, such deals are difficult to execute, and media buyers have long turned away from them.

The downside for media buyers is that consolidation typically leads to higher prices.

But Wall Street analysts have favored the deal, believing Comcast is far better suited to run an entertainment company than GE.

Jeff Zucker will remain chief executive of NBCU, reporting to Comcast CEO Steve Burke, but at some point Zucker will likely be replaced. Zucker has survived under GE but his track record as a CEO has not been up to par. He's been widely criticized for managing for the bottom line and blamed in particular for NBC's tumble to 4th place in the ratings.

Presumably an early goal for Comcast will be to invest dollars and talent in making NBC the flagship TV property once again.

In relation to measuring analytics, most cable advertising reps know about audience reach, demographics, and top-line results. Of course, this data is nowhere near as deep as the analytics data from an online advertising campaign. With online, we can know who's responding to our ads, what they're doing on our websites, how much time they spend there, and whether or not they complete a purchase.

But even without that in-depth level of data, most people believe that cable advertising works. But too many cable advertising reps allow themselves to be beaten when it comes to measurement. When compared with the detailed analytics available for online ads, television advertising can be somewhat sketchy. However, that only makes it far from being useless.

Television advertising (and offline tracking in general) can provide much greater insight than most people think. Understanding this can help make cable advertising measurement almost as precise as online advertising measurement.

Gathering data, and making decisions based on that data, requires a system that can take into account imperfect, incomplete, and subjective information, and then provide context for that data in order to help us understand the situation.

In order to deal with the vagueness of cable advertising measurement, you need to find a doable level of tracking, accept it with all its imperfections, gather the data, analyze the data, and learn more as you go. You can improve on the system itself as you learn more. This enables your television advertising measurement system to evolve into a system that is almost just as accurate as online data analytics.

Some rules to follow are:

• Have intimate knowledge of the company, its performance indicators, and the patterns and trends that already exist with its performance. How would the company be doing if no advertising was running? Identify the patterns and trends that already exist.
• Make sure to do the work. You need to gather data from your advertising campaigns and compare it to your baseline. Analyze the data. Make the incremental changes as you go. Keep an eye out for any peculiarities for that time period and make allowances for those. Over time, this will evolve into a highly efficient analytics machine.
• Make comparisons with what your performance model is telling you with big company-wide metrics like profitability.
• Finally, never burden your potential customers with tracking. Don't create custom URLs just to track the campaigns. This will reduce your overall response rate.

You can know if your system is working if the ROI is positive. All you need to do is measure it. And an ROI-positive campaign is incredibly scalable, so it will give you the ability to increase frequency and build brand awareness.

In its venture to convince advertisers and advertising agencies to buy television advertising time through its online auction-based Google TV Ads platform, Google has made a deal with TiVo giving media buyers access to digital set-top data generated by subscribers of TiVo. This deal is the most recent move by Google to gain a following among mainstream marketers and advertising agencies for its television advertising platform. The platfrom has gotten alot of popular buzz but it has failed to gain any critical mass because of its limited access to quality television advertising inventory.

Up to now, Google TV Ads has plans to sell local advertising on DISH Network, and national TV ads on a handful of mostly low-rated or emerging cable TV networks.

Google is using the deal with TiVo to leverage their enhanced data to make the Google TV Ads platform more attractive to advertisers, and as a result, more appealing to big TV networks to begin using to sell their television advertising time.

Google TV Ads main data source is the digital set-top boxes of DISH Network subscribers, and some small digital cable TV systems that have partnered up with Google. Google subsequently enhanced those TV audience data streams by licensing demographic TV audience information from Nielsen Co., and more recently by licensing geo-demographic analytics data from Nielsen's PRIZM system.

The new deal with TiVo gains access to second-by-second DVR viewing data, which will give Google TV Ads advertisers insights about household-level advertising impressions generated by their buys, but it does not include any of the enhanced analytics generated by TiVo's StopWatch service, which is not covered by this deal.

Google hasn't disclosed how much television advertising is actually being processed through its platform, but the system is believed to be popular mainly with direct response and "long tail" advertisers and advertising agencies, and among bigger advertising agencies using it primarily to test and gain insights about TV audience exposure via the system, which competes with Microsoft's NAVIC, and Spot Runner's Malibu platforms. The cable TV industry's Canoe Ventures also is seen as a potential competitor or collaborator with Google TV Ads, but its long-term market play still remains unclear in the minds of many TV buyers and sellers.

Meanwhile, the amalgamation of TV audience data streams and analytics tools being assembled by Google TV Ads has been both intellectually attractive to Madison Avenue, as well as confusing, as was evident during a series of presentations made by various data suppliers and end-users during a TV audience measurement summit held by Google earlier this month.

During one of those presentations, Nielsen Senior Vice President-Insights, Analysis and Policy Pat McDonough, noted there still are a number of problems with the kind of set-top data being used by Google TV Ads, including the fact that it's difficult to know when people are actually sitting in front of their TV sets when the set-top devices are on and tuned to a channel. According to Nielsen's estimates, 10% of digital set-top devices "never get turned off," and 30% are on for 24-hours in any given day. While methods have been developed for editing the digital set-top data to factor out the non-viewing portion of their tuning, the real value is in reporting the "long tail" of the TV universe - the part not measured by Nielsen's traditional TV methods.

During another presentation by the full service ad agency Karlen Williams Graybill Advertising, which showcased the results of an actual TV buy made earlier this year for the Act and Gold Bond Ultimate brands across eight cable TV networks, comparing both Google TV Ads and Nielsen's conventional TV ratings samples, the agency concluded that there were no "statistically significant" differences, and that, "There is no perfect rating methodology."

Source:  MediaPost News

This is another example of one of our cable advertising spots. This one is for a local New Jersey car dealership, George Wall.

This spot proves a couple of things. First, not all cable television advertising spots need to have one person screaming over another about their amazing deals in order to be effective. Second, not all cable advertising spots need to cost alot of money. They can be made by utilizing a minimal amount of resources, both human and other. Third, your company's daily business doesn't need to be interrupted with a film crew on site.

Finally, it is a buyer's market in the worlds of both online and traditional media. This small dealership, by adding a 3rd franchise, is expanding, and it needed an affordable way to get it's message out to the local market. In the example of this cable advertising spot, visuals play a vital role in attracting customers to the business. And it is all done at an affordable rate.

Here is the spot:

Here is the final part of our television advertising for Beyer Bros. Embrace the cheese of cable advertising!

Here is part 2 of our television advertising for Beyer Bros. Keep in mind that it's cable advertising so its bound to be somewhat cheesy.



The benefits of this type of cable advertising:

• total cost $10,000
• 5 hours total airtime, during primetime hours
• shown in 3 states, across 26 cable systems (again, that's 11,000,000 households!)

vs going straight to the cable provider:

• cost per month $4,000
• 3 hours and 20 minutes total airtime (200 spots, 60 seconds each)
• broadcast in 1 cable system, for a maximum of 40,000 households

Here is an example of some television advertising we've done for one of our clients, Beyer Brothers Corp. It's an infomercial that's about 30 minutes long. We know it's a little cheesy, but it's basic cable advertising. We also maximized the amount of views while using the least amount of money. Here's how:

The infomercial cost $1,500 to produce, and another $8,500 for airtime, giving us a total of $10,000. That $10,000 gave us 5 half-hour infomercials for 2 weeks, which is 5 hours of airtime. And those 5 hours of airtime were only primetime hours. The infomercial was shown in 3 states (New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut), across 26 cable systems. That's a total of 11,000,000 households that possibly viewed our infomercial. Think of all those leads!

That, compared to, let's say, going straight to the cable provider is a much better deal. Going straight to a cable provider means your infomercial will only be shown on that one cable system. The average monthly cost is $4,000 for 200 airtime spots, each being 60 seconds long. That's 3 hours and 20 minutes of total airtime. Now you do the math. Would you rather pay $4,000 for 3 hours and 20 minutes of airtime that will only be on 1 cable system (which means it will only be broadcast to 40,000 households, at best)? Or would you rather pay $10,000 for 5 hours of airtime that will be on 26 cable systems (being broadcast to 11,000,000 households)?



And don't ask what the deal is with the gorilla, because I honestly have no idea. The point is that it gets people's attention, even if it's in an outlandish way.

Cablevision on Tuesday took the wraps off Optimum Select, a new advanced telelvision advertising service that includes a call-to-action application.

Among the first clutch of clients to sign on as Optimum Select partners are: Unilever, Gillette, New York-based retailer Century 21 and Benjamin Moore.

First announced last month, Optimum Select went live in early October, with an opt-in execution for Gillette’s line of body wash. Cablevision subscribers who clicked on an on-screen overlay were issued free samples of Gillette’s shower-gel product.

Gillette provided 30,000 samples for the promotion. The stockpile was depleted in a week.

In a second initiative, paint brand Benjamin Moore sent a coupon for a free two-ounce color sample to Cablevision subscribers who pressed the “select” button on their remote during the spot. Similar premiums are available to viewers who interact with ads for Century 21 and Degree Fine Fragrance Body Mist, a Unilever brand.

“Unilever has been enhancing our television advertising spend with interactivity whenever possible, and it’s a proven element in our overall marketing mix,” said Rob Master, director of media North America for Unilever. “We applaud all new developments that add further scale and consumer involvement to the existing iTV footprint.”
 
In addition to the RFI wrinkle, Cablevision also allows for telescoping long-form content from standard 30-second spots, which presents an opportunity for marketers to more fully immerse viewers in their brand messaging. Automotive clients are particularly well suited for telescoping ads, as this will increase automotive sales leads.

Cablevision is also tinkering with addressable ad units and for the last few years has offered dedicated advertising channels like the VOD showcase Disney Channel on Demand.

“We’re extremely pleased by the initial response,” said David Kline, president of Rainbow Advertising Sales Corporation. “Advertisers recognize the extended brand experience enabled by Optimum Select, where direct marketing meets TV and transforms the traditional media ad model to offer qualified lead generation, brand engagement, enhanced measurement, insight and learning.”

While Cablevision didn’t disclose how it was pricing its Optimum Select units, the operator said advertisers will pay a premium for the interactive spots. For the first stage of the deployment, the interactive ads have been activated on 25 major cable networks.

Local ad sales account for a tiny fraction of Cablevision’s overall revenue haul. In the second quarter of 2009, the MSO took in $26 million in ad sales, down 13 percent from a year ago ($31 million). That works out to 1.4 percent of the company’s total Q2 revenue of $1.88 billion.

Cablevision will begin pitching Optimum Select to media buyers and marketing companies later this week.

--Source:  MediaWeek

The pay-TV industry will start to see success in advanced television advertising beginning mid-2010, with U.S. revenues topping $130 million by year-end, according to the new Parks Associates report Addressable, Interactive Television Advertising in the U.S.

Consumer demand for time-shifted TV viewing on VOD and DVR service platforms, combined with the broad deployment of Canoe Ventures' national addressable television advertising platform, will drive the growth in advanced television advertising. By 2014, U.S. addressable, interactive television advertising revenue will exceed $4 billion, accounting for nearly 12% of total cable, DBS, and telco TV ad revenue.

Advanced television advertising includes traditional linear 30-second ads and non-linear ads that include VOD and DVR advertising and interactive formats, such as overlay, tags, IPG banners, microsites, RFI, showcases, and telescoping.

"Major U.S. cable television operators, direct broadcast satellite (DBS) TV providers, and telcos have identified advanced advertising as a key revenue opportunity moving forward," said Heather Way, research analyst, Parks Associates. "In the short term, digital TV operators continue to ramp up their investment in advanced advertising solutions as a preemptive move to sustain ad revenues. In the long term, the investment serves to grow the advertising business segment."

Addressable, Interactive Television Advertising in the U.S. highlights the key advanced television advertising industry players and examines the business and technology drivers shaping the advanced television services segment. In addition, the report studies the existing business models and discusses how the models will change to accommodate addressable and interactive television advertising solutions. The report concludes with advertising revenue forecasts, implications, and recommendations for industry investors.

--Source:  Reuters

In the last post, I wrote about optimizing your website to tell Google and your visitors where you are and what you do. But another important online place where it's absolutely critical to clearly identify where you are and what you do is your local business profile on Google Maps, Yahoo Local, and Bing Local.

Your Categories

In Google Maps, you can categorize your business in up to 5 categories. They may be standard categories that are provided by Google Maps or those that you can create yourself. Use 1-2 of the standard Google Maps categories that best fit your business, and then create 3-4 that contain your best keyword terms plus the geography terms for which you want to be found.

For example, as a New Jersey marketing company, we classify ourselves in the already established categories of Advertising, and Marketing. For our other four categories we use the top keyword phrases for which we want to be found, such as cable advertising, outdoor advertising, radio advertising, print advertising, traditional media advertising, or automotive ad agency.

The categories you choose may be based on any criteria that are important to you. Some suggestions are your most profitable procedures or the categories in which your strongest competitors have categorized themselves. The categories may also be based on some other criteria known only to you.

Use geographic terms in your categories in order to make it completely clear to Google where you do business. Using the names of nearby areas may also help your site rank better for those searches. For example, our office is in Westfield, NJ, but most searchers use "New Jersey" or "NJ" in their queries, so we use New Jersey terms in our categories instead of Westfield terms.

However, Yahoo Local and Bing Local do not allow you to create your own categories. So you must choose as many categories as you are allowed, picking the most appropriate and most important first.

Your Descriptions

Also use geography terms within the description area of your profiles, where you have complete control of what is written. These descriptions are crawled and indexed by the local spiders, so make certain they find your most important geographic terms within them.

Your Attributes

Attributes (only in Google Maps) allow you to go crazy with terms to tell spiders and humans what you do and where you do it. You can, in essence, create and name a field whatever you want and then populate it with terms describing that property.

Almost every business pulls people from both its immediate location and surrounding areas. So, you could create a field named Locations Served and list the towns and neighborhoods near you and from which your business typically draws customers.

Some business, like plumbing, carpet cleaning, lawn care, and pet sitting go to the customer instead of customers coming to them. For a business like this, you could title a field Service Areas and list the places where you are willing to travel to provide your services.

You can also include attributes that allow you to use keyword terms that contain geographic modifiers. For example, if you have an advertising agency in New Jersey, you could create a field titled New Jersey Marketing Services and populate it with terms like "New Jersey marketing", "traditional media in NJ", "best ad agency NJ", "online marketing consultants NJ", "public relations NJ", and "New jersey retail advertising agency". This is an effective way to help you rank for long-tail terms that apply to where you are and what you do.

Your Coupons

Although not every business type has been traditionally associated with coupons, creative entrepreneurs are finding ways to use them to their benefit. Nearly every business can offer some sort of discount or value-added coupon for its goods or services. For inspiration you can look around to see what your competitors are doing with coupons. Then, when you create your coupons, include your best keyword terms plus your location in the offers.

It's highly likely that attributes from Google Maps Local Business Listings and coupons from all of the platforms are pushed out to other places on the Web, such as Google Base and coupon Web sites, so the impact can be very far-ranging.

Local business listings are designed to help searchers find businesses in particular geographic locations. Make it easy for Google Maps, Yahoo Local, and Bing Local to tell where you are and what you do to increase the odds they will find your business when a relevant search is made.

What and where? These are the two big questions that must be answered over and over again in local SEM.

Local searchers ask these questions implicitly and explicitly. In some cases, geo-terms are used and in other cases they aren't. For example, search queries can be "best ad agency in NJ," "cable advertising NJ" or simply "best ad agency" or "cable advertising."

Search engines such as Google and Yahoo want to know the same things about your business that searchers want to know. Where is it and what products/services does it offer?

Are you answering these critical questions for your potential sales leads as well as the search engines?

Many times local businesses choose online marketing consultants based on the attractiveness of the websites they create without giving any thought to SEO. Even those website designers who know how to help with search rankings are rarely knowledgeable enough about the specifics of ranking for local search. As a result, the local business owner ends up with a beautiful website that never ranks for competitive keywords or attracts any new customers.

By following a few simple tips and tricks, you can prevent this from happening to your online marketing investment.

Your Home Page

You need to make it clear to people who land on your page what you do and where you do it. Simply because everyone in New Jersey knows where Broad Street is, it doesn't mean that everyone who sees a Broad Street address on your website will know that you're in New Jersey. The searcher may be entirely new to the area or just passing through, which may be the reason why someone may be searching for your business in the first place.

So, if you're a New Jersey marketing firm, don't expect people to look around to find that information on your site. Say it clearly near the top of the page and do it in text form, that way it is unmistakable to the search engines as well as to the searchers. Don't assume anything! It's important to make this information so clear that it can't possibly be misunderstood.

Your Page Title

This is the most important ranking factor for SEM. And if that isn't enough of a reason, then think about it from the human point of view.

Google displays the page title as the headline in the listing that appears for your pages in the SERPs. If someone is for searching for "marketing companies new jersey" and the headline they see in the search results says "THE Best of the Best Marketing Companies in NJ," it'll grab their attention much better than a headline that says "marketing company".

Google will also bold the words that were in a search query in the title when it appears on the page. So, for example, if a searcher in Central NJ asks for "co-op advertising" and your page title says "The Co-Op Advertising Professionals in Central NJ", then your title will look like this to the searcher: "The Co-Op Advertising Professionals in Central NJ".

Your Meta Tags

Along with your page title, these are also displayed in the SERPs. Meta tags are like the ad copy that entices people to click on your listings and go to your website.

Much like the page title, if your meta tags have the terms used in the search query then Google will bold these words on the SERPs. If the tags don't contain the keyword phrase that was used in the query, then Google will pull a snippet off the page that contains that phrase.

It's important to use your best keyword terms in your meta tags because, even though they may not help your pages to rank, they will likely encourage searchers to click through to your site.

In my next post, I will give more tips and tricks on how to clearly tell the search engines and the searchers where you are and what you do.

The Federal Trade Commission has made its guidelines tougher for traditional media and online advertising.

From now on, advertisers who use atypical examples, like someone losing over 100 pounds from a diet pill, also need to provide typical examples. The newly revealed guidelines, which were announced October 5th, 2009, also have some requirements for celebrity endorsements. Celebrities now need to disclose their association with advertisers, if any, outside of the context of their traditional media ads. This includes appearances on talk shows and online social media connections. Celebrity endorsers and advertisers are now liable for any false or unsubstantiated claims.

The FTC has also place restrictions on social media advertisers, such as bloggers, online marketing consultants, and word-of-mouth marketers. All three must now reveal if and when they received any material considerations, such as monetary compensation or free products, for their endorsements. Advertisers must also reveal if they paid for the research that backs up their claims.

Of course the FTC has the consumers in mind when making these new rules and regulations. The new guidelines will increase transparency for consumers. However, the increased scrutiny upon marketing companies will increase costs, which will most likely be passed onto the consumer.

--Source:  Broadcasting & Cable, 10/05/09

When it comes to broadcast communications, we’re very well vertically integrated.  We work with all broadcast media such as radio advertising, cable advertising, and general television advertising.  We have connections with many different radio stations and cable stations to get any ad placed.  We also create commercials and advertising that can be seen or heard on any TV station or radio outlet.  And even though we're located in New Jersey, we do alot more than just New Jersey marketing.  We can work with anyone, anywhere in the country.

Advertising on mass media outlets serves an important function for any business, and that function is branding.  Branding gets your name out there and adds legitimacy to your business in the eyes of the public.  Are you looking to be branded through top-notch commercials?  Want more people to know about your business? Give our full service ad agency a call (877-876-2995) and we'll figure out a plan for you.