When people are in front of the TV, they don’t just watch TV.
The pioneering Middletown Media Study conducted in the pre-iPhone and pre-iPad era of 2005 showed that, at the time, 28.5% of 240.9 daily TV viewing minutes were accompanied by exposure to at least one other medium. (Talking on the phone and texting were the most frequent sources of interruption). In addition, about half of all TV minutes were accompanied by non-media life activities, such as caring for others, eating and cleaning.
The competition for TV viewer’s attention has hardly subsided. Since the study, smartphone penetration in the US soared from 3.8% in 2006 to 44% by the end of 2011. Today, for many tablet and smartphone owners (45% and 41%, respectively) using their mobile device while watching TV is a daily activity.
Rose Castronova was Chief Financial Officer of Hill Holliday’s New York office for most of my 18 years at the agency. And I can say without an nanosecond of hesitation, that she was one of the finest human beings to ever call Hill Holliday home.
After a long illness which she fought courageously, Rose passed away late Friday evening.
HITE Radio & TV sits at my street corner. The company was established in 1940 – one year after David Sarnoff announced the dawn of television in the U.S. I’m reminded everyday when looking at the logos of TV set manufactures of days passed that a “traditional” medium television is no longer.
We’re pretty excited about our new film for Oxfam America. Oxfam wants Congress to stop giving food aid money to special interest groups, and give it to people who need it most. Take a look, share, join the cause.
NBC’s Fashion Star premiered last week to pretty good Nielsen ratings and social ratings which went on to increase for this past Tuesday’s second episode. While from a content perspective, it’s not exactly what I tend to watch on TV, I’m really impressed with the elegance of the program’s architecture and social TV format for three main reasons:
Strong social TV footprint:Fashion Star hits on what is becoming a standard footprint for these kinds of shows by integrating the Twitter backchannel into the broadcast programming, making episodes available on demand across multiple platforms, and having a beefy social media presence in Facebook, Twitter, and a partnership with GetGlue.
Test & learn attitude: I absolutely love that Fashion Star is experimenting with “emerging” platforms like Pinterest which is an appropriate and, frankly, perfect place to be in both from a target and user-experience perspective.
Content as advertising: Most interesting to me is the fact that the show has brilliantly integrated 3 major brands into the content of the show in a way that, in my opinion, sets the bar for sponsorships because it doesn’t feel like a sponsorship – it feels like (because it is) a natural part of the show. Many times brand integrations have an evident and blatant beginning and end – almost like a commercial within the show – but in this case, the brands are editorially woven throughout the show’s content as three retail buyers act, in effect, as the ultimate judges of the designers’ fashions.
If you’re tuning in to the long awaited season 5 premiere of “Mad Men” this Sunday (and who isn’t?), check out the Newsweek / Daily Beast official “Mad Men Talking Man Men” live chat featuring our own Lance Jensen.
Details here: What: Mad Men Talking Mad Men Live Chat Who: Lance Jensen, Lincoln Bjorkman, Tor Myhren, and David Lipman When: Sunday, March 25th, 9pm ET – 10pm ET (during 1st hour of Mad Men season 5 premiere) Hosts: Brian Ries and Chelsie Gosk, Newsweek & The Daily Beast Where:thedailybeast.com Twitter hashtag:#MadMenChat
‘Audience targeting’ is often used synonymously with ‘data buying’ – selecting a data segment whose audience descriptors meet your targeting qualifiers. But with the vast amount of data available to us, doing audience targeting only through pre-packaged data segments is one-dimensional. It’s a one-size-fits-all approach to something far more complex than that.
Today’s Beacon spotlight is on ChoiceStream ‘CRUNCH’, a company whose audience targeting technology is innovative and multi-dimensional. CRUNCH is a product of ChoiceStream – a company with over ten years’ experience in predicting online consumer behavior. The company’s core business is built on understanding relationships between audiences, context, products. And CRUNCH leverages data, including ChoiceStream’s own unique data set, to inform audience segmentation, ad decisioning, and program optimization.
