In Demand Network has a three-year exclusive deal to begin airing a video version of Howard Stern’s radio show on one of its video-on-demand channels, Reuters reports. In Demand said it will likely launch something like a “Howard Stern Channel” later this year, beginning with his remaining shows while he is still broadcasting on Viacom Inc.’s Infinity radio system, and continuing with those taped once the show moves in January to Sirius.
Gannett will take over the Detroit Free Press from Knight Ridder as part of a three-way newspaper deal, Reuters reports. The deal also calls for Gannett to sell The Detroit News to MediaNews Group, a privately held publisher that owns 40 daily newspapers.
Clear Channel Outdoor beat out JCDecaux to win exclusive advertising rights to the street furniture in Washington, D.C. for the next 20 years, Mediaweek reports. Clear Channel Outdoor’s Adshel unit will replace, expand, and maintain 800 bus shelters.
For unknown reasons, Clear Channel was recently knocked out of the running for NYC’s 20-year contract for citywide advertising rights and custodial duties over 3,300 bus shelters, some 330 newsstands, and 20 public toilets. JCDecaux is a favorite to win the contract to be awarded later this summer.
AOL’s Advertising.com has settled charges brought by the FTC which said it tricked consumers into downloading software that spawned pop-up ads, Mediaweek reports. The FTC charged that Advertising.com ran ads for its SpyBlast software that, when downloaded, came with pop-up ad software. The bundled adware was not disclosed to the user except in the end-user license agreement.
AOl’s ad revenues were up 45 percent to $320 million last quarter, ClickZ reports. It earned $30 million from paid search and $60 million from its Advertising.com unit. During the same time, they lost nearly a million subscribers as dial-up subscribers over age 15 dropped the ISP.
Univision Communications’ WXTV has another “first” under its belt. It was the top-rated local newscast in New York, regardless of language, at 11 p.m. among Adults 18-49 on Aug. 2, Mediaweek reports. Last week its 6 p.m. local newscast was tops on July 26 and July 28 among Adults 18-49 and 25-54.
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XM Satellite Radio has reached a deal to carry news, information and music programming from The New York Times Company’s newly established radio unit, The New York Times reports. The companies will also jointly develop hourly newscasts and quarterly music specials.
Thanks in part to a media auditing practice created by Media IQ two years ago, slow but significant changes are taking place that affect the quality of media buys - and those changes go well beyond rate negotiations to include advertising schedules and the environment in which TV ads appear, according to MediaPost.
Media IQ created a system for scoring national TV outlets that focuses not just on compliance and costs, but also takes into account two fundamental beliefs of TV advertising: that clutter hurts advertising recall and effectiveness, and that the first commercial airing in a break is more effective than those that follow. Its system considers the amount of clutter the outlets air during commercial breaks, as well as the positions in which they schedule the ads during those breaks.
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Members of MySpace, the leading site for advertisers in June, fear that its purchase by News Corp will mean censorship and access fees, reports AP (via Yahoo News).
News Corp. purchased Intermix Media, the owner of MySpace, mainly so that Fox Interactive Media can reach the site’s 22 million registered users. MySpace co-founder and CEO Chris DeWolfe said that News Corp. will change nothing about the site beyond extending MySpace’s reach internationally.
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Procter & Gamble will keep its ad spend steady in the coming fiscal year, Brandweek reports. P&G’s ad spend was 10.7 percent of its year-end sales of $56.7 billion, or about $6.1 billion. It might be down a bit this year to 10.5 percent or 10.4 percent, but will be maintained at about the same level as a percentage of sales.
CEO A.G. Lafley said P&G is testing alternatives to television advertising and he doesn’t want his businesses to lock down on too precise an ad spend number so that minds will be open to better ways to “communicate convincingly to consumers than just turn on the tube.”
Sunset Publishing is targeting twenty-somethings with a one-time special issue publication, MediaPost reports. Living 101 will go on sale Aug. 9 and is designed for Generation Y readers. If it’s a success, Sunset will consider a regular publishing run. Stories will address issues such as living on one’s own for the first time, finding a job, and finding a mate.
Upscale viewers are sticking with NBC despite its fourth-place finish last year, MediaPost reports. New research from Magna Global shows that among both adults 18-49 and adults 25-54, NBC still retains the highest upscale index of all broadcast networks, grabbing a 113 index for adults 18-49 with incomes of $100,000 or more, and a 139 index for adults 25-54 with incomes of $100,000 or more.
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PhRMA’s new direct-to-consumer voluntary advertising guidelines contain few requirements that will add to marketers’ ethical and legal burdens in creating drug ads and does not add much to the trade group’s July 21 statement that “encouraged” the industry to better target its audience, Adweek reports. There are no penalties for not following the guidelines and no mandatory ad-free time period between a drug’s approval by the FDA and its consumer launch.
Utah’s Rep. Scott Wyatt, R-Logan, plans to introduce legislation that would prohibit advertising illegal activities in Utah, such as fireworks, prostitution and, the real aim of the legislation, gambling, which is banned in Utah but legal, in at least some form, in every neighboring state, the Desert Morning News reports.
Last time Utah tried something like this, a ban on alcohol and beer advertising that is no longer in effect, it spawned a slew of signs offering “Bir” and “Ice Cold Bee.”
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Yahoo is expected to launch today a contextual advertising program - using an ad platform similar to Google’s AdSense - for small-to-midsize web publishers, including blogs, report CNET and DM News (via MarketingVox). Yahoo has been working for months on a self-serve contextual ad service tailored to bloggers and other small online publishers, thus encroaching on what has been Google territory.
Yahoo and Google are already rivals in serving major search-advertising partners, but Google has held an effective monopoly on text ads for smaller sites, including blogs.
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The Direct Marketing Association’s Catalog Council will now be called the Catalog & Multichannel Marketing Council, B to B writes. The name change reflects what the DMA calls “the changing needs of the catalog industry, which is now comprised of more than basic catalog marketing and includes e-commerce, retailing, and other marketing channels.”
Sirius doubled its ad revenue from last quarter to this quarter, reaching the $1 million mark, and raised predictions about year-end subscribers from 2.7 million to three million, reports AdAge. The company’s net loss widened to $177.5 million from $136.8 million a year ago, but CEO Mel Karmazin said the company could reach positive free cash flow as early as the end of 2006, and promised positive free cash flow for 2007.
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