Comcast Chairman Brian Roberts welcomes the competition posed by telcos entering the video sector, believing he could take more phone customers from the Bells than the telcos could capture in video customers from cable, writes Broadcasting & Cable.
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The Boston Globe appointed Timothy J. Murphy its new vice president of advertising, marketing and sales, and named Peter Ockerbloom the new vice president of retail and national advertising, writes Editor & Publisher. Murphy, 36, was previously the executive director of advertising marketing, while Ockerbloom, 37, was formerly the retail advertising director.
Though XM Satellite Radio already airs commercials on its talk-show channels, beginning this May, listeners will have to endure commercials by Clear Channel Communications on certain music channels like contemporary hits station KISS and country music station Nashville, Business Week reports. The addition of the ads resolves a dispute concerning Clear Channel’s demands that XM run ads on its Clear Channel stations.
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During Sirius Satellite Radio CEO Mel Karmazin’s keynote speech at the Morgan Stanley Global Automotive Conference this week in New York, he told the recording industry he would pay significantly higher fees if it removed music from terrestrial stations and made music available exclusively to satellite listeners, Radio Ink reports.
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The New York Times announced yesterday that it would sell its $100-million investment in Discovery Times channel back to its partner in the founding of the project, Discovery Communications, the New York Observer writes.
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During the average week, about 43.7 million Americans over the age of 18 - approximately 20 percent of the nation’s adult population - watched TV in unmeasured, out of home locations, according to a Fall 2005 survey, Total TV Audience Monitor, released yesterday, MediaPost writes.
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Daytime shows are down by as much as 19 percent for the year in key demographics, causing networks to offer makegoods to advertisers and a corresponding squeeze on second quarter inventory along with rate hikes as high as 30 percent, reports Mediapost. That is compared to the 3 to 5 percent price increase the major broadcast networks are aiming for overall, writes USA Today. (The average price of $108,681for a 30-second ad in the current season was flat from the year before, according to Nielsen Monitor-Plus.)
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1105 Media last week acquired Stevens Publishing, an 80-year-old company that publishes eight b-to-b publications including Environmental Protection, Occupational Health and Safety, Security Products and Water & Wastewater Products, BtoB writes. Stevens also publishes seven newsletters covering environmental news from Washington, D.C., and online buyers’ guides and list services.
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YouTube.com has begun another promotion for established media companies as it tries to establish itself as a legitimate ad vehicle, writes AdWeek (via MarketingVox). The popular video-sharing service began showing Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” video as part of a promotion for Hollywood Records’ Queen Stone Cold Classics compilation. The video is in YouTube’s “Featured” section on its homepage and encourages viewers to tune into American Idol, contestants of which have been singing Queen songs.
New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer’s recently filed suit against Direct Revenue has revealed some of the underhanded tactics and dealings of the adware company, reports Mediapost (via MarketingVox). Among the juicy tidbits of information to be revealed from copies of internal emails and memos found in the filings, which were posted on Ben Edelman’s website, is that Yahoo Search accounted for roughly $200,000 per month of revenue for Direct Revenue during April-June 2005, according to Mediapost.
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When Time Warner Cable introduced video on demand in New York, it generated advertising and agency interest in the medium, and cable operators are hoping for the same result when the company brings interactive TV to the city by the end of the year, Ad Age writes. Time Warner experimented with interactive TV during the run-up to the Democratic mayoral primary in September. Viewers of Time Warner Cable’s NY1 News network were able to participate in a “snap poll” by using specially marked keys on their digital remotes, and were tracked and reported on within minutes.
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Advertising within videogames will be heading toward the $2 billion mark by the end of the decade, according to Massive Inc., MarketingVox reports. CEO Mitch Davis, who predicted that in-game ad spend would reach as high as $1.8 billion in the U.S. by 2010, accounting for some 3 percent of total media spending, reports Mediaweek. Davis was delivering the keynote at the second annual Advertising in Games conference in New York.
Time magazine announced yesterday that it would close its Canadian bureau on April 28, a significant cutback for the magazine which has long maintained a Canadian presence and published a Canadian issue of the magazine, Mediapost reports. This is part of the recently announced cutbacks of 250 jobs across multiple titles. According to a source, the Canadian edition will obviously contain less Canadian content but it will not be entirely gone, the Toronto Star writes.
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Chipotle Mexican Grill, which has been spun off from McDonald’s Corp., has chosen Denver’s TDA Advertising & Design as its new agency of record and has unveiled two movie-screen ads from the agency’s creative team which will air before previews at theaters near Chipotle locations, AdAge writes. TDA had worked with Chipotle on a project basis before getting the nod as agency of record.
Direct marketers are planning to add staff this quarter, according to a quarterly survey by Bernhart Associates Executive Search. Of 156 direct marketing companies - agencies, suppliers and end-users - 72 percent said they would add positions, 11 percent said they were planning to freeze hiring, and only 1.3 percent planned cutbacks, according to Multichannel Merchant.
