Hollywood Wants Direct-to-TV Shortcut

August 5, 2010 by Peter Koeppel.

Major Hollywood studios are said to be in talks with the nation’s largest cable television provider to facilitate sending newly-released movies to TV within weeks of their box office debuts.

This shortcut in how movies are delivered and viewed would completely alter how film distribution takes place and would likely have huge implications for the rental market.

Time Warner Cable broke the news of its “Premium Video on Demand” at a cable industry convention earlier in June. The cable giant presented several scenarios for how it could work; the one receiving support from most studio executives seems to be the idea of taking movies 30 days into their box office release and sending them to pay-per-view viewers at home.

This shortcut-to-home would mean that those willing to spend the money to see the new movies before they hit video (a full three months early) would pay a premium to do so. That premium of $20-$30 could mean a large income for studios and TW.

Talks are ongoing and nothing is finalized, say insiders, but some studios may sign before the summer’s end and these Premium Video on Demand offerings could be available as early as December 2010 or the first quarter of 2011.

Those likely to be most affected by this shakeup would be secondary theater venues, which often receive movies well after their original debut, and rental outlets, which are already suffering from a sluggish economy and streaming options such as Netflix. These businesses thrive on the staggered system that Hollywood currently uses to promote movies, pushing them to premier theaters, then secondaries, then DVD release for rental and purchase and then cable or satellite TV.

The proposal was pitched to most major studios in Hollywood including Warner’s own Warner Brothers, Walt Disney, Universal, Paramount and others.

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Better Twitter Search Engine Will Cost

June 30, 2010 by Peter Koeppel.

Bill Gross recently unveiled a new venture called TweetUp, designed to improve Twitter’s search engine abilities while also capitalizing on companies who want their Tweets to be read first.

The new platform works in a somewhat similar fashion to Google search and ads: A user types in a search phrase and comes up with the most relevant tweets available on their query – along with a series of ads that companies will pay to have pop up at the top of the page.

Gross suggests that his new venture will be incredibly useful to Twitter users who have a hard time sorting through all the noise to find the Tweets that are most relevant to what they’re interested in.

The search engine that could find more relevant Tweets would probably be extremely popular – but the question is whether it will remain so with the added feature of paid ranked advertisements. If users don’t accept the paid ad placement as legitimate, the new search engine may not be nearly as popular as Gross is counting on.

So far, however, TweetUp is raising capital quickly from investors like Index Ventures and Revolution: $3.5 million to date. Part of the confidence is based on the quality of the algorithm TweetUp uses to sort relevant (non-paid) Tweets, which Gross considers to be as high a quality as Google’s fabled algorithm for ranking the relevance of the Web’s contents at large.

Peter Koeppel is Founder and President of Koeppel Direct, leading in DRTV direct response television and infomercial campaign management industry. With a Wharton MBA and over 25 years of marketing and advertising experience

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Hulu Got Less Funny – and Possibly Less Profitable

May 5, 2010 by Peter Koeppel.

Hulu.com’s three-year-old platform for watching online media has turned into one of the most successful attempts to bring TV to the web – even if its advertising platform has often struggled to keep up with demand as viewers surged from 580 million to 1.01 billion in the short span of time between September and December of 2009.

Looks like that advertising problem might have been the dealbreaker for Viacom. The company announced that it would pull its extremely popular comedy shows “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” and “The Colbert Report” from Hulu.com, and carried through on its intentions on March 9th, after warning Hulu viewers that their shows would no longer be available on the website.

There’s no word on whether Hulu will take a hit in advertising revenue from this split; the two shows were some of the most-watched on the website, and users have already been expressing dismay at their removal.

Both Hulu and Viacom sources are claiming that the split was completely amicable, and that they are in talks for some future deals. That may be so; after all, Hulu is directing viewers to Viacom’s websites, where full episodes of both shows are still streaming live.

However, until the advertising problem can be worked out, it’s likely that Hulu will be a little less funny for the foreseeable future.

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Apple Seeks to Make TV Cheaper

March 30, 2010 by Peter Koeppel.

One of the many possible applications of the iPad is as a portable mini-TV, but the expense of buying a TV show via iTunes has proved prohibitive for many people.

After all, it costs essentially the same amount of money to buy a full season of a show in high-definition on iTunes as it would to purchase the same season on DVD – which can then be watched on a full-screen TV.

If Apple wants people to consider watching TV off their big screens and onto a screen as small as the iPad or even the iPod or iPhone, it needs to eliminate the pricing problem. Rumor is it’s in talks to do just that.

Apple is attempting to reduce the price of TV shows to 99 cents apiece, which is one-third of the current price for an episode of a high-definition show at $2.99. The new pricing has by no means been finalized, and there are even whispers that networks have pulled out of the talks entirely, but insiders are saying Apple is still pushing hard to get their new price point.

If Apple does, it may be able to make the iPad into a reasonable alternative to a big-screen TV – sure, it’s not as big, but for the price, it’s still high-def, and it’s still all the shows people want to see.

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Is Twitter Really Worth $1,000,000,000?

March 9, 2010 by Peter Koeppel.

Twitter CEO Evan Williams recently confirmed that the website has received new funding of $100 million, which added to the microblogging site’s previous funding makes for a $1 billion valuation for the microblogging service. Among the investors are Spark Capital, Benchmark Capital, Institutional Venture Partners (all of whom doubled their original investment), T. Rowe Price and Insight Venture Partners.

This may seem surprising to many who questioned Twitter’s ability to make money at all with its free social media service, especially considering that to date, Twitter has yet to earn a dime. Is it realistic to think these investors are going to see real advertising money in the future?

It’s still hard to say. There’s no current online advertising model that seems applicable to a distributed service like Twitter. Twitter has proven invaluable to marketers who use it to connect with their customer base, but so far it’s yet to bring Twitter itself anything of value except its enthusiastic investors.

Ideas for how to use Twitter as a revenue-generating company vary from running keyword ads next to tweets as Google does for its searches and for blog content. However, so far there are no plans to put ads on Twitter until 2010.

Though Twitter has yet to make money for itself, this hasn’t stopped other companies from thinking they have something here. So far Twitter has turned down acquisition bids from Facebook, Google and Microsoft. Thus far, Twitter seems to be sitting on a gold mine that no one knows how to drill.

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Jivox Gives Small Business Owners a Leg Up in Online Advertising

February 21, 2010 by Peter Koeppel.

The best place for a local small business to advertise for a reasonable price used to be the local newspaper, but with print publications folding left and right, those ads are no longer getting the returns they used to.

While many technology-based businesses are already learning to adapt their advertising strategies to the web, small storefront businesses may be intimidated by the Internet and uncertain how to translate their 2-by-3-inch print ad to that medium.

Enter Jivox, a small start-up company in San Mateo that offers small businesses the online tools to create a good-looking video ad for a reasonable price. Once the ad is created, Jivox takes the mystery out of web advertising by marketing the video to websites that potential customers might be visiting, like their regional newspaper site and other related online media. That means the small business doesn’t need to figure out where their offline customers are spending their time online.

With the dual assistance offered by Jivox – creating the ad in the first place, and then finding the correct audience online – a lot of the mystery of the web is removed, and it gives many of these companies a genuine chance to compete with other, larger companies who can afford to have a whole section of their marketing department devoted to figuring out new media advertising.

The company is run by Diaz Nesamoney, a successful start-up entrepreneur twice before, and this looks like another great offering. He’s already signed on the assistance of CBS and Media-News Group, as well as hundreds of eager small, local businesses who are grateful for a leg up to the big leagues of Internet advertising.

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“Just Say No” – to Drug Commercials

December 22, 2009 by Peter Koeppel.

TV commercials for prescription drugs are fairly common, usually tailing out with a brief warning to “ask your doctor if X drug is right for you.”

The short spots often focus on sexual or extremely personal problems, like sexual impotency or restless bladder syndrome. They usually ask a few questions too, like “do you have problems with those intimate moments?” or “aren’t you tired of going to the bathroom several times a night?”

The answers to those questions are getting dangerous, or so say representatives in Congress. They’ve introduced a new bill, called the Say No to Drug Ads Act, which prevents pharmaceutical companies from deducting the cost of direct-to-consumer drug ads as a business expense.

The bill may hope to discourage these ads from appearing altogether. Congressmen are concerned that many people are self-diagnosing ailments using the suggestive language from these ads and insisting that their doctors prescribe the medication recommended by the commercial.

However, that is not the stated intention of the bill. Supporters say that the bill simply hopes to end tax breaks for companies who advertise drugs on television, and that there will be stricter regulations about how they appeal to their target markets so there is no deceptive information given, nor important information left out.

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Cars That Still Sell for Sticker Price

November 30, 2009 by Peter Koeppel.

There is no shortage of news out there talking about how poor the car industry is doing these days. It is clear that this is indeed the case judging from record-low spending in advertising to the sharp drop in consumers who own cars or are currently shopping for one. People are holding on to their existing cars for longer and holding off serious car shopping overall. 

So it’s a little surprising to hear that Edmunds.com recently reported there are a shocking number of cars out there that still sell for sticker price – or more.

Some of these cars are rarely, if ever, sold below sticker in the entire history of the auto industry, including such movie stars of the car world as the Aston Martin (of James Bond fame) and the Ferrari (which has always spoken for itself). BMW also has several cars that are doing very well in sales – especially those models that only produce a few thousand of each every year.

Beyond the crème-de-la-crème of autos, the other sector that’s doing very well is hybrid vehicles. Both Ford and Toyota have been seeing sticker-price sales of their hybrid vehicles, and they may be assisted by the promise of lower gas mileage and savings at the pump.

Those who are praying the American auto industry makes a rebound can find good news in the General Motors’ Camaro. The car is reincarnation of the classic muscle car, and it is actually selling for above sticker price – as much as $2,500 and more.

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Is Television Still Relevant?

November 3, 2009 by Peter Koeppel.

As movies, TV shows, the news, and homemade videos continue to stream free and often commercial-free online, the idea that television is on the way out has occurred to more than a few marketers.

This attitude is reinforced by the recent innovations in social media, which have often been far more effective in conversion dollar for dollar than TV ads.

Yes, there is hope for TV
However, there’s still hope for television, and there’s reason to believe it’ll hold out for quite awhile longer. For one thing, there’s the community factor. There are certain TV shows that people watch as events, such as sporting events or American Idol.

People enjoy being a part of the group, and they don’t want to miss it and watch later. They want to see it now, along with all the other fans.

The problem television is facing is the ability to adapt to the needs of people who do want to watch later. Instead of having those people look up those videos on DVD, some companies are looking to options online for capturing those audiences and keeping TV relevant, like the streaming-video site Hulu, which features full-length shows, movies and – most significantly for television producers – ads.

Television will stick around as long as we feel the need for community, which is probably forever. The question is how it will shape and change around the other new innovations that crop up.

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Ads Hide Within iPhone Applications

September 29, 2009 by Peter Koeppel.

The iPhone is undeniably a status symbol, but it may also be a marketer’s dream. Several major companies including Burger King Holdings Inc. and Lions Gate Entertainment Corp. are using the iPhone to promote their products.

One of the most innovative ways these companies are using the iPhone is through the purchasable and optional applications available for the device. Instead of standard mobile advertising, which can involve a banner ad on the regular screen or a tagline following a text message, companies are now crafting ads that can be disguised as applications.

Users can play games or manipulate images on the iPhone, and the applications can be very popular. If the application is also completely saturated with a company’s advertising, they reach their consumer.

The big challenge? Creating an application that’s compelling enough to stand out among thousands of others. If consumers can get the same game without advertising, they will. It means that companies may be investing some of their marketing budget into figuring out ways to entertain their customers as well as entice them

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