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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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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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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Advertising Dollars to Reach the Female Demographic pt 1

May 13, 2008 by Peter Koeppel.

The facts are amazing: Even though women still earn less money than their male counterparts (78 cents for every dollar a man gets), women make more than 80 percent of the buying decision in all homes. No wonder infomercial advertisers strive to capture the attention of females. But what complicates matters for marketers is how women shop. Unlike men, women research items more extensively and are less likely to be influenced by ads. This means marketers need to fine-tune their advertising messages and be seen in marketing venues that women deem credible.
 
Today, companies are paying more attention to the style and form of their products in an effort to appeal to women, and marketers are shifting away from only running television ads in favor of promotional efforts in venues women trust, such as reviews in women’s magazines and spots on TV shows like Oprah and Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.
 
Such activities prove that marketing today is getting more fragmented. What used to work in the past won’t necessarily work today. So in order to have your product or service reach the female market-even if it’s not a female-oriented product-you need to view marketing a bit differently than you did a few years ago.
 
A recent article in Advertising Age magazine details how women spend their leisure time. In it, columnist Mike Vorhaus asked women of all ages to identify from a list of activities their favorite leisure activity. What he found in the female category impacts all drtv advertisers who have a product that targets women-or who simply want to get a piece of the buying power that women possess.

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Status Check: Online Political Advertising

March 12, 2008 by Peter Koeppel.

Tracking the use of online campaigning by this year’s presidential candidates is seemingly a loss cause. The prevalence of social networking, viral video and blogs makes it nearly impossible to gauge, until later and perhaps after-the-fact, the impact the Internet has had (or will have) on this year’s election.

(Even four years ago, would anyone have known or even imagined a CNN presidential debate in which Facebook or You Tube figured so prominently?)

A recent report by ClickZ.com says that the use of measurable online campaign methods, such as paid display advertising, is on the rise. Since about January 2007, presidential candidates have been using the Internet and Internet ad space as means of reaching out to potential voters.

The amount of campaign dollars put towards the online effort is still low in comparison to traditional efforts such as broadcast advertising and television ads.

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Despite WGA (Writers Guild of America)Strike, Networks Still Come Out Ahead

February 18, 2008 by Peter Koeppel.

According to a recent article in the Hollywood Reporter, the Writers Guild of America strike isn’t harshly affecting TV and the networks.

Instead, the article reports that television advertisers are sticking to their guns and standing by the networks. In fact, while most advertisers had the option to back out of up to 50% of their upfront purchase in late January, few actually acted on that option.

The WGA website also claims that even if advertisers and media buyers requested their money back, it wouldn’t be a significant issue for these TV networks. In the article, MPG Senior VP Group Account Director Jason Janefsky, is quoted as saying, “The networks don’t care if advertisers exercise options or take money back. They can spin the inventory for a higher unit cost.” In other words, no skin off the networks’ backs.

Additionally, the networks are saving, from a financial standpoint, on all those cancelled writers contracts, along with the elimination of its non-writing staff. Despite the writers strike, now in its third month, the networks continue to move forward with a positive outlook and healthy hopes for the future.

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TiVo helps Direct Response Advertisers with Interactive Solution

January 8, 2008 by Peter Koeppel.

It’s no secret that the proliferation of services like TiVo has changed the way viewers access and “digest” television.

As a response to this still-evolving trend, TiVo has announced that it’s formed the Interactive Direct Response Advertising Group, an entity that aims not only to help the drtv community fully understand the challenges of advertising in the age of DVR, but, more importantly, to offer real and viable alternative advertising solutions to the DR community.

In a press release, the company acknowledged what many of us already know: TiVo and DVRs lessen the need to “channel surf,” thus potentially lowering viewership for infomercials and other direct response television advertisements. (We know that many, if not most, viewers fast-forward through commercials.)

Relevant solutions?  
What’s positive about the formation of this group is that it promises to find and present valuable, timely and workable (in other words, real) solutions for the portions of the direct response market that are impacted by this growing trend.

The DR community’s goal vis-a-vis TiVo and DVR is to “relate to customers directly from the remote control.” One proposed solution includes TiVo’s Interactive Advertising Platform which allows viewers to use their remote controls to click on tags that appear over television commercials in the Ad Showcase area if and when they want to request additional information or view special offers.

For infomercial advertisers, this change in approach presents a unique opportunity to create customized, easily-trackable and actionable offers specifically for the TiVo viewer.

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