Media

Account assignments, executive appointments and miscellaneous news from advertising agencies.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity… Not only is this the first line of one of the classics; it is the opening scene of a drama we sometimes witness in the magazine media world. Hearst recently announced that rate bases were jumping again on two of its titles: Food Network Magazine and HGTV Magazine. This will be the 11th consecutive rate base increase for Food Network Magazine since launching in 2009 and the 3rd increase for HGTV Magazine since the first official issue in June 2012. It is the best of times for Food Network Magazine. Yet it was the worst of times for another culinary magazine that had been around for almost 70 years: Gourmet. In 2008, when the economy busted and technology burst upon the scene, some major publishers, like Condé Nast, struggled to keep their footing. So Gourmet was sacrificed and Condé Nast concentrated all of its life-giving oxygen on Bon Appétit. Condé Nast also drove the nails into the coffin of Domino Magazine, the last print issue hitting the stands in March 2009. Yet, just four short years later HGTV is going strong. So has the economy improved that much in four or five years that the magazine media industry can expect the amazing growth that titles like Food Network and HGTV are realizing? Or is there more to the story? Perhaps we have finally learned a very important lesson: that as long as we integrate and communicate to our audience the relevant message, via the relevant platform, we can see our numbers grow once again. Some people will argue that Food Network and HGTV magazines are just riding on the coattails of their TV networks; I say that’s just foolish drivel out of the mouth’s naysayers. Remember Lifetime magazine? In the cases of Food Network and HGTV, stories are rarely repeated between the pages of the print magazines and those that come to life on the television screen. Both magazines are substantial and are their own unique experiences, apart from their broadcast counterparts. What I believe that we can take away from this is two things: One, you have to be willing to listen to your customers, bottom line. Paying just lip service to your customers is not going to work. It doesn’t matter what you as an editor or publisher want, you can’t self-support your own magazine; it’s going to take a community of loyal readers to do that for you. Two: We need to learn from the old business model, take from it what still works and be willing to sacrifice what does not. Doing the same thing time and time again won’t fly in 2013. Take the best from the past, focus on the present, and always keep an eye on the future, that’s where your business model should be headed. This column first appeared on min online May 17, 2013.

Given the more generous subsidies offered in other states and countries, major studios including NBCUniversal, Paramount and Disney all have large-scale, long-term expansion plans.

After a lackluster 2012-13 season, network television is relying on family related comedies and the supernatural to attract viewers.

Mr. Rose will host a half-hour program called “Charlie Rose Weekend,” which will replace “Need to Know” on Friday evenings.

Ed Cunningham, an ESPN sports analyst, tapped the crowdfunding service Kickstarter to finish what has been a nearly six-year labor of love.

After years of anticipation, The Pirate Bay documentary TPB-AFK was finally released to the public in February. The film, created by Simon Klose, is available for no cost and has already been watched by millions of people. The public response to this free release model has been overwhelmingly positive, but it’s now meeting resistance from Hollywood, TPB’s arch rival. Over the past weeks several movie studios have been trying to suppress the availability of TPB-AFK by asking Google to remove links to the documentary from its search engine. The links are carefully hidden in standard DMCA takedown notices for popular movies and TV-shows. The silent attacks come from multiple Hollywood sources including Viacom, Paramount, Fox and Lionsgate and are being sent out by multiple anti-piracy outfits. Fox, with help from six-strikes monitoring company Dtecnet, asked Google to remove a link to TPB-AFK on Mechodownload. Paramount did the same with a link on the Warez.ag forums. Paramount DMCA notice Viacom sent at least two takedown requests targeting links to the Pirate Bay documentary on Mrworldpremiere and Rapidmoviez. Finally, Lionsgate jumped in by asking Google to remove a copy of TPB-AFK from a popular Pirate Bay proxy. Lionsgate DMCA notice While it’s entertaining to think that these takedowns are truly targeted at TBP-AFK, the more likely explanation is that they are collateral damage. Most DMCA takedown processes are fully automated and somehow the TPB-AFK links were (mistakenly) associated with infringing titles. However, that doesn’t make it less of a problem. The whole episode shows once again that something is seriously wrong with the current implementation of the DMCA takedown system. At the moment rightsholders get to take down whatever they want, with almost no oversight and no incentive to improve the accuracy of their systems. Perhaps a six-strikes plan or some other form of “education” is in order for copyright holders who fail to learn from their mistakes? Source: Hollywood Studios Censor Pirate Bay Documentary

Internet measurement techniques need a complete overhaul. New ways have emerged, potentially displacing older panel-based technologies. This will make it hard for incumbent players to stay in the game. The web user is the most watched consumer ever. For tracking purposes, every large site drops literally dozens of cookies in the visitor’s browser. In the most comprehensive investigation on the matter, The Wall Street Journal found that each of the 50 largest web sites in the United Sates, weighing 40% of the US page views, installed an average of 64 files on a user device. (See the WSJ’s What They Know series and a Monday Note about tracking issues.) As for server logs, they record every page sent to the user and they tell with great accuracy which parts of a page collect most of the reader’s attention. But when it comes to measuring a digital viewer’s commercial value, sites rely on old-fashioned panels, that is limited user population samples. Why? Panels are inherited. They go back to the old days of broadcast radio when, in order to better sell advertising, dominant networks wanted to know which station listeners tuned in to during the day. In the late thirties, Nielsen Company made a clever decision: they installed a monitoring box in 1000 American homes. Twenty years later, Nielsen did the same, on a much larger scale, with broadcast television. The advertising world was happy to be fed with plenty of data — mostly unchallenged as Nielsen dominated the field. (For a detailed history, you can read Rating the Audience, written by two Australian media academics). As Nielsen expanded to other media (music, film, books and all sorts of polls), moving to the internet measurement sounded like a logical step. As of today, Nielsen only faces smaller competitors such as ComScore and others. I have yet to meet a publisher who is happy with this situation. Fearing retribution, very few people talk openly about it (twisting the dials is so easy, you know…), but hey all complain about inaccurate, unreliable data. In addition, the panel system is vulnerable to cheating on a massive scale. Smarty pants outfits sell a vast array of measurement boosters, from fake users that will come in just once a month to be counted as “unique” (they are indeed), to more sophisticated tactics such as undetectable “pop under” sites that will rely on encrypted URLs to deceive the vigilance of panel operators. In France for instance, 20% to 30% of some audiences can be bogus — or largely inflated. To its credit, Mediametrie — the French Nielsen affiliate that produces the most watched measurements — is expending vast resources to counter the cheating, and to make the whole model more reliable. It works, but progress is slow. In August 2012, Mediametrie Net Ratings (MNR), launched a Hybrid Measure taking into account site centric analytics (server logs) to rectify panel numbers, but those corrections are still erratic. And it takes more than a month to get the data, which is not acceptable for the real-time-obsessed internet. Publishers monitor the pulse of their digital properties on a permanent basis. In most newsrooms, Chartbeat (also imperfect, sometimes) displays the performance of every piece of content, and home pages get adjusted accordingly. More broadly, site-centric measures detail all possible metrics: page views, time spent, hourly peaks, engagement levels. This is based on server logs tracking dedicated tags inserted in each served page. But the site-centric measure is also flawed: If you use, say, four different devices — a smartphone, a PC at home, another at work, and a tablet — you will be incorrectly counted as four different users. And if you use several browsers you could be counted even more times. This inherent site-centric flaw is the best argument for panel vendors. But, in the era of Big Data and user profiling, panels no longer have the upper hand

We know Intel shunned ARM processors and played virtually no role in the smartphone revolution. But we now learn Steve Jobs asked Intel to build the iPhone microprocessor. Paul Otellini, Intel’s departing CEO, admits he should have followed his gut – and made the smartphone world a very different place. CEO valedictions follow a well-known script: My work is done here, great team, all mistakes are mine, all good deeds are theirs, I leave the company in strong hands, the future has never been brighter… It’s an opportunity for a leader to offer a conventional and contrived reminiscence, what the French call la toilette des souvenirs (which Google crudely translates as toilet memories instead of the affectionate and accurate dressing up memories). For his farewell, Paul Otellini, Intel’s departing CEO, chose the interview format with The Atlantic Monthly’s senior editor Alexis Madrigal. They give us a long (5,700+ words) but highly readable piece titled Paul Otellini’s Intel: Can the Company That Built the Future Survive It? Photo: Guardian.co.uk The punctuation mark at the title’s end refers to the elephantine question in the middle of Otellini’s record: Why did Intel miss out on the smartphone? Why did the company that so grandly dominates the PC market sit by while ARM architecture totally, and perhaps irretrievably, took over the new generation of phones — and most other embedded applications? According to Otellini, it was the result of Intel’s inertia: It took a while to move the machine. Madrigal backfills this uneasy explanation with equal unease: “The problem, really, was that Intel’s x86 chip architecture could not rival the performance per watt of power that designs licensed from ARM based on RISC architecture could provide. Intel was always the undisputed champion of performance, but its chips sucked up too much power. In fact, it was only this month that Intel revealed chips that seem like they’ll be able to beat the ARM licensees on the key metrics.” Note the tiptoeing: Intel’s new chips “seem like” they’ll be fast enough and cheap enough. Madrigal charitably fails to note how Intel, year after year, kept promising to beat ARM at the mobile game, and failed to do so. (See these 2010, 2011 and 2012 Monday Notes.) Last year, Intel was still at it, dismissively predicting “no future for ARM or any of its competitors“. Tell that to ARM Holdings, whose licensees shipped 2.6 billions chips in the first quarter of this year. Elsewhere in the article, Otellini offers a striking revelation: Fresh from anointing Intel as the microprocessor supplier for the Mac, Steve Jobs came back and asked Intel to design and build the CPU for Apple’s upcoming iPhone. (To clarify the chronology, the iPhone was announced early January, 2007; the CPU conversation must have taken place two years prior, likely before the June, 2005 WWDC where Apple announced the switch to x86. See Chapter 36 of Walter Isaacson’s Jobs bio for more.) Intel passed on the opportunity [emphasis mine]: “We ended up not winning it or passing on it, depending on how you want to view it. And the world would have been a lot different if we’d done it, […] Indeed, the world would have been different. Apple wouldn’t be struggling through a risky transition away from Samsung, its frenemy CPU supplier; the heart of the iPhone would be Made In America; Intel would have supplied processors for more than 500 million iOS devices, sold even more such chips to other handset makers to become as major a player in the smartphone (and tablet) space as it is in the PC world. Supply your own adjectives… Indulging briefly in more What If reverie, compare the impact of Intel’s wrong turn to a better one: How would the world look like if, at the end of 1996, Gil Amelio hadn’t returned Apple back to Steve Jobs? (My recollection of th

LONDON — With the same publishing platform used by its staff and it network of 1000 contributors, Forbes.com is increasing branded content in the form of articles published on brands micro-sites.   The company is publishing about 8 such articles a day and is expanding into branded video projects, says Mike Perlis, President and CEO of Forbes Media, in this interview with Beet.TV The platform is called BrandVoice. While the company publishes about 8 such articles a day, that is quite small compared to the daily Forbes.com editorial flow of about 400 article. We interviewed him at the FT Digital Media Conference in London last month, where he was a speaker.