TV Audience Fragmentation: Realizing the Advertising Opportunity

by Gerard Broussard, Pre-meditatedmedia.com

May marks a time of year when advertisers, media agencies and networks crouch to their starting-block positions in anticipation of the start of TV’s upfront marketplace. Like so many years past, thoughts run the gamut from what will be the hottest new programs to which networks or agencies will set the pace for the pricing of national TV commercial inventory during the coming year. The upfront process can be thought of as the ultimate sausage- making machine with as much as 65%-80% of the ingredients (one year’s TV inventory) being squeezed through for sale over the course of a six-week period. As this annual event unfolds, it makes sense to reflect on its true purpose: to deliver entertainment to viewers while tendering marketing value for the event’s ultimate underwriter, the advertiser.

by Dave Zornow

Ad sales people and researchers are always looking for compelling stories on how advertising is effective — and something a smart marketer can’t do without. Here’s a story which proves that point to retailers — using their own words and emotional outrage.

The Village of Haverstraw, NY passed a local ordinance banning cigarette Point-Of-Sale Advertising beginning in October 2012. And the retailers and their trade groups went ballistic. Retailers and their trade groups cried foul in Big Implications for a Little Village’s Ban, a convenience store trade publication article about new regulations passed this Spring to ban tobacco advertising in convenience stores in the Lower Hudson Valley Hamlet Northwest of New York City.

We all know that politics is a full contact sport. But does the campaign of Arkansas Republican Steve Womack have cat blood on his hands, after a “hit job” takes out a competing campaign manager’s family pet?

by Larry Elkin

There was something refreshing in the political scene Wednesday when congressional sponsors ran away, as fast as they could, from two ill-considered bills that sought to stamp out Internet piracy by more or less stamping out the Internet.

It was fun to watch politicians on both sides of the aisle scurry together in search of cover.

by Bill Batson

I recently pulled a Rip Van Winkle. I did not touch a computer keyboard or cell phone from 2007 until 2011. As a resident of a village in the region of the world depicted in Washington Irving’s immortal short story, I embrace my kindred spirit Van Winkle. Skipping five years of technology in the 21st century isn’t so different than Rip Van Winkle’s 18 year hiatus during the 1700’s.

by Larry Elkin

The young people who started the Occupy Wall Street protest a few weeks ago are about to learn some important lessons about life in the grown-up world.

It’s college graduation time. Which means hugging, crying, packing, moving and worrying about what the future holds.

This year’s graduation at Ithaca College in upstate New York connected baby boomer parents with their recent graduates via the shocking realization that if Dustin Hoffman’s character in the graduate was real, he would be retiring this year. And what a working career he would have had.

Once serious but lately comedic actor Leslie Nielsen died last weekend at age 83. Famous for his Airplane and Naked Gun appearances, he once tried to compete with the other Nielsen — according to this 1998 April Fool’s article.

Detective Frank Drebin, we’re going to miss you.

At Thanksgiving dinners across the country this weekend, travelers asked, “Is airport scanning designed to creep out the tourists or the terrorists?

Would stratified sampling be a better way to root out the bad guys without lessening our collective confidence in the TSA?

A religious hurricane forecast to hit a suburban NYC community in November, 2010 changed course at the last minute, allowing a high school production of The Laramie Project to take the stage with no worries about religious fundamentalists disrupting the play.

But to end the story there would be to miss “a teachable moment” about the averted storm – and why local reporters needed to write about it.