Benton RSS Feed
Despite an unstable economy and increased competition, traditional television is apparently holding its own in getting its share of advertising dollars.
“The investment community thinks broadcast TV is going away, but we are not seeing that,” says Marci Ryvicker, who covers media for Wells Fargo Securities. “You still have growth in the industry and that’s a really important concept.” Ryvicker’s remarks were part of a panel on the media economy moderated by TVNewsCheck Editor Harry Jessell this morning at the TVB Forward conference in New York. Despite small fluctuations, the nearly 25% of total advertising dollars being spent on TV this year is relatively close to the percentage spent in previous years, Ryvicker says. The percentage of ad money going to newspapers and radio is down, with some of that money being redirected to the growing mediums of cable and the Internet. National spot advertising is expected to be up 16.2% this year, and local spot sales are expected to grow 8.4%, primarily due to political advertising. And although those figures will decline significantly in 2013, when stations won’t have the benefit of election spending, Ryvicker says she believes broadcast TV ad revenue will continue to rise. Much of next year’s growth is expected to come through local spot sales to the auto industry.
Ryvicker: Local TV Advertising is Here to Stay
A new report from the bipartisan Information Technology and Innovation Foundation outlines major differences and several similarities in telecom policy between President Barack Obama and candidate Mitt Romney, many rooted in the basic Democrat/Republican divide over the role of government regulation.
Based information gleaned from "campaign websites, party platforms, administration documents, and media reports," the study looks at a number of topics, including broadband telecommunications policy. While the President has not commented on a report from his tech advisers on sharing government spectrum (to free up more for wireless), the Republican Party platform calls for a federal spectrum inventory to identify surplus that can be auctioned. The Obama Administration supports network neutrality conditions on some spectrum auctions and substantial spectrum allocations for unlicensed use. Romney would not place net neutrality conditions on auctions and would allocate "much less" spectrum for unlicensed. On the FCC's network neutrality rules, the Obama Administration has given its strong support, and supports exempting wireless nets from most net neutrality rules. The Romney camp would prefer market forces over regulation, and would rather not apply the rules to either wired or wireless broadband. The Republican Party platform calls the net neutrality rules an attempt to micromanage telecom policy.
ITIF Report Compares Obama, Romney Broadband Telecom Policies Comparing the 2012 Presidential Candidates’ Technology and Innovation Policies (ITIF)
The Federal Trade Commission has charged the Coleadium, Inc. affiliate network which uses the name “Ads4Dough,” and its owner, with recruiting affiliate marketers that made deceptive claims on fake news sites to promote acai berry supplements, and so-called “colon cleansers,” as weight-loss products.
According to the FTC, in addition to misleading consumers about the effectiveness of the supposed weight-loss products, the marketers recruited by the defendants also promoted “free trials” of the products, in which consumers were tricked into signing up for additional shipments of products, and were billed monthly. Under the agreed-upon settlement, the defendants will pay $1 million, and will be required to monitor affiliate marketers in their network to ensure that their statements are truthful and in compliance with federal advertising law.
FTC Charges Second "Affiliate Network" of Internet Advertisers with Deceiving Consumers by Using Fake News Sites Old ploy network (FTC blog)
Senate Homeland Security Chairman Joe Lieberman (I-CT) said there is little chance the Senate will revisit his proposed cybersecurity legislation until after the November election.
Sen Lieberman, a lead sponsor of the Cybersecurity Act of 2012, also said he supports a review by the White House of possible executive actions to boost cybersecurity. The broad cybersecurity bill has White House support but stalled amid partisan sniping and finger-pointing before Congress recessed in August. Republican critics say the bill could create regulations for private computer networks that would be burdensome to businesses.
Senate Unlikely to Revisit Cybersecurity Bill before Election, Lieberman Says
Mobile operator 3 Hong Kong will offer its subscribers a WhatsApp Roaming Pass for $8 ($1 USD) a month that gives them unlimited access to WhatsApp services without counting it against their data caps, or a $48 ($6.19 USD) daily pass offering unlimited WhatsApp use and 5MB of service in 78 destinations around the world.
WhatsApp, the popular texting app that has taken a huge chunk out of operators’ lucrative texting plans around the world, has been working to get closer to carriers. But this deal is worth paying attention to because if it succeeds in giving customers what they want while also helping carriers mitigate the margin-shaving effect of over the top services, it may be the future of mobile data plans. Instead of buying a bucket of bytes, what if users ended up buying a bucket of bytes and access to a few favorite apps? Then the mobile pricing looks more like an a la carte cable offering and less like forcing people to pay an arbitrary fee for a device ($40 for a smartphone!) in addition to the bucket of bytes as new plans from AT&T and Verizon do.
Behold! The a la carte pay TV model is coming to your mobile data plan
Mobile phone makers collectively will ship a whopping billion smartphones a year by 2016, according to NPD Group’s DisplaySearch group. In comparison, the total number of smartphones shipped will be around 567 million this year, the research group says.
These shipment numbers include new and replacement devices. With a billion devices, I wonder if there will be such a thing as a feature phone by 2016? The impact of those shipments is going to be profound on everything from the chip business, to sensors, to the amount of data we create and bandwidth we consume. I can only imagine how a billion computers in our hand will transform societies.
A billion smartphones shipping by 2016
Chances are you've visited city Facebook pages for information on local events, city services or elected officials. But how can you be sure you've landed on the city's official page and not a look-a-like? With so many groups and organizations representing a municipality in some way, it can be confusing for a user to determine who can legitimately lay claim to the official city moniker. The social media giant has been contacting cities and governments across the globe to get them to make adjustments to page names deemed too generic in order to help eliminate some of the confusion.
On a webinar given by Facebook in conjunction with the National League of Cities (NLC) on Tuesday, Sept. 11, Facebook's Public Policy Manager Katie Harbath explained what cities must do to properly distinguish their Facebook page as the official hub of the city, such as adding “government" to its name to avoid confusion. On the whole, the new rules are vague, and Facebook hasn’t effectively communicated the reasons for the change — apologies for which led the discussion. According to the NLC, Munich, Germany, lost access rights to its Facebook page for failing to comply with the new guidelines on the company's timetable. According to Harbath, while many cities have been contacted, the company is still working its way through all pages potentially affected.
Cities Must Change Facebook Page Names, or Else
Most media buyers are counting the days to the 2012 election. But it's got nothing to do with casting their vote to help determine the next President of the United States. Thanks in large part to excessive Super PAC spending, the 2012 elections will see paid media spending reach as high as $9 billion across all media channels.
In fact, there was more money to spend than the traditional election ad season could handle. As a result, battleground states have been seeing ads since May -- two months earlier than usual. At its peak, more than 80% of October’s TV ads are predicted to be election-oriented. This election season has media buyers in a constant state of alert. Regardless of which state, local broadcast buyers are often forced to revisit their clients' best-laid plans as their ads get preempted by political ads that pay an excessive amount for their clients’ spots. We're advising clients to move to less saturated channels, or programming targeted less by political ads, during the election ad season. But some brands see this season as an opportunity to stand out in contrast to consumer media's political cacophony. In this instance, shifting the focus from spots to integration is key.
[Pistulka is a Senior Specialist, Broadcast at Empower MediaMarketing]
Political Ad Tracker: Frontline Intel From A Battleground State
[Commentary] Google’s system isn’t the answer to Universal Service.
The first network in a town or region generally has an obligation to serve everyone, and the government will subsidize telephone service to hard-to-reach areas where the cost exceeds the norm. The Federal Communications Commission is in the process of converting the Universal Service Fund from a vehicle for conventional telephone service to an up-to-date program that supports both cellular and broadband, but the conversion is just getting started. In the meantime, we certainly can’t expect that the newest and fastest networks built entirely with private financing will serve everyone. They will serve those who can be served in a financially sustainable manner, and the rest will depend on subsidies.
Creating demand for broadband is essential to creating competition to build better networks. Other essentials are making it easy to get access to Rights of Way, and subsidizing broadband service in remote areas until they have enough demand to support a private network in a sustainable way. We’re undergoing a once-a-century transformation in how telecom works, thanks to the Internet and the smart phone, so there’s bound to be some disruption of long-running programs along the way. That’s why it’s important to have a clear goal and to deal with the obstacles that come up along the way.
Supply and Demand in Kansas City
[Commentary] The Rural Cellular Association, the small carriers’ lobbying group, pressed their case for handset subsidies. They’re formed a new front group called The Interoperability Alliance. If they have their way, handsets will become larger, slower, more expensive, and heavier for the 70% of Americans who have the poor taste to buy cellular service from the two largest carriers.
The “interoperability” that the group seeks has three actual effects:
- It makes the low-cost spectrum licenses that RCA members bought for the lower 700 MHz band more valuable.
- It raises the cost of mainstream smartphones.
- It puts the FCC in the middle of the design process for future smartphones.
Under-the-Table Subsidies