Comedy Central's "Fully Torqued" phallic billboard on Hollywood's Sunset Boulevard touting the new season of its Workaholics sitcom is awfully silly. TMZ claiming that its coverage of the sign is an "Exclu-Stiff" is even sillier. The show follows the lives of three recent college grads—and they finished cum laude, judging from that billboard. I'm not entirely sure what I meant by that, but I'm a firm believer that HBO got a bigger bang for its buck using a similar concept to promote Hung two years ago. The TMZ commenters' views on the Workaholics ad are priceless.
Read MoreUSA is doubling down on its commitment to digital media this year, with a broad portfolio of ancillary projects—six, covering the network's slate of originals—to boost viewership, draw in megafans, and provide deeper ad integrations for the shows' partners while the series are running. This year, the company has not one but four major automotive sponsors (Ford, Toyota, Lincoln and Lexus) buying tie-in digital integrations, and Capital One on a fifth.
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The pay TV business continued to expand in the first quarter, but that growth is clearly decelerating. The top 10 publicly traded operators of cable, satellite and telecommunications-based pay TV services added 494,000 video subscribers in the first quarter, according to data compiled by paidContent from Q1 earnings reports. That represents just 54 percent of the quarter-to-quarter growth reported by these companies in Q1 2009, when the U.S. was mired in recession. Earlier in the week, Sanford Bernstein senior analyst Craig Moffett released data indicating the total subscriber gain to be only around 422,000 — in addition to the hard data released by
Read MoreAlong with the headache of making sure TV ads that get bumped by politicals are quickly rescheduled, advertising agencies also will have to cope with the Federal Communications Commission’s controversial new rule requiring TV stations to post online the rates charged for each political ad. “Rates for the political season could show up in databases and on buyers’ desktops, and other buys would be measured by this,” said John Shelton, the CEO of Strata, a provider of software-based buying tools. “This is more likely to impact the business outside politics rather than the business inside politics.” Broadcasters warned that having ad-rate data readily available online would put stations at a marked disadvantage as they compete with other local media outlets. It was a concern FCC commissioner Mignon Clyburn, a former newspaper publisher, acknowledged even as she voted for the rule. The move could leave both buyer and seller with a lot to explain during the hectic advertising season. The concern is that advertisers would demand the same ad rate as others without regard to the specific factors that drove their campaign. “I don’t want this to create more questions about local markets in our clients’ minds that might discourage them not to buy local,” said Maribeth Papuga, an evp and director of local investment for MediaVest. However, Tony Sweeney, svp, media director at Philadelphia-based LevLane, said there may be an upside in terms of transparency, noting “that level of detail doesn’t typically get discussed.”
Read MoreABC News and Univision on Monday announced a joint venture to launch an English-language TV news network aimed at Hispanic Americans. Both partners will own a 50 percent stake in the network, which is yet to be named. The signal will go live sometime in the first half of 2013. Financial terms were not disclosed. In advance of the network’s linear TV debut, ABC News/Univision will unveil a new website this summer. Content tailored for mobile devices and a social media component are also in the works. Aimed at the nation’s English-speaking and bilingual Hispanic population, the network will cover the issues that are particularly relevant to the growing demographic, including: the economy, jobs, health care, immigration, education and politics. Along with hard news, the channel also will offer a measure of lifestyle/entertainment programming. In selecting English as its default setting, the new network is looking to serve assimilated Hispanics and those who effortlessly toggle between the two languages in school, at work and at home. As the country’s largest Spanish-language media organization, Univision already provides news content in its native tongue. According to the most recent U.S. Census data, the Hispanic population as of April 2010 stood at 50.5 million, marking a 43 percent increase from 35.3 million in 2000. Mexicans are by far the predominant ethnic group in the Hispanic subset (31.8 million). Hispanics now account for 16 percent of the country’s total population. That number is projected to nearly double to around 30 percent by 2050
Read MoreNBCUniversal is certainly getting its mileage out of Joel McHale's contracts: a day after the Community
Read MoreHere’s a new trailer for HBO’s upcoming series, “The Newsroom” by famed Hollywood screenwriter Aaron Sorkin. The series — by the man behind the hit television show, “The West Wing” and the Facebook movie, “The Social Network” — is set at a cable news channel under siege in the new media age. In other words, lots of hand-wringing over blogs and tweeting, along with the drama. It looks tasty and Walt Mossberg and I will be asking Sorkin about it at the 10th D: All Things Digital conference at the end of this month, where he will be appearing as a speaker . Enjoy (I also included another trailer for the show that starts off the series):
Read MoreTruTV is headed into its upfront season with a new slate of reality programs and a new mandate: define "reality." These days, said executive vp and COO Marc Juris, the discussion of reality programming isn't nearly nuanced enough.
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