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 MoreOn Tuesday (Apr. 24) AOL looked to maximize the attention the Digital Content NewFronts—a string to TV-upfront-styled events—have been receiving over the past couple months. Case in point: the portal used its event to announce not just new content but also new properties including a cross-platform video hub, iPad and mobile apps and even a fantasy league. AOL chairman and CEO Tim Armstrong didn’t make an appearance until late into Tuesday’s event, but when he did show up on stage it was to announce the AOL On Network, underscoring the video platform’s importance to the company’s strategy going forward. The product was born out of AOL’s acquisition of online video distribution company 5min Media in September 2010 and is overseen by former 5min cofounder Ran Harnevo who serves as svp of AOL On and manned the bulk of the network’s presentation. The AOL On Network consists of 14 channels siloed into verticals such as News, Entertainment, Tech, Parenting and Travel. The network will stream videos across the Web on various non AOL sites, as well as through mobile and tablet sites and apps as well as
Read MoreI am very, very skeptical about Walmart’s new “disc to digital” service , where you pay money to convert your old DVDs into files you can access from the cloud. Who wants to haul their discs to a store — and take out their credit card — to do something that should work at home, for free? BTIG Research’s Rich Greenfield has the same take, more or less. But Greenfield has actually gone ahead and tried the service out ( registration required ), and he thinks the experience itself is … really good: “We believe Vudu is a very well done iVOD/EST service and, at worst, Vudu will gain far greater consumer awareness from the industry’s disc-to-digital marketing campaign.” I still think the overall concept is flawed here. If Hollywood wants people to embrace this idea, which is designed to promote high-margin movie purchases instead of lower-margin rentals, it shouldn’t involve travel and an upfront payment. And some of the fine print will trip people up, as well. As I noted last month, Walmart’s scheme comes with some important asterisks, like the fact that Disney/Pixar titles won’t work, and that iPad users can only stream the files to their machine, and can’t download them. But give Walmart credit for a digital product that seemingly does at least some of what it ought to do, right out of the box. Greenfield has a seven-minute walk-through of the process (spoiler: contains no violence, nudity or adult themes), if you’re interested:
Read MoreTop News: Hollywood org looks to further outreach to biz community
Read More
When a movie opens to nearly $153 million dollars, the studio executives backing it always tend to look like geniuses. But in the case of the Lionsgate (NYSE: LGF) marketing department, what they did digitally to stoke buzz for youth-novel adaptationHunger Games is earning them a particularly large amount of street cred among their envious peers. Emphasizing the creation of digital content based on writer Suzanne Collins’ popular source novel in lieu of more expensive ad buys, Lionsgate may have created a template for other studios to follow. “I can’t emphasize enough what they were able to accomplish with so little money,”
Read MoreFilm News: Sets Feb. 2 date at Hollywood & Highland Grand Ballroom
Read More
SANTA MONICA, Calif. — Selling a movie used to be a snap. You printed a poster, ran trailers in theaters and carpet-bombed NBC’s Thursday night lineup with ads. Today, that kind of campaign would get a movie marketer fired. The dark art of movie promotion increasingly lives on the Web, where studios are playing a wilier game, using social media and a blizzard of other inexpensive yet effective online techniques to pull off what may be the marketer’s ultimate trick: persuading fans to persuade each other. The art lies in allowing fans to feel as if they are discovering a film, but
Read MoreMan vs. Wild star Bear Grylls has been canned by Discovery, according to the network. “Due to a continuing contractual dispute with Bear Grylls, Discovery has terminated all current productions with him," a network spokeswoman said via email. Rumors abound, of course. Sister publication The Hollywood Reporter says that Discovery couldn't get Grylls to participate in two unannounced projects that were part of his contract. What's most surprising about the cancellation is that Man vs. Wild consistently performs well for Discovery, with a 1.1 million viewer average over the most recent season. Whatever Grylls did to anger the powers that be at the network, it must have been vexing enough to make his numbers appear to be more trouble than they're worth.
Read MoreWeb video distributor Blip has a new CEO: Discovery’s Kelly Day, who had been at the cable network for seven years, most recently as the head of its U.S. Web sites and e-commerce. Day takes the spot vacated by Blip founder Mike Hudack , who left the company last fall. She’s one of several top hires the Web video company has made in recent years with traditional media credentials. COO Steve Brookstein , who joined a year ago, spent most of his career at cable providers like Comcast. And sales chief Evan Gotlib came to Blip after stints at Conde Nast, Time Inc. and Disney. Blip was one of many Web video start-ups created in the wake of YouTube, and it deserves credit simply for sticking around since then. Blip’s co-founders were smart enough not to make it a (would-be) YouTube competitor and focused instead on helping video creators distribute and sell their stuff on other sites. By last year that business was generating around $10 million a year , and Blip now says the clips it distributes generate around 300 million video views a month. Which sounds big unless you compare it to YouTube, which generates four billion views a day. Blip doesn’t need to worry about YouTube’s scale per se, but it does need to pay attention to the video giant’s renewed focus on “professional” content. That means clips from Hollywood talent but also from the new breed of Web video natives that Blip has made its living helping out.
Read More
Comcast, cablevision, cox and ... Netflix? Netflix has been careful to describe itself as a complement to cable distributors, but as it quietly tests network-branded pages in what appears to be an effort to give content partners more visibility, it risks positioning itself as a substitute for cable packages. These pages, which Netflix is trying out with a few cable networks, let Netflix users browse shows by TV network. Viacom , the parent of MTV, Nickelodeon and Comedy Central, and Discovery Communications, whose networks include Animal Planet and TLC, appear to be the first companies testing these pages. But finding the network-branded pages
Read More
