Dear TV, Don’t Make The Same Mistakes Digital Did.
When it comes to TV, one thing is clear: the OTT market is exploding. In 2018, OTT services raked in more than $28B in revenue, and that number is expected... Read More
Four Lessons from the Demise of MoviePass, Part 2
In my last article, I described two of the four biggest lessons to be learned from MoviePass’s demise. Here are the final two lessons. Lesson 3: Beware the hidden (or... Read More
Week In Review: ESPN Hits 2M Subs For Plus, CBS Hits 2.6M Streamers For The Super Bowl
1. ESPN Hits 2M Subs For Plus ESPN+ now has over two million viewers and Disney is understandably pleased with the results, given that the service is just 9 months old.... Read More
How Does Digital Compete with TV-Like Numbers?
We may all be addicted to our phones, and we surely have NO IDEA how that is changing our cognitive functions, our relationship to our community, let alone how it... Read More
Jeep, In-Game TV Ads Dominate Super Bowl Social Video
Jeep didn’t have a Super Bowl ad, but social video results show the car brand’s “spot” earned enough impact that it may as well have.... Read More
Streaming Services Came Out to Play During Super Bowl LIII
Competing with TV doesn’t mean streaming services can ignore TV completely (especially when it comes to ads), as the Super Bowl proved again on Sunday.... Read More
Roku’s Extreme Walled Garden Is A Bold But Risky Move
Roku announced an even more extreme version of the so-called “walled garden” today, in a press release that outlined how Roku’s version of Amazon’s Channel Store concept would work. Viewers... Read More
Viacom Building Formidable Ad-Supported Alternative For Hollywood’s Digital Future
With its $340 million acquisition of ad-supported streaming service Pluto TV, Viacom has added another important piece to its transformation as a player in the digital world. Importantly, the company... Read More
Maybe It’s Not The Algorithm
There’s been a lot of talk about how Netflix’s amazingly awesome algorithms were responsible for taking the show You from purgatory on Lifetime and turning it into a streaming hit. ... Read More
The Ad Champs of the Championship Games
Mama Meme Me This year’s Super Bowl advertisers seem a little slow to the punch compared to years past with only 17 pre-teasers designated through Sunday, down dramatically from years... Read More
Netflix Turns Up Heat In Online Video’s Shark Pool As Three More Services Jump In
As if the pool of big fish in on-demand video wasn’t already stuffed full, this past week saw three more sharks dive in, just to make it interesting, along with... Read More
WEEK IN REVIEW: Amazon Launches Its Own FAST, Hulu, AT&T Get Attributable.
1. Amazon Launches Its Own FAST Happy 2019. While rumors of Amazon launching its own FAST (Free Ad-Supported Streaming TV Service) have been swirling about for a few months now,... Read More
Questions (and Opportunities) Around ESPN’s College Football Megacast
ESPN’s latest megacast opened up some questions — and great opportunities — for the network to explore for OTT advertising.... Read More
2018 Advertising Review: Top Brands By Spend, Impressions and More
Before we get too far into 2019, we thought we’d take a look back at the last year in television advertising — based on complete data (vs. the full-year projections... Read More
CBS Has A Plan B, And Its Name Isn’t Nielsen
Remember how last week in our TVREV predictions, number 10 was “Networks insist on adding ACR data to Nielsen”? Well call us prescient yet again. While at CES, we wound... Read More
Netflix’s Merry Holiday Season Sets It Up To Survive Challenging 2019 Competition
There, he said it: “Netflix, Netflix, Netflix.” If that punchline to a joke by host Andy Samberg wasn’t quite the theme of Sunday night’s broadcast of the Golden Globe Awards,... Read More
The Year Ahead. Our Fearless Predictions For 2019, Part 2 of 2
Picking up where we left off with Part 1, here are our last six predictions for 2019. 7. As the content bubble explodes, a lot of great shows get lost... Read More
Q&A With WHOSAY CEO Steve Ellis On Integrating Influencer Marketing For Success
Steve Ellis is founder and CEO of WHOSAY, which after nearly a decade is one of the oldest and largest influencer-marketing agencies in the business. And as of about a... Read More
The Age of Interruption is Over, But the TV Business Doesn’t Want to Address It
Over the holiday break, if you were able to pull yourself away from whatever binge show you’ve been engorging yourself on, there was an abundance of great sports to watch... Read More
The Year Ahead. Our Fearless Predictions For 2019, Part 1 of 2
It’s that time of year again, time for us to get out our crystal balls and predict the future. Before you laugh, remember that we were spot on last year... Read More
WEEK IN REVIEW: AT&T and Hulu Launch “Pause” Ads, Amazon Starts Selling Chromecasts Again
1. AT&T and Hulu Launch “Pause” Ads Given the popularity of binge viewing, both Hulu and AT&T decided that rather than bury their heads in the sand and pretend it... Read More
The ‘Identity Crisis’ in Video Advertising
The ‘Identity Crisis’ in Video Advertising The video industry, in keeping with its tradition of storytelling, loves to summarize epochal industry dynamics into short catchphrases. First, when streaming video was... Read More