CYNOPSISDIGITAL
05.01.14 Good morning. It’s Thursday, May 1, 2014, and this is your first early morning digital briefing.
Hulu brought in an all-star cast (including Seth Meyers, Mindy Kaling, and band Capital Cities) to ramp up excitement and laughs at its morning NewFront presentation at the Hammerstein Ballroom. Hosted by Saturday Night Live cast member (and Awesomes voice) Cecily Strong, the show was a tight, professional presentation spotlighting options for advertisers, Hulu-style. CEO Mike Hopkins revealed that Hulu Plus now has more than six million subscribers on more than 400 million devices, and users are spending 50 minutes on the service on desktops. In addition, SVP of Advertising Peter Naylor unveiled Hulu’s ad platforms: the In-stream Purchase Unit with Pizza Hut as its launch partner, Cross Platform Interactive ads with launch partner Corona Extra and the Hulu 360 ad, which recognizes a user’s device type to better target ads. "In the short term, we want to look at any areas of friction, and take a hard look at programmatic buying. We also want to give clients early looks at originals and at our ad innovations," Naylor told Cynopsis. The Hulu advantage, he added, is that the service "has so much subscriber data that it makes it easier to connect the dots."
Over the next year, Hulu will triple its content marketing spend to spread the word about the following original shows that have been renewed: Deadbeat, Seth Meyer‘s animated series The Awesomes, Quick Draw and latino original series East Los High, which are all coming back for a second season. Mindy Kaling of The Mindy Project and Community‘s Gillian Jacobs and Danny Pudi presented the exclusive release of their series on the platform. May 28th will mark the U.S. debut of teen dance drama The Next Step.
Breaking Bad star Bryan Cranston kicked off the Crackle NewFront yesterday, introducing Tightrope, the comedy detective series he’ll be executive producing for the service. Crackle has also signed a video upfront agreement with Spark, part of the Publicis Groupe, that gives the agency and its clients access to premium video inventory across Crackle’s long-form network. The deal includes a first look at a number of integrations into Crackle original shows and movies and also awards them a first look at upcoming measurement and video capabilities.SVP of Advertising Sales James Smith said, "We can do traditional brand integration, or something as offbeat as Jerry Seinfeld pointing out the product placement in a series."
Other highlights include:
Sports Jeopardy!: Sony Pictures’ hit game show gets sporty. The show will air weekly for 52 weeks and is hosted by Emmy-Award winning sportscaster-Dan Patrick.
Chad Michael Murray showed up to announce that Chosen is in production for a fourth season. The series is executive produced by Milo Ventimiglia and Russ Cundiff alongside creators Ben Ketai (30 DAYS OF NIGHT: DARK DAYS) and Ryan Lewis (HIGH SCHOOL, FAT KID RULES THE WORLD).
Via video, Jerry Seinfeld introduced his Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee (40 million views), which has been renewed for four more seasons (24 eps). With Acura as the main sponsor, the new season will boast guests like Sarah Jessica Parker and Jon Stewart. It debuts this summer.
The Throwaways: a feature film scheduled to premiere this winter. Exec produced by Jeremy Renner and Don Handfield, the thriller is about a notorious hacker captured by the CIA who either has to work for the agency or spend the rest of his life in prison.
"Our users do what they view," said Digital Sales Executive Vice President Beth Lawrence as she opened the inaugural Scripps Networks Interactive NewFront in New York yesterday. The lifestyle network was ready to tout their best wares through their original digital series and web platform Ulive, all while having a good time. Such a good time, in fact, that at one point, rapper Vanilla Ice (Ice Does Digital) and host Bert Kreischer (Travel Channel‘s Trip Flip) danced together on stage to the 1989 hit "Ice Ice Baby." Annoucements included:
- On Ulive, more than 50 new and returning series will roll out this year, including HGTV host and interior designer Sabrina Soto’s Secrets of a Super Aunt and The Lo Down (wt) featuring TV personality Lo Bosworth. Yoga Rebel also returns for a second season featuring yoga guru and model Tara Stiles.
- Food brands including FoodNetwork.com, CookingChannelTV.com and Food.com (with 40 million monthly active users) introduced the digital-only companion series to Chopped called Chopped After Hours. Celeb chef Bobby Flay unveiled his show Bobby Flay Fit, and SNL’s new cast member Sasheer Zamata will cook up some fun in Fodder.
- Travel Channel will produce nine new original series, and has renewed four entries including A Day in the Life and Host’s Hometown, hosted by Kreischer, Man Find Food’s Adam Richman and Bizarre Foods America’s Andrew Zimmern.
Scripps also announced a partnership with Twitter Amplify‘s promoted tweets program. Starting in the first quarter, the first shows to take on this platform are Guy’s Grocery Games, Cutthroat Kitchen, The Kitchen and Great Holiday Bake-Off (wt). Brands will be able to inject their message into real-time social TV conversations offering them a simple mobile and social extension for true two-screen campaigns.
YouTube packed Madison Square Gen for its Brandcast event last night at the Theater at Madison Square Garden, pumping up the crowd with a DJ blasting music to viral YouTube videos and special choreography from So You Think You Can Dance and DanceOn‘s Travis Wall. The streaming site brought in creators like Bethany Mota and producers of the hit inspiration channel SoulPancake, host of Redbull Signature Series‘ Sal Masekela (behind Felix Baumgartner’s viral spacejump video). "We look at YouTube as an alternative source of entertainment, but those under 35 look at it as a way of life," said Google’s President, Sales, Americas, Margo Georgiadis.
The evening’s big announcement was about Google Preferred, an initiative that allows buyers to more easily purchase the 5% top-tier content and to effectively measure video performance. Marketers will also be guaranteed to reach the scale of audience they’re targeting.
Other News:
* DREAMWORKS TV, DreamWorks Animation’s all new FAMILY channel, which will feature original live-action and animation content specifically for YouTube. It officially launches this summer.
* DigitasLBi is signing on to Google Preferred. "The introduction of Google Preferred is the undeniable evidence that there is scarcity in premium online video and it is a marketplace at an exciting tipping point," said Tony Weisman, CEO of DigitasLBi. Brands like Johnson and Johnson and Heineken have already embraced the Google Preferred plan.
Whose NewFront have you liked best so far? Vote at http://www.cynopsis.com/
Spain’s Hola! TV is launching today on DirecTV. A spinoff of the lifestyle and entertainment magazines Hola! and Hello!, Hola! TV will feature more than 500 hours a year of original Spanish-language lifestyle and entertainment programming. It launched six months ago in Latin America and is a joint venture between Spanish media group Atresmedia, and HOLA! Magazine.
The Onion is continuing its efforts to position itself as more than just a print publication, with the debut of three web series that parody different media entities. "Who’s F**king" is an homage of sorts to the New York Times‘ vows section and "will combine the earnest romance of the NYT’s love stories with vulgar descriptions of lewd sex acts," Tubefilter reports. "Wonderverse" is a satire of "Cosmos" while "ClickHole" will poke fun at such organizations as BuzzFeed and Upworthy.
Rovi has been busy lately. The company has signed a deal with the National Cable and Telecommunications Association to offer access to Rovi DTA Guide Technology for NCTA member companies. Rovi has also renewed an agreement with Panasonic for a multiyear global license that includes Latin American and China coverage. Finally, Rovi has signed a long-term renewal and patent license agreement with Canadian cable and satellite pay-TV provider Shaw Communications.
Flipps, which created an app to help stream content from mobile devices to connected TVs, raised $2.4 million from Earlybird Venture Capital and existing investors.
Vevo goes live in Mexico today, marking the 14th territory launch for the music video and entertainment platform.
TiVo has announced that it now has more than 4.5 million subscribers, a jump from its previous record of 4.45 million subscribers that it had at the end of 2006, zatznotfunny.com points out. Nearly half of TiVo’s current subscribers come from Virgin Media in the UK. In 2006, more than half of the subscribers were from DirecTV.
TravelChannel.com greenlighted nine new web series, including "All American Sideshow," "Fall Foliage," "Microbrew Madness," "Next Travel Channel Star," "Off Road Trippin’: Texas," "The Perfect Shot," "Top 10 Locals List," "Travel Fact or Fiction," and "Travel’s Best." It has also renewed four other web series: "A Day in the Life," "Gear Guide," "Ghost Fit," and "Host’s Hometown."
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BlackArrow and Nielsen are working together to accelerate the adoption of On-Demand Commercial Ratings by the pay-TV industry. Nielsen ran a successful test of ODCR with Comcast late last year and is now looking to roll it out across the industry.
Cablevision and ActiveVideo plan to deploy the new CloudTV AdCast platform later this year. American Express will be the first advertiser to test the new platform that allows delivery of HTML5 interactive ads from the cloud and simplifies the process of extending rich, graphic-intensive ads to television.
Supercell tops the Apple iOS games revenue list for the month of March, VentureBeat reports, followed by King and GungHo Online. The top five are unchanged from February’s list. However, Sweden’s Mediocre scored with the new Smash Hit as it was the top game download for the month. The remaining top-five game downloads were King’s Farm Heroes, Green Chili‘s Flappy Wings, Glu‘s Frontline Commando 2, and Ketchapp Studio‘s 2048.
Zynga cofounder Eric Schiermeyer has a new game studio, Luminary, which is getting ready to launch its first game, Greedy Goblin. The goal "is to send your goblin racing into a rival fortress and then steal as much gold as possible," VentureBeat reports.
What’s the best way to maximize your NewFronts efforts this year? Check out 4 Smart ways in our Cynsiders column on the new cynopsis.com.
Saffron Digital has named Tom Ramsey as Senior Director of Sales. Ramsey has held executive management positions at Starz Entertainment Group, CSTV/CBS Sports, FOX Sports Net, and Quickplay Media.
The Africa Channel has added Narendra Reddy Senior Vice President of Programming & Production and has promoted Brian Newton to Vice President of Marketing & Digital. Newton was previously the channel’s creative director while Reddy was the general manager fro DreamWorks Animation India.
A CYNOPSIS MESSAGE
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May 20, 2014 @ 1:30 3:00 PM EST | REGISTER NOW!.
It’s a tearjerker, but we loved this spot for Pfizer that has gotten more than 4 million views. It’s a wonderful story told without words of the love of a brother for his ill little sister. We dare you not to have a lump in your throat. Check it out at www.cynopsis.com
See you tomorrow,
Jessica Reese @JMarieReese
05.01.14
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