Today’s Premieres
Apple TV+: Best Foot Forward; Trying
CBS: Blood & Treasure at 9p
National Geographic: Cesar Millan: Better Human Better Dog at 9p
Netflix: Blown Away
Reelz: On Patrol: Live at 9p

Today’s Finale
WE tv: Mama June: From Not to Hot at 9p

Saturday’s Premiere
OWN: Black Love at 10p

Sunday’s Premieres
Discovery+: 90 Fiance UK
Disney Channel: The Secret Life of Pets at 7p
HGTV: Ugliest House in America: Ugly in Paradise at 8p; Renovation Island at 9p; Mexico Life at 10:30p

Sunday’s Finales
Food Network: Beachside Brawl at 10p
PBS: Hotel Portofino at 8p
Showtime: We Hunt Together at 8p, Supreme Team at 10p

IN THE NEWS

Nielsen is expanding its cross-platform measurement of YouTube across computer, mobile and connected TV devices. First available in Nielsen Total Ad Ratings, Nielsen Four-Screen Ad Deduplication will be foundational to deduplicate audiences across devices, services and platforms in the company’s forthcoming cross-media measurement platform, Nielsen ONE. “Four-screen measurement is a critical step toward Nielsen ONE, as it provides the comparability necessary to produce a trusted, deduplicated number across platforms that enables clients to better understand reach, manage frequency and verify the audiences of their media buys,” said Kim Gilberti, SVP Product Management, Nielsen. “As consumer engagement across platforms continues to converge, digital measurement must provide continuous and comparable metrics across all channels.”

“Our financial results for Q2 do not reflect our ambition,” said Snap CEO Evan Spiegel, as the company’s quarterly report showed net losses growing to $422 million, up from $152 million during the same three months ending in June last year. Adjusted EBITDA was $7 million (versus $117 million last year) and free cash flow was a negative $147 million (versus negative $116 million). Daily active users increased by 18%, to 347 million. “We are evolving our business and strategy to reaccelerate revenue growth, including innovating on our products, investing heavily in our direct response advertising business, and cultivating new sources of revenue to help diversify our topline growth,” said Spiegel.

Jitters about the surge of Covid infections in LA have some big names shifting to virtual for the Television Critics Association event kicking off next week. So far all of Disney’s platforms, along with CBS, Fox and PBS, among others, have canceled in-person events, amid fears of causing expensive production shutdowns. Showtime, The CW and Warner Bros. Discovery had already dropped out of the event altogether for various reasons, including to focus on the winter TCA sessions.

Syfy handed “Resident Alien” an early season three renewal. The comedy/drama based on the Dark Horse comics ranks among the year’s most-watched cable series.

Ad revenue for the NFL 2021/2022 Season reached $4.3 billion, rising +14% season-over-season, according to Standard Media Index. SMI also found:
* Nearly all networks grew revenue this season, with only CBS seeing an -18% decline vs. last season (driven by the growing Super Bowl shifting to NBC).
* Additional games bolstered the Regular Season, while Playoffs revenue soared +17% with a flat game count.
* Advertisers across most category groups expanded investment this past season. Notably, the “Online Ticketing & Entertainment Sites” subcategory, containing the Sportsbook sector, grew investment over 7x YoY.

CNN is in “secret talks” to lure “Morning Joe” stars Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski away from MSBC, reports Radar. CNN’s CEO, Chris Licht, helped Scarborough create the MSNBC morning show back when he was an executive producer at MSNBC.

George Clooney, Gladys Knight, U2, Amy Grant and composer Tania León will be celebrated at the 45th annual Kennedy Center Honors. The ceremony will again air on CBS.

CBS Stations has hired 28 additional news professionals as it debuts evening newscasts for its independent and CW-affiliated stations in 10 markets this week. The new hires focused on producing these newscasts include community journalists, anchors, weathercasters, producers, directors, editors, managers, a graphic designer and a multiplatform content coordinator.

While 95% of marketers surveyed said their company has clearly defined customer experience strategies in place, a mere 12% reported having successfully implemented more than 80% of their CX initiatives, according to a study by Hinduja Global Solutions. Named as the top three barriers to success were:
* Difficulty assigning metrics: 21%
* Insufficient processes: 20%
* Lack of internal resources (e.g. staffing): 18%, with 21% listing the skills gaps of internal employees.

2022 Top Women in Media

Save the date

Registration for this year’s Top Women in Media Awards gala opens in four days, on July 18th! Mark your calendar to attend this magical night as we celebrate women!

MORE INFO

PRODUCTION & DEVELOPMENT

CBS ordered a pilot for “The Never Game,” starring and exec produced by “This Is Us” alum Justin Hartley. The drama series from director Ken Olin and 20th Television is based on the novel by Jeffery Deaver about a survivalist who helps solve mysteries.

“Found” has been picked up to series by NBC. The missing persons drama from Nkechi Okoro Carroll (“All American”), Berlanti Productions and Warner Bros. Television, stars Shanola Hampton (“Shameless”). “‘Found’ is very compelling while also shining a light on an issue that is extremely relevant, and we know with this group at the helm these stories will be told authentically across all aspects of the production,” said Lisa Katz, President, Entertainment Scripted Content, NBCUniversal. “Additionally, we have been determined to find a vehicle for Shanola and this project on NBC could not be a more perfect fit.”

Manabu Movemet foundation has signed a collaborative agreement with Chicago-based Have Dreams, a resource center for programs and education for people with Autism Spectrum Disorder, to develop animated and ancillary content that any child can follow along and enjoy.

NEW & RETURNING SERIES

Season four of Fuse’s “Made From Scratch” will feature Eva Longoria (“The Boss Baby 2: Family Business”), singer-songwriter Noah Cyrus, Javon Walton (“Euphoria”), Jason Genao (“On My Block”), professional gamer Tyler “Ninja” Blevins (“Free Guy”), reality star Amara La Negra (“Don’t Cancel Me”), and singers Kyle and Syd whipping up their favorite dishes. The season kicks off Thursday, July 28.

INSP’s “Wild West Chronicles” is back for season two on Thursday, July 28 at 8p. The docudrama offers accounts of the West’s tall tales, little-known stories and notorious events.

Comedy group The Try Guys attempt cooking new dishes with zero recipes in Food Network’s new one-hour series “No-Recipe Road Trip with the Try Guys,” premiering Wednesday, August 31 at 10p.

Freeform’s four-part docuseries “Keep This Between Us” will air as a two-night event, with two episodes on Monday, August 29 at 9p and 10p and Tuesday, August 30 at 9p and 10p. “Keep This Between Us” exposes an epidemic of widespread grooming — manipulative and coercive behavior by abusers to gain access to potential victims — in US high schools, following one woman’s journey as she reexamines her past relationship with a trusted teacher.

SPORTS

The CBS Sports Classic, the annual college basketball showcase featuring Kentucky, North Carolina, Ohio State and UCLA, has been extended for three years through 2026. The event, which began in 2014, is broadcast each year on CBS and available to stream live on Paramount+. The 2022 CBS Sports Classic will be held on December 17 at Madison Square Garden.

Kansas Athletics inked a multimedia rights agreement with Learfield, which has managed the Jayhawks’ multimedia rights since 2007, with the expanded relationship including custom content creation for Jayhawk fans on multiple university-official platforms. Learfield also increased its commitment to the staff infrastructure at Kansas with the hiring of three newly created positions.

MLB Originals introduced a new gamified talk show where celebrities try to hit a baseball, titled “MLB Originals presents Celebrity Sluggers.” The series offers interviews with the challenge of hitting fastballs of increasing speed. Produced in partnership with Team Whistle’s MAGNET, Celebrity Sluggers is hosted by Hannah Stocking, and runs on MLB’s YouTube channel, MLB.TV and Facebook.

More new talent for Prime Video’s Thursday Night Football, which announced that reporter Kaylee Hartung will patrol the sidelines during Thursday Night Football’s game coverage. Additionally, Super Bowl Champions Andrew Whitworth and Aqib Talib will join Thursday Night Football as contributors to Prime Video’s comprehensive wraparound coverage.

Byron Allen’s Allen Media Group locked in a distribution partnership with the Central Intercollegiate Athletic Conference. This is the second consecutive one-year partnership that grants HBCU GO cable, linear, streaming, broadcast, VOD, and pay-per-view rights to premier NCAA Division II HBCU conference sporting events.

COMING UP

With Discovery now a corporate sibling of HBO, Discovery’s Shark Week, returning for its 34th year on Sunday, July 24, will feature an exclusive look at the new HBO Original series “House of the Dragon” during the 9p hour of premiere night. Based on George R.R. Martin’s “Fire & Blood,” the series is set 200 years before the events of “Game of Thrones” and premieres Sunday, August 21, at 9p on HBO and HBO Max. In addition, Warner Bros. Discovery’s linear and streaming portfolio – including TBS, TNT, truTV, Food Network, HGTV, CNN, Cartoon Network, Adult Swim, Animal Planet, Science Channel, ID, OWN, TCM, discovery+, and HBO Max – will air Shark Week-inspired content.

“Deadpool,” “Deadpool 2,” and “Logan” drop on Disney+ today, July 22. Fans heading to San Diego Comic-Con can celebrate the arrival of the films by picking up a free mini chimichanga, a.k.a. Deadpool’s favorite word to say, while supplies last.

Lifetime’s “Love, Lies and Seduction” August movie slate kicks off Saturday, August 6 at 8p with “A Dangerous Affair.”

The 75th annual DGA Awards ceremony has been slated to take place February 18 at the Beverly Hilton. Nominations for television, commercials and documentaries will be announced on January 10.

CASTING

Sarah Michelle Gellar (“Buffy the Vampire Slayer”) will star in Paramount+ series “Wolf Pack,” a spinoff of “Teen Wolf.” Gellar will play an arson investigator.

The fifth and final season of NBC medical drama “New Amsterdam” will not include original cast member Freema Agyeman. “The time has come for me to hang up her white coat,” posted the actress on Instagram. “While I am saddened, I am also incredibly excited to see how the story concludes as a fan of the series. It has been such a joy to play Dr. Helen Sharpe for 4 seasons – those magnificent writers built a badass!”

Eréndira Ibarra (“Ingobernable”) has joined Starzplay’s six-episode dramedy series “Yellow” (working title) as a series regular. “Yellow” is the first Spanish-Language Original to be available across the streamer’s footprint in the UK and Europe, joining the previously confirmed territories Spain, Latin America. The series will also be available on Pantaya in the US and Puerto Rico.

Tru Valentino has been elevated from recurring to series regular for season five of ABC’s “The Rookie.” Valentino joined the show as Officer Aaron Thorsen in season four.

STREAMING

F.A.S.T. viewership has more than doubled year-over-year, and today, 6 out of 10 households with connected TVs are using F.A.S.T. services, according to Comcast Advertising’s F.A.S.T. Report. Many consumers may be landing on F.A.S.T. channels without even realizing it, through their integration into the channel guide by TV manufacturers, notes the report, which points out 70% of XUMO users are cord cutters, relying on XUMO as a complement to SVOD services. “F.A.S.T. is a new and engaging way for consumers to watch and discover premium content in an environment that mimics linear TV,” said James Rooke, President, Comcast Advertising. “And because F.A.S.T. services are easy and free to access without signing up, it’s becoming a valuable way for advertisers to reach audiences – especially cord cutters.”

FOX News Media has expanded distribution of FOX Nation across FuboTV. Subscribers to FOX Nation on FuboTV can access the service via the FuboTV app on connected TV, mobile and tablet devices as well as on the web.

Sixty-seven percent of Gen Z say that subscribing to streaming services is totally worth the money and 42% use streaming services solely for their original programming, according to data from Helixa. The top 5 shows across Gen Z were “Pretty Little Liars,” “Rick and Morty,” “American Horror Story,” “Sportscenter,” and “Stranger Things.” Across the five audience segments identified by Helixa, (Fashion Foodies, Competitors, Activists, Dedicated Gamers and Entertainment Fanatics) “Rick and Morty” was the only show to appear in each groups’ top 5.

TECH TALK

Facebook has launched a Feeds tab, where users can see posts from friends, groups, Pages and more separately and in chronological order, announced Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a post. “One of the most requested features for Facebook is to make sure people don’t miss friends’ posts,” wrote Zuckerberg. “The app will still open to a personalized feed on the Home tab, where our discovery engine will recommend the content we think you’ll care most about. But the Feeds tab will give you a way to customize and control your experience further.” The redesign is similar to TikTok’s algorithmically chosen videos.

Programmatic activation partner MiQ introduced CookielessIQ, a cookieless “readiness” assessment for advertisers, designed to further optimize their campaigns ahead of the deprecation of third-party cookies. The CookielessIQ score represents an advertiser’s progress in minimizing cookie reliance, offering visibility needed to benchmark efforts and establish test and learn mechanisms far in advance of deprecation timelines to identify the best methods for driving programmatic performance in a privacy-compliant fashion, all without sacrificing results. “The truth is, there’s no escaping the new reality, and advertisers and brands need to start seriously considering other data sets and approaches that will help target, activate, and measure their efforts without reliance on long-established cookie based methods,” said Erin Madorsky, Chief Strategy Officer for MiQ. “We believe transparency and experimentation are the key to preparing for change.”

Social video intelligence and measurement Tubular Labs is partnering with Banijay Rights to give Banijay a better understanding of the company’s social media content strategies and commercial return on investment. The team is already using Tubular’s Intelligence products for forward planning, trend identification, data wrangling and competitor benchmarks.

GOING GLOBAL

TelevisaUnivision announced that streaming service ViX+ is now available in most of Spanish-speaking the US, Latin America, and Mexico.

Marcus / Glass Productions, in partnership with Can’t Stop Media, announced that “Let’s Make a Deal,” produced by Fremantle, will be expanding internationally in eight new territories: Germany, Indonesia, France, United Kingdom, Italy, Hungary, Ireland, and Poland.

2022 THAT BIG TV CONFERENCE

Drum roll please…

The speakers for That Big TV Conference keeps getting better! Please welcome Brittany Mehciz, Head of Social Media, Hulu to this year’s linup!

REGISTER TODAY

RATINGS

Tuesday night’s MLB All-Star Game continued recent audience dips, although the FOX broadcast still drew 7.507 million viewers, marking a 10% drop from 2021. That was good enough to rank as the most-watched telecast of the day.

NBC Sports’ coverage of the World Track & Field Championships reached 11.4 million total viewers across NBC/USA Network/CNBC, which surpasses its complete coverage of all previous World Championships according to the company. Sunday afternoon’s coverage of the championships on NBC averaged 2.235 million TV-only viewers, making it the most-watched Track & Field event on the network in 18 years, excluding the Olympics and US Team Trials, and up 192% vs. the network’s average viewership of the last World Championships in 2019.

EXECUTIVE MOVES

Warner Bros. Discovery Chief Corporate Communications Officer Nathaniel Brown announced the newly-merged company’s executive communications slate. Members of the leadership team include Megan Klein, for Corporate Communications; Laura Watson, for Executive Communications; Kim Page, for Internal Communications; Blake Bryant, for Global Brands, Franchises, Experiences, Home Entertainment and Licensing; Nate Smeltz , for US Sports Communications; Monica Neal, for Diversity, Equity & Inclusion; Cara Brugnoli, for Revenue Communications; Fiona McLachlan for the EMEA region; and Selina Govan for the APAC region. Eight executives from the pre-merger companies will exit.

Chris Alexander is stepping down as EVP of Publicity and Corporate Communications for Disney Television Studios. “In March, I received an email congratulating me on 30 years at the Walt Disney Company,” said Alexander in a statement. “While I certainly appreciated the acknowledgement, it became a wake up call of sorts. I’ve had a fantastic run and some wonderful experiences, but I realized that I want to do more than one thing in this life, and 30 years seems like a good round number on which to end.”

Paul Buccieri, President and Chairman of A+E Networks Group, has joined the Roybal Advisory Board. The History Channel/A+E Networks has partnered with the Roybal Film and Television Production Magnet Fund, which was established by George Clooney, Grant Heslov and Creative Artists Agency’s Bryan Lourd to support the Roybal Film and Television Production Magnet, a specialized academy founded in 2021 to drive transformational change across the entertainment industry for students from underserved communities. The school is set to welcome its inaugural class in the fall.

IN MEMORIAM

Writer, consultant and cable TV industry expert Jim Barthold died June 14. He was 77. “He was truly one of a kind, an outstanding journalist who made tech accessible to us all, and someone with whom you always knew where you stood,” said longtime friend Paul Schneider.

Actor Taurean Blacque died July 21 after a brief illness. He was 82. Blacque was best known for his role as Detective Neal Washington on “Hill Street Blues.”

This Day in History
1926 – Troy, NY recorded a state record 108°F.

Friday Fun Fact
The longest recorded wedding veil was 23,000 feet.

Answer to Our Last Trivia Question
Adam was retired from what occupation on “Mom” (2013-21)? Stuntman. Kudos to: Betsy Frank-Betsy Frank Insights/NYC; Joe Swaney-Purchasing Power/Atlanta; Kelly Sapp-FETV/NYC; Jim DeBlasi-The Cue/NYC; Barb Throm-Stealth Creative/Saint Louis, MO; Sandy Spiegel/Chicago; Andy Pittman-TAMU/College Station, TX; Ken DuBow-Access Entertainment/LA; Amy Levy-Amy Levy Public Relations/LA; Anne Wettig-Fox Sports/LA; Joy Aronson/LA

Today’s Trivia Question
Who played the biological father of the Grace’s first child on “Grace Under Fire” (1993-98)? (Email [email protected] with your answer and be sure to include your name, company, city and time zone. Unofficial rules: a limit of four per time zone.)

Cynopsis Team