With 2008 presidential candidates already sparring, it became quickly apparent that television would play a larger role in the outcome of this election than in any prior campaign. This hastened me back to that indelible marker in TV’s history when it was first credited with changing the course of a presidential election.

We’ve all seen the footage from the 1960 debate where an ashen and gaunt-looking Richard Nixon in a taupe suit contrasts so negatively to a confident, youthful JFK in a dark ensemble. Many who saw the debates on TV felt JFK won convincingly. We’re told their televised debate turned an election, and few disagree.

Since that heady day where politics and television first intersected, we’ve learned that every candidate has had to lay a progressively larger bet on romancing voters through the most powerful selling machine ̵...Read More

To the many loyal Multichannel News readers, I have a confession -- there’s a business I like more than television-advertising sales and the entire advertising business itself. It’s the reason I fell in love with TV in the first place. That business is the art and science of selling more stuff. That is my enduring business love -- and I’m not alone.

In the ad-sales business, many are fascinated by marketing and pure raw selling. There is a reason many of us filter every facet of TV ad sales through a virtual meat grinder of SKUs, flankers, line-extensions, case-rates, penny profit, product launches and restages, test translations, BDIs/CDIs, a&u studies, segmentation studies, price elasticity, cost-per-lead, conversion, upselling, brand-positioning, brand portfolio management, traffic counts, same-store-sales, end-aisle-display, slotting f...Read More

As a frenetic year in the world of television advertising begins to wind down, one of the ways 2006 may be remembered is that it was a banner year for “new-box” prophecies.

A lot of attention has been rightfully paid to the full range of video capabilities made possible by a growing number of “new boxes,” from video iPods to portable media players to video-enabled cell phones to game stations. And there are more permutations than you can count.

These new boxes promise to augment, extend, alter, or forever change TV viewing and, thus, television advertising.

The new-box prophecies were born out of new products of great promise (see: Apple) and from the “ubiquity” of new video applications (see: Google’s acquisition of YouTube) on “TV-like” boxes (broadband-video-enabled PCs). The sheer number of video-ap...Read More

Nielsen just announced an indefinite postponement of its commercial minute ratings product. This reflects what Nielsen’s customers have clearly said: They have no appetite for a largely unusable product.

The first imperative: Get the data right before we go an inch further as a collective TV-advertising industry.

This level-headed approach stands in contrast to the minority position that shouted several points at mid-year including: The issuance of the proposed commercial ratings data file was a lock for 2006, that this data was what the advertisers were clamoring for and finally not only was the train leaving the station, but if certain sectors of TV had quarrels with the data -- it was their loss and the minority’s gain -- better just...Read More