Message From Michael -- August 25, 2008

TAMI… TAMI… NBC’S IN LOVE

UN-CONVENTIONAL WISDOM

FACTOIDS OF THE WEEK

WEB VIDEOS OF THE WEEK

COCKTAIL CHATTER



TAMI… TAMI… NBC’S IN LOVE: And the Olympics are proof of that, but it may be an unrequited love. By the time you read this, the Beijing Olympics will have gone down in the record books as the most watched television event in U.S. history, surpassing the Atlanta Olympics, according to numbers supplied by NBC and Nielsen. That’s especially interesting because as late as July, many media observers were predicting that the Beijing Olympics could go down in history as the least watched games because of the time difference. According to The Programming Insider, the Olympic coverage has beaten the four other networks COMBINED by an average of 40% to 75% most nights. Oh, yes, TAMI. That’s NBC’s acronym for Total Audience Measurement Index, which compiles total numbers for multi-platform viewing – TV, including the network and its cable operations, the Internet, mobile audiences and video on demand. The NBC Olympics website had 50 live feeds a day on everything from badminton to wrestling. But the big events were reserved for television where the ad dollars are. That fact, plus speculation that some online users were reluctant to download Microsoft’s video player Silverlight, is why some observers say the video streaming scored a silver instead of a gold. Even so, the numbers are pretty amazing, with Nielsen reporting that U.S. daily traffic to NBC’s video site averaged 1.5 Million unique visitors from home and work each day. In the first four days alone, Marketing Vox reports, there were 291 Million page views and 13.5 Million video streams. As of a week ago, that had gone up to 65 Million video streams and 1 Billion page views. (Just for the record, NBC’s previous online record came during the Tiger Woods – Rocco Mediate golf match in which there were 9.1 Million page views and 1.5 Million streams.) Website compete.com, though, says the real winner of the gold in online Olympics was Yahoo’s Olympics page which averaged slightly higher than NBC in terms of page views but slightly lower in terms of time engagement. Research firm eMarketer estimates the NBC online revenue at $5.75 Million, compared to the $1 Billion in TV sales. Interestingly, several reports note that despite the multiplatform approach, TV still accounted for anywhere from 92% to 94% of all Olympic viewing. Website tvbythenumbers.com put it even higher – at 99.7%, based on total viewing minutes on each, even though NBC says it put 3600 hours on television and 2200 hours on the Internet. Regardless, NBC officials still say the multiplatform approach and TAMI measurement system is the way of the future, with online and other platforms helping to drive prime time viewing.

Side Note: Working with chinarank.org.cn, and based on 200 Olympic-related sites in China, Nielsen Online calculated the DAILY unique browsers in China alone at 64.5 Million – or about a quarter of all the 250 Million Internet users in what is now the largest Internet population country in the world. Nielsen cited the video streaming not only of NBC but also of Terra in Brazil as ‘impressive.’ It also noted that upwards of a million people around the world daily went to the official website – Beijing2008.cn, with the U.S., Australia and France ranking in the top three as their athletes scored medals.

Foot Note: Does anybody besides me remember the Debbie Reynolds song that the headline for this section was based on?

UN-CONVENTIONAL WISDOM: That is what will be needed to win the Presidential election, if several marketing and Internet research sites are to be believed. As the two party conventions get underway, much is being made about the un-conventional versus conventional approaches of the two candidates. (Yes, there is a play on words in there somewhere.) First, let me give you some statistics in case you haven’t seen them. According to monitoring site techpresident.com, Barack Obama has 458,954 MySpace friends, compared to John McCain’s 64,598. According to monitoring site tubemogul.com, Barack Obama had a cumulative viewing of just under 57 Million views on YouTube compared to John McCain’s 14 Million. According to monitoring site twitterholic.com, Barack Obama had just under 65,000 followers while John McCain had just over 1,600 followers. (Yes, they both twitter… sort of.) In fact, Obama is the top twitterer, even though his messages (like McCain’s) are simplistic campaign announcements. According to their YouTube websites, Barack Obama had just over 15,000 subscribers but with more than 15 Million channel views while John McCain had more than 13,000 subscribers but with just over one Million channel views.

But more critical than the technology is what you do with the technology. According to a front page article in M.I.T.’s Technology Review, Obama made the greatest use of the social networking capabilities of the Internet to build his political network. It all lies at a technology center called Blue State Digital where graduates of the Howard Dean presidential campaign have taken those efforts to the next level. All of the campaigns used the Internet but the Hillary Clinton campaign was marked by a top down approach that limited the social networking aspects, while the Ron Paul campaign had a bottom up approach that resulted in “Internet anarchy” and the John McCain campaign had such a limited view that it created a “walled garden” that didn’t allow for a free flow of visitors. In addition to online videos, profiles on all the sites, and SMS text messaging, the Obama campaign identified volunteers and wannabes who helped in the get-out-the-vote campaign, donating and holding local events. The article notes that all of the campaigns also get the public records to find out who voted and when, but the Obama campaign correlated that with its own list of people, and who organized house parties, who donated, and what other online connections they had. It should be noted that the McCain campaign has made some dramatic changes, including ‘blogettes’ from his daughter and the viral video comparing Obama to Paris Hilton and the one likening him to Charlton Heston’s Moses; while there has been some criticism of Obama’s latest efforts, including the text messaging announcement of his VP choice which came after many in the mainstream media had already identified Joe Biden. Anyway, you can read the complete article at http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/21222/?a=f .

More Campaign Factoids. According to Nielsen Media, the Democratic Convention has had more viewers than the Republican Convention in nine of the last 12 Presidential campaigns starting in 1960. The Republican exceptions were Richard Nixon’s in 1972, Gerald Ford’s in 1976 and George W. Bush’s in 2004. The Obama campaign’s image-based online advertising was five times bigger in July than June, with 417 Million impressions; while the McCain campaign doubled its sponsored search link to reach more than 15 Million impressions. By comparison, McCain had 16 Million image-based ad impressions in July and Obama had One Million search link impressions in July. The two ran a combined total of 127,513 local TV spots between June and August 1st, and 668 national cable TV ads. McCain had 57,000 local TV spots compared to Obama’s 70,000. McCain had 526 national cable ads, compared to Obama’s 142; and McCain had 256 spot radio ads compared to Obama’s 184. Neither candidate placed ads on any of the national broadcast networks or syndication during June and July. Obama’s top five targeted states for ads were Florida, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. McCain’s top ad markets were Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Iowa.

FACTOIDS OF THE WEEK: The number of cell phones sold in the U.S. dropped 13% to 28 Million in the second quarter of this year compared to last year, according to research firm NPD Group, but the total value of the phones sold was only down 2%, at $2.4 Billion because they have more features and are more expensive. The same group says the sale of video games reached $9.5 Billion in July of this year compared to $7 Billion last year. The group estimates the gaming community in the U.S. at 174 Million. Of those, three percent are “extreme gamers” who spend an average of 45 hours a week playing video games. According to Kansas State University professor Michael Wesch, the equivalent of 385 24/7 TV channels of video (9,232hours) is uploaded to YouTube every day.

WEB VIDEOS OF THE WEEK: Just to make sure, you’re with it and in the know, we are starting a new feature about online videos. On YouTube, Numa Numa is one of the hot videos, garnering more than 18 Million views (and, no, I don’t understand why.) Former Doogie Howser star Neil Patrick Harris is the star of a new webcast Dr. Horrible. And, finally, Midnight Rida which is billed as an “urban comedic spoof” of the 1980s TV series Knight Rider, is proving a popular hit on Maniatv.com. (Warning – language is rough.)

MFM FOOTNOTE: Because of the dominance of the Olympics and the Convention, I did not do an anticipated review of the latest research on audience segmentation amongst news viewers from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. A special edition of MfM will come out later for that.

MFM DISCLAIMER: We confess that we have not been updating the media-consultant.blogspot.com website often enough. Partially that is because we have been re-building the MediaConsultant.TV website. More on that later. In any case, for those asking, the blog of past MfM’s is up to date.

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