September 2008

Candidates Pitch on Sports Networks

Regional sports networks are becoming an attractive venue for candidates to reach swing voters. The amounts the campaigns are spending on regional sports networks are still tiny when compared with the hundreds of millions of dollars being dedicated to TV advertising across the board. It's likely regional sports networks have pulled in well under $10 million in election ads, according to estimates from people familiar with their political sales. Nevertheless, regional sports networks offer unusually ardent audiences. Their viewers usually watch live so they don't zap commercials. Most of them are men, a difficult demographic for any marketer to reach. And they may be swing voters, too. More viewers of Fox Sports Net, for instance, are "middle of the road" politically compared with most other cable networks, according to Mediamark Research & Intelligence.

Talked-About Ads Were Seldom Aired

Sen. John McCain received considerable publicity for a television ad accusing his Democratic opponent of having "lashed out at Sarah Palin, dismissed her as good-looking . . . then desperately called Sarah Palin a liar. How disrespectful." In the two weeks after the Republican convention, the commercial aired seven times. Sen Barack Obama drew substantial media attention for a spot declaring: "John McCain is hardly a maverick. . . . Sarah Palin's no maverick, either. She was for the 'Bridge to Nowhere' before she was against it. Politicians lying about their records." During the same period, that commercial aired eight times. In the two-week period that ended Sunday, the McCain campaign released 25 ads, 12 of which aired fewer than 25 times. The Obama campaign released 28 ads, 11 of which aired fewer than 25 times. "They've smartly figured out that there's news of the day, and by feeding the content beast that is cable news and the blogosphere, they're getting out their unfiltered take on the news of the day," said Evan Tracey of TNS Media Intelligence/Campaign Media Analysis Group, which compiled the figures. Given the media's hunger for controversy, he said, "the campaigns are the enabling girlfriend." By contrast, McCain's most frequently aired spot during this period, casting him and Alaska Gov. Palin as the "original mavericks," aired 15,938 times. Obama's top spot, detailing the lobbying records of senior McCain aides, ran 14,809 times.

How IT could have prevented the financial meltdown

In the coming weeks the feds and the surviving financial services institutions will have the daunting task of unraveling all the securitized loans and other instruments that are hiding the toxic investments. But does the technology exist to do that? And if so, could it have been used to prevent the bad debt from hitting the fan in the first place? The fact is that despite government regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley, there is little visibility mandated by current regulations into the origination of loans and how they are broken up, resold, and resold again. Not only could those mortgages be sold to other banks, but they could be divided into five, 10, or 20 slices and resold to five to 10 different organizations, making it difficult to track who was involved and who ended up taking the risk. Had these financial services companies and banks established business intelligence metrics as to the ratios of what kind of debt they were holding versus the cash reserves they held, their analytics systems might have driven alerts earlier in the process, says Michael Corcoran, a product manager at the BI provider Information Builders. But as anyone in business already knows, consolidating that kind of data to get those answers more often than not is a slow process that typically ends up being done manually in an Excel spreadsheet well after the fact.

Media Cos. Plug Product Placement at FCC

Saying that product placement is here to stay, is growing and is integral to the survival of free ad-supported media in a multiplatform environment that has already put the 15- and 30-second ad in jeopardy, a mix of big media companies, broadcast groups and advertisers got together to tell the Federal Communications Commission not to adopt any new policies on enhanced sponsorship identification or product placement. In a filing in the FCC's inquiry into sponsorship-identification rules and embedded advertising, the companies and associations, together dubbing themselves the National Media Providers, argued Monday that the boost in product placement should not result in a boost in FCC rules. They argued that the FCC lacks jurisdiction in one case and justification in all cases, and that, legally speaking, product placement isn't even advertising but more akin to the sponsorship IDs in noncommercial shows.

Yahoo clears path for AOL talks

Yahoo's new board on Tuesday cleared the way for a fresh round of discussions with Time Warner over the future of its AOL unit, potentially reigniting negotiations for a combination of the two Internet businesses that stalled earlier this year. The green light for the talks came as Yahoo's directors met for the first time since activist investor Carl Icahn was granted access to the boardroom. Mr Icahn and two allies, former Viacom boss Frank Biondi and former Nextel head Frank Chapple, were given seats at the board table as part of a settlement to head off a revolt at the Internet company's last shareholder meeting.

Net-Enabled Appliances Can Save Energy

The idea of using the Internet to cut energy use is gaining traction, with a number of startups launching online energy dashboards and in-home displays that supply information about how much you're using and at what cost. Information is power, they argue, and the research proves them right. One British study found that energy management systems can help cut residential electricity use by as much as 15%. Most of the products currently on the market require consumers to react to the information provided, either through timed schedules or immediate actions: High prices? Don't run the dryer. Critical peak period? Run down to the basement and turn down the water heater. But for monitoring systems to really pack an energy-savings punch, the information needs to be instantly actionable, with limited input required by the end user. That's where your Web-surfing refrigerator comes in.

Study: Gay TV characters on the rise

Broadcast television will have 16 gay and bisexual regular characters in prime-time series this fall, more than double the seven of a year ago, a new study has found. The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation said it was a positive sign of networks making their shows more representative, although more work needed to be done. These characters accounted for 2.6 percent of all the regular characters in TV series, up from 1.1 percent last year and 1.3 percent in 2006, according to the study.

McCain-Palin Love-Hate Media

The McCain-Palin campaign seems to be at war with the media. On Monday, John McCain's senior adviser Steve Schmidt slammed the New York Times as nothing more than a partisan rag. Schmidt might want to break the news to Steve Duprey, the McCain adviser who scurries at many campaign stops to get copies of it for the candidate and his top aides. He might also want to break the news to McCain himself, who has enjoyed a very friendly relationship with the paper and many of its biggest stars -- as recently as 24 hours before the Schmidt attack. The McCain campaign also complained about being called "liars," asking the media to scrutinize specific elements of Sen Barack Obama's record. But the call was so rife with simple, often inexplicable misstatements of fact that it may have had the opposite effect: to deepen the perception, dangerous to McCain, that he and his aides have little regard for factual accuracy. Then on Tuesday, the traveling press was informed that reporters would be banned from covering Gov Sarah Palin's meeting in New York with world leaders; only photographers and a TV crew were to be allowed in. The move appeared designed to ensure that Palin, who has faced only two interviews since becoming the GOP Veep candidate would face no questions. CNN decided to yank its crew in protest, a major blow to the McCain campaign's efforts to get TV coverage of this highly stage-managed moment. The Associated Press also apparently objected, as did other networks. According to The New York Times, the campaign subsequently relented and decided to let in a producer. But that left print reporters out in the cold.

Deregulated Media And Our Endless Campaign "Silly Season"

[Commentary] As a democracy, the U.S. government guarantees us the right to "free and fair" elections. Ideally, every licensed voter can cast a ballot without fear of harm or reprisal, and all votes are counted. But this certainly isn't all that there is to a free and fair election. Our government, through the unconscionable complacency of the deregulated Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the Federal Elections Commission (FEC), the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Congress has derailed our right to fair elections well before we pull the curtain to cast our votes. The roles played by broadcasters and political advertisers in the months leading up to the first Tuesday in November are critical to the legitimate execution of our political process. Thanks to the blatant and careless airing of false advertising and broadcaster retreat from journalistic responsibilities, the American people are denied the fundamental democratic principle of free and fair elections. If citizens are fed half-truths and lies, the outcome of the election process certainly cannot be considered fair.

How the Media Have Handled Palin's Religious Faith

Who is Sarah Palin? The question has dominated campaign coverage in the weeks since her nomination as John McCain's running mate. In the mainstream media at least, the answer has focused almost as much on her family life as on her public record. But despite that focus, and the debate over her beliefs, coverage of her religious background and beliefs has often been a peripheral element in the story. These are among the findings of the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism and Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, which examined front-page and lead stories among top print, television, radio and online news media. Many news stories have raised Palin's religion, and its implications, as part of her profile, but quite often, in-depth reporting of Palin's religious biography have only been included as details below the lead. Even the media's coverage of her personal life -- including her choice to give birth to a baby with Down syndrome -- did not translate into analysis of the policy implications of her values or in-depth consideration of the belief system that informs her choices.

Benton

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