Spire Express » Broadcast Production

YouTube Redefining the Entertainment Business

Mike — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 15:36:21 +0000

Danielle Sacks, award-winning senior writer at Fast Company magazine chronicles how YouTube CEO Salar Kamangar and his team have transformed Google’s Folly into a mind-blowing — and lucrative — global platform that is redefining the entertainment business.

Read the print article here.

Read the article on Fastcompany.com

True ROI Accountability

Mike — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 17:18:28 +0000

Web marketers can easily tell whether a particular consumer visited a specific site, when she visited, and whether she bought something. But despite a decades-long head start, television advertisers haven’t been as successful connecting the shows people watch to the products they buy. Now a new media research company, TRA – for “True ROI Accountability for Media” – is taking another crack at the problem. It merges data from people’s cable set-top boxes with consumer-purchase databases…

Google Radio-Ad Heads Quit

Mike — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 17:30:10 +0000

The heads of the radio-advertising firm bought by Google Inc. a year ago have left the company as the Internet giant faces skepticism about its efforts to sell ads on radio stations. Google confirmed the departures of Chad Steelberg and Ryan Steelberg, brothers who led the radio-ad firm dMarc Broadcasting Inc. and sold it to Google last year for $102 million, plus the potential for $1.1 billion in performance-based payments tied to revenue and ad-inventory targets.

Google Tests New Ad Offerings-but Will Advertisers Follow?

Mike — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 15:49:36 +0000

GOOGLE INC. has been racing to extend its reach on the Internet and in traditional media. Now it needs advertisers to follow. Among those it is wooing is Alan Cohen, chief marketing officer of Gemstar-TV Guide International Inc.

Spot Runner Raises Monday from Heavyweights

Mike — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 15:42:45 +0000

SPOT RUNNER RAISES MONEY from a raft of media and advertising heavyweights. CBS Corp. and two advertising holding companies, WPP Group PLC and Interpublic Group, each took a minority stake in Spot Runner after participating with several others in a $40 million round of financing for the closely held firm. Spot Runner, of Los Angeles, helps small businesses create…

Maine’s advertising industry can compete

Mike — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 15:33:39 +0000

The fact that an executive from Garrand Marketing Communications bested thousands of competitors to win the right to produce a TV spot for the Super Bowl is, of course, big news. It would be big news for any winner. The fact that he works for an agency in Portland, Maine, is big news only because we don’t think of ourselves as a major player in the advertising business.

Web-Video ‘Skins’

Mike — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 14:02:51 +0000

CBS is about to start showing some skin. About a year after they were introduced, a handful of video-ad formats-called bugs, tickers and skin – are jockeying to become the favorites among marketers. The skin format, in which the ad appears in a graphic surrounding the window where the video plays, has been slower to gain momentum because it isn’t widely available on top video sites.

Digital Cinema Gains Support

Mike — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 19:06:58 +0000

A consortium of movie exhibitors has obtained the backing of five Hollywood studios for a plan to help finance the rollout of digital cinema equipment in U.S. theaters, bolstering the effort to make products like 3-D cinema widely available. Though the transformation to digital projectors in theaters has been discussed for a decade, only in the past few months have a number of Hollywood’s biggest studios signed on to the project.

What’s Upfront?

Mike — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 13:32:10 +0000

For a few days in May, network executives and media buyers gather for the “upfront,” the television industry’s most lucrative – and over-the-top – ritual. For almost 50 years, ad buyers have made the annual trek to New York to watch TV execs outline their networks’ fall-season offerings, negotiate for billions of dollars in advertising time and indulge in endless servings of demographic jargon and chilled jumbo shrimp.

EBay Ad-Sales Plan Gets Breath of Air From Oxygen

Mike — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 13:19:49 +0000

The companies behind a controversial new online exchange for buying ad time on television are moving ahead with their plan to test the system, over the objections of many TV networks, which argue that it could erode prices. The Online Media Exchange system, which was created last fall by eBay…