Thursday, May 15, 2008
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Tribune, WFLA Staffs Offered Voluntary Buyouts
Things are a bit grim around here....
From TBO.com:
By TED JACKOVICS The Tampa Tribune
Published: April 14, 2008
TAMPA - The Florida Communications Group said today it is offering voluntary buyouts, including severance packages, to about half its 1,326 employees, including those with The Tampa Tribune and WFLA, News Channel 8.
The program is aimed at reducing staff and other costs in a difficult economic environment in the Tampa Bay area, said John Schueler, president of Florida Communications Group, which oversees the operation of The Tribune, WFLA, TBO.com and other Florida media outlets.
Schueler said the program includes severance packages depending on years of service with the company for eligible employees.
For example, some employees would be eligible for severance up to 39 weeks. Schueler said that if not enough employees accept the severance offer, layoffs are possible.
He said that FCG has not determined the amount of money the company wants to save or the number of employees it must shed but that the cost savings needed are significant.
In addition to the Tribune and News Channel 8, FCG, a subsidiary of Media General, includes TBO.com, Centro Grupo de Comunicacion, Sunbelt Newspapers, Suncoast News, Hernando Today and Highlands Today.
From TBO.com:
By TED JACKOVICS The Tampa Tribune
Published: April 14, 2008
TAMPA - The Florida Communications Group said today it is offering voluntary buyouts, including severance packages, to about half its 1,326 employees, including those with The Tampa Tribune and WFLA, News Channel 8.
The program is aimed at reducing staff and other costs in a difficult economic environment in the Tampa Bay area, said John Schueler, president of Florida Communications Group, which oversees the operation of The Tribune, WFLA, TBO.com and other Florida media outlets.
Schueler said the program includes severance packages depending on years of service with the company for eligible employees.
For example, some employees would be eligible for severance up to 39 weeks. Schueler said that if not enough employees accept the severance offer, layoffs are possible.
He said that FCG has not determined the amount of money the company wants to save or the number of employees it must shed but that the cost savings needed are significant.
In addition to the Tribune and News Channel 8, FCG, a subsidiary of Media General, includes TBO.com, Centro Grupo de Comunicacion, Sunbelt Newspapers, Suncoast News, Hernando Today and Highlands Today.
Monday, April 14, 2008
NBC 2008-2009 Schedule
The new NBC 2008-2009 schedule was recently announced, so I have been examining these new programs very closely in order to attempt to predict their ratings success (or failure).
Generating estimates for new programming is truly an art form. We RDs typically use past performance history of similar shows to indicate the type of audience that may watch a particular show. This involves analyzing each show and trying to find a similar show on my network or any other network that can be used as a similar comparison. In addition, much like the stock market, I like to say "past results do NOT guarantee future success".
NBC made it tough this year by not providing pilots to watch. Its very difficult to understand the tone and feel of a show from a single paragraph written description, and thus it is difficult to find comparison shows. NBC also varied from the "norm" on a number of points. One, most networks announce their Fall schedules in meetings called "upfronts", usually held in May. NBC announced its schedule a full 6 weeks early, getting the jump on the competition. The downside is, as previously mentioned, no pilots to preview these programs. The advertising community must judge the strength of a new show simply on the strength of the person describing ("selling") the show. I can see where this will get very iffy, as the schedule filters its way down to the local level.
Secondly, NBC presented not just a schedule for Fall, but a full Fall-Winter-Spring-Summer 2008-2009 schedule. Knowing, as I do, NBC's proclivities towards frequent program changes, I am not likely to trust that the schedule presented to me will actually ever air in its entirety.
Generating estimates for new programming is truly an art form. We RDs typically use past performance history of similar shows to indicate the type of audience that may watch a particular show. This involves analyzing each show and trying to find a similar show on my network or any other network that can be used as a similar comparison. In addition, much like the stock market, I like to say "past results do NOT guarantee future success".
NBC made it tough this year by not providing pilots to watch. Its very difficult to understand the tone and feel of a show from a single paragraph written description, and thus it is difficult to find comparison shows. NBC also varied from the "norm" on a number of points. One, most networks announce their Fall schedules in meetings called "upfronts", usually held in May. NBC announced its schedule a full 6 weeks early, getting the jump on the competition. The downside is, as previously mentioned, no pilots to preview these programs. The advertising community must judge the strength of a new show simply on the strength of the person describing ("selling") the show. I can see where this will get very iffy, as the schedule filters its way down to the local level.
Secondly, NBC presented not just a schedule for Fall, but a full Fall-Winter-Spring-Summer 2008-2009 schedule. Knowing, as I do, NBC's proclivities towards frequent program changes, I am not likely to trust that the schedule presented to me will actually ever air in its entirety.
My apologies...
My sincere apologies to anyone who may have been reading this blog and frustrated by the lack of updates recently. Thus is the life of a TV Research Director - work tends to wax and wane, and lately my work has been all waxing and no waning.
Some exciting changes are afront here in my work, most of which I am not at liberty to speak of, but which revolve around the company looking towards the future of local media. Where are we, as a company, going to be in five years? I have no idea, and I'm not sure if anyone else knows either, but these are exciting and terrifying times for all of us in the media business.
Some exciting changes are afront here in my work, most of which I am not at liberty to speak of, but which revolve around the company looking towards the future of local media. Where are we, as a company, going to be in five years? I have no idea, and I'm not sure if anyone else knows either, but these are exciting and terrifying times for all of us in the media business.
Monday, March 24, 2008
Vegetable Soup Analogy Debunked: Should Television's Small Sample Be Sacked?
Vegetable Soup Analogy Debunked: Should Television's Small Sample Be Sacked?
by Frank S. Foster , Monday, March 17, 2008 TVBoard @ MediaPost.com
I HAD A VERY INTERESTING conversation the other day with an industry veteran regarding the state of the television audience measurement industry. As someone who has been a spokesperson for new ways of measuring television, I am occasionally approached by people who assume that I have no idea how it has always been done. The conversation began innocently with concerns about set-top-box data, each of which I answered simply and directly.
After 30 minutes, he had nothing more to say. When I suggested counting one in five anonymous households and mathematically inferring demographic attributes would be a more acceptable solution than projecting from a small panel, he became quite agitated. "The panel is the only acceptable solution," he cried. "No other approach allows us to taste the soup!"
The infamous vegetable soup analogy had been thrown down. Now, this particular gentleman should have known better -- he was granted an advanced degree from a prestigious college -- because the analogy borders on the ridiculous. But when faced with an argument he was not winning, he turned to something familiar. I told him I was running late but that I would address the issue in my next MediaPost TV Board column. So here goes.
I googled "Nielsen Media Research Soup" and found a white paper of sorts with Nielsen's logo entitled "What TV Ratings Really Mean." Below is an excerpt:
"Actually, a representative sample doesn't have to be very large to represent the population it is drawn from. For example, you don't need to eat an entire pot of vegetable soup to know what kind of soup it is. A cup of soup is more than adequate to represent what is in the pot. If, however, you don't stir the soup to make sure that all of the various ingredients have a good chance of ending up in the cup, you might just pour a cup of vegetable broth. Stirring the soup is a way to make sure that the sample you draw represents all the different parts of what is in the pot."
"A cup of soup is more than adequate to represent what is in the pot." That seems a fair assumption, but the application to television audience measurement is problematic. I believe Nielsen projected that there will be 112,800,000 television households in the U.S. market for the 2007-2008 television season. I believe it is generally accepted that the effective size of the current national people meter panel is 10,000, although many think it will grow to 17,000 by 2011.
To make my point, I will be generous and assume the effective sample will be 20,000 at some point, and that the number of television households will remain constant. 20,000 out of 112,800,000 equates to 1 in 5,640 households. So how small does that make Nielsen's cup?When I was a child, the biggest pot in my mother's home was a five-gallon soup kitchen pot. There are 16 cups to a gallon, so there must have been 80 cups in her soup kitchen pot. So Nielsen's "cup" isn't really a cup. There are 256 tablespoons in a gallon, so there must have been 1,280 tablespoons in my mother's soup kitchen pot. So Nielsen's "cup" isn't really a tablespoon. If there are 768 teaspoons in a gallon, there must have been 3,840 teaspoons of soup in the soup kitchen pot. But that means a teaspoon is still too big to use and Nielsen's "cup" is smaller than a teaspoon. According to Wikipedia, there are 60 "drops" in a teaspoon, so there must have been 230,400 drops in my mother's soup kitchen pot. Which means Nielsen's "cup" actually translates to 41 drops -- or approximately 2/3 of a teaspoon.
What further complicates the analogy is that Nielsen's one pot is used to measure television in its entirety -- which consists not of one network, but hundreds. How do you measure hundreds of networks with just 41 drops? Assume a broadcast network had a great night and 20% of the nation's population watched that network's program. Nielsen's "cup" for that network would be 20% of 41 drops, or approximately eight drops. Out of those eight drops Nielsen would have to differentiate by age, sex and race. A popular network with a 2.0 rating would have one drop of soup, give or take. The ratings for the vast majority of networks would be based on much less soup than that.
Keep in mind we have not discussed the "stirring" of the sample, nor have we talked about those cups that are drawn from the pot and dumped because they would not agree to take part in the tasting. We have also limited our analysis to Nielsen's national panel. Their local panels are an order of magnitude smaller and more problematic. If we include geographic targeting (Sys Code Clusters, for example) the issue becomes further complicated. Of course, addressable advertising cannot be measured by a sample at all.
To my learned colleague with whom I spoke the other day, this has been a real-world examination of the vegetable soup analogy. The small sample approach was fine when collecting more data was expensive and wrought with problems, but it makes little sense today. Ultimately, it will be the television industry that will decide if small panels remain the "gold standard." I continue to believe counting one in five households and using mathematical inference to determine demographics is a vastly superior solution.
Undoubtedly, there will be those who disagree. Rebuttals can be posted on this blog or addressed directly to me. My contact information is listed below.
Post your response to the public TV Board blog.
See what others are saying on the TV Board blog.Frank S. Foster ( foster.frank@evadconsulting.com) is a senior consultant at EVAD Consulting and is currently working with TNS in a strategic capacity related to its television audience measurement efforts. Prior to EVAD, Mr. Foster was the co-founder and president of erinMedia.
by Frank S. Foster , Monday, March 17, 2008 TVBoard @ MediaPost.com
I HAD A VERY INTERESTING conversation the other day with an industry veteran regarding the state of the television audience measurement industry. As someone who has been a spokesperson for new ways of measuring television, I am occasionally approached by people who assume that I have no idea how it has always been done. The conversation began innocently with concerns about set-top-box data, each of which I answered simply and directly.
After 30 minutes, he had nothing more to say. When I suggested counting one in five anonymous households and mathematically inferring demographic attributes would be a more acceptable solution than projecting from a small panel, he became quite agitated. "The panel is the only acceptable solution," he cried. "No other approach allows us to taste the soup!"
The infamous vegetable soup analogy had been thrown down. Now, this particular gentleman should have known better -- he was granted an advanced degree from a prestigious college -- because the analogy borders on the ridiculous. But when faced with an argument he was not winning, he turned to something familiar. I told him I was running late but that I would address the issue in my next MediaPost TV Board column. So here goes.
I googled "Nielsen Media Research Soup" and found a white paper of sorts with Nielsen's logo entitled "What TV Ratings Really Mean." Below is an excerpt:
"Actually, a representative sample doesn't have to be very large to represent the population it is drawn from. For example, you don't need to eat an entire pot of vegetable soup to know what kind of soup it is. A cup of soup is more than adequate to represent what is in the pot. If, however, you don't stir the soup to make sure that all of the various ingredients have a good chance of ending up in the cup, you might just pour a cup of vegetable broth. Stirring the soup is a way to make sure that the sample you draw represents all the different parts of what is in the pot."
"A cup of soup is more than adequate to represent what is in the pot." That seems a fair assumption, but the application to television audience measurement is problematic. I believe Nielsen projected that there will be 112,800,000 television households in the U.S. market for the 2007-2008 television season. I believe it is generally accepted that the effective size of the current national people meter panel is 10,000, although many think it will grow to 17,000 by 2011.
To make my point, I will be generous and assume the effective sample will be 20,000 at some point, and that the number of television households will remain constant. 20,000 out of 112,800,000 equates to 1 in 5,640 households. So how small does that make Nielsen's cup?When I was a child, the biggest pot in my mother's home was a five-gallon soup kitchen pot. There are 16 cups to a gallon, so there must have been 80 cups in her soup kitchen pot. So Nielsen's "cup" isn't really a cup. There are 256 tablespoons in a gallon, so there must have been 1,280 tablespoons in my mother's soup kitchen pot. So Nielsen's "cup" isn't really a tablespoon. If there are 768 teaspoons in a gallon, there must have been 3,840 teaspoons of soup in the soup kitchen pot. But that means a teaspoon is still too big to use and Nielsen's "cup" is smaller than a teaspoon. According to Wikipedia, there are 60 "drops" in a teaspoon, so there must have been 230,400 drops in my mother's soup kitchen pot. Which means Nielsen's "cup" actually translates to 41 drops -- or approximately 2/3 of a teaspoon.
What further complicates the analogy is that Nielsen's one pot is used to measure television in its entirety -- which consists not of one network, but hundreds. How do you measure hundreds of networks with just 41 drops? Assume a broadcast network had a great night and 20% of the nation's population watched that network's program. Nielsen's "cup" for that network would be 20% of 41 drops, or approximately eight drops. Out of those eight drops Nielsen would have to differentiate by age, sex and race. A popular network with a 2.0 rating would have one drop of soup, give or take. The ratings for the vast majority of networks would be based on much less soup than that.
Keep in mind we have not discussed the "stirring" of the sample, nor have we talked about those cups that are drawn from the pot and dumped because they would not agree to take part in the tasting. We have also limited our analysis to Nielsen's national panel. Their local panels are an order of magnitude smaller and more problematic. If we include geographic targeting (Sys Code Clusters, for example) the issue becomes further complicated. Of course, addressable advertising cannot be measured by a sample at all.
To my learned colleague with whom I spoke the other day, this has been a real-world examination of the vegetable soup analogy. The small sample approach was fine when collecting more data was expensive and wrought with problems, but it makes little sense today. Ultimately, it will be the television industry that will decide if small panels remain the "gold standard." I continue to believe counting one in five households and using mathematical inference to determine demographics is a vastly superior solution.
Undoubtedly, there will be those who disagree. Rebuttals can be posted on this blog or addressed directly to me. My contact information is listed below.
Post your response to the public TV Board blog.
See what others are saying on the TV Board blog.Frank S. Foster ( foster.frank@evadconsulting.com) is a senior consultant at EVAD Consulting and is currently working with TNS in a strategic capacity related to its television audience measurement efforts. Prior to EVAD, Mr. Foster was the co-founder and president of erinMedia.
Friday, March 14, 2008
Media Roundtable Luncheon
I had the opportunity to attend and speak at a George Allen Florida All Media Roundtable yesterday. There were some very interesting speakers at this Roundtable including:
George Measer - CEO of a local group of community newspapers and past preseident of the National Newspaper Association. Mr. Measer spoke about the decline in circulation for daily newspapers nationwide, but interestingly enough, community newspapers have been shielded from this decline and are actually increasing. These seems to be a strong demand for hyper-local news.
Norman Rau - President of Sandusky Radio, with ten radio stations in Phoenix and Seattle. Mr. Rau spoke on the subject of radio, obviously. What struck me about his speech was his' company's attempt at incorporating the internet into their portfolio, but not having a lot of sales success. All of their radio stations are currently streamed online, Mr. Rau said, but with 80% of a radio station's business local, local businesses do not care about the worldwide listeners attracted to an online streaming radio station. The amount of local visitors listening to their stations online is relatively low, and thus they have had trouble quantifying the value to their clients.
Jerry Bilik - VP of Creative Development for Feld Entertainment. Feld Entertainment is the current owner of Ringling Circus, and also has the exclusive contract to product the Disney on Ice shows. He talked about how even in a declining economy, live family shows like Disney on Ice and the circus thrive. Even as families are struggling with high costs of gas, food and housing, they will still find money to bring their children to these kind of events, simply for the moral factor. Mr. Bilik also mentioned a great breaking news: The Ringling Bros Circus is actively searching for locations to FINALLY bring the circus back home to Sarasota, Florida for a year-round show and winter headquarters! This would be huge for the Sarasota area. If anyone has any potential locations in Sarasota that may meet the needs of the circus, contact me and I can put you in contact with Mr. Bilik.
Bob Chandler - Former CBS Senior Vice President and supervisor of 60 Minutes. Mr. Chandler spoke about the upcoming 40 year anniversary of 60 Minutes and told us the origins of how the show originally came to be. Even I got nostalgic about that period of time in TV history, and I wasn't even around then!
I spoke on the subject of TV and the internet, and the multitude of ways that our company is trying to provide content across any particular platform we can imagine - from TV to newspaper to online to cell phones, where people are, that's where we're going to be. There seemed to be a lot of interest in this new world of media, and a lot of disbelief in the way things have advanced and changed. I received some very insightful questions, particularly on the subject of "Information Overload". I just covered information overload in a previous post, so it is definately a problem in my mind as well.
All in all, it was an insightful lunch, and I was delighted to share in the wisdom of these past giants of the media industry.
George Measer - CEO of a local group of community newspapers and past preseident of the National Newspaper Association. Mr. Measer spoke about the decline in circulation for daily newspapers nationwide, but interestingly enough, community newspapers have been shielded from this decline and are actually increasing. These seems to be a strong demand for hyper-local news.
Norman Rau - President of Sandusky Radio, with ten radio stations in Phoenix and Seattle. Mr. Rau spoke on the subject of radio, obviously. What struck me about his speech was his' company's attempt at incorporating the internet into their portfolio, but not having a lot of sales success. All of their radio stations are currently streamed online, Mr. Rau said, but with 80% of a radio station's business local, local businesses do not care about the worldwide listeners attracted to an online streaming radio station. The amount of local visitors listening to their stations online is relatively low, and thus they have had trouble quantifying the value to their clients.
Jerry Bilik - VP of Creative Development for Feld Entertainment. Feld Entertainment is the current owner of Ringling Circus, and also has the exclusive contract to product the Disney on Ice shows. He talked about how even in a declining economy, live family shows like Disney on Ice and the circus thrive. Even as families are struggling with high costs of gas, food and housing, they will still find money to bring their children to these kind of events, simply for the moral factor. Mr. Bilik also mentioned a great breaking news: The Ringling Bros Circus is actively searching for locations to FINALLY bring the circus back home to Sarasota, Florida for a year-round show and winter headquarters! This would be huge for the Sarasota area. If anyone has any potential locations in Sarasota that may meet the needs of the circus, contact me and I can put you in contact with Mr. Bilik.
Bob Chandler - Former CBS Senior Vice President and supervisor of 60 Minutes. Mr. Chandler spoke about the upcoming 40 year anniversary of 60 Minutes and told us the origins of how the show originally came to be. Even I got nostalgic about that period of time in TV history, and I wasn't even around then!
I spoke on the subject of TV and the internet, and the multitude of ways that our company is trying to provide content across any particular platform we can imagine - from TV to newspaper to online to cell phones, where people are, that's where we're going to be. There seemed to be a lot of interest in this new world of media, and a lot of disbelief in the way things have advanced and changed. I received some very insightful questions, particularly on the subject of "Information Overload". I just covered information overload in a previous post, so it is definately a problem in my mind as well.
All in all, it was an insightful lunch, and I was delighted to share in the wisdom of these past giants of the media industry.
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Lazy Mechanic vs Industrious Mechanic
On the heels of my past post, here is a story that has always struck me as a good approach to have as a Research Director. In fact, I've had this story printed out and posted on my cube wall for years.
____________
THE LAZY MECHANIC: First, to preface my system for doing library research, let me explain the story of the Lazy Mechanic and the Industrious Mechanic. According to my Dad, who comes from a line of machinists, engineers and other early technocrats, it's better for a factory to hire a lazy mechanic to service it's machines, than an industrious one.
He says that an industrious mechanic will carefully oil, and service and repair a machine so that it works perfectly (with lots of his help and labor) and never needs replacing. This will leave you with an outdated and labor inefficient machine, that is in too good a repair to justify scrapping.
A lazy mechanic, on the other hand, doesn't want to spend his day oiling and repairing and servicing. So he will use his mechanical knowledge to alter the machine to make it more efficient, (expending extra time at the beginning), so he needn't work on it for the future. He will also ignore doing any kind of servicing that isn't actually necessary to the operation of the machine. In short, he will expend his energy on making it a better machine, rather than maintaining an inefficient status quo.
This is one of life's important lessons. If something takes a lot of time, trouble, and effort to do, when it is something that should be simple, chances are that the system is set up wrong. In this case you need to apply your effort to finding a better system that works faster, rather than simply dumping all your effort into forcing an inefficient method to work for you. This will take extra time at the beginning, and save you time in the long run.
____________
THE LAZY MECHANIC: First, to preface my system for doing library research, let me explain the story of the Lazy Mechanic and the Industrious Mechanic. According to my Dad, who comes from a line of machinists, engineers and other early technocrats, it's better for a factory to hire a lazy mechanic to service it's machines, than an industrious one.
He says that an industrious mechanic will carefully oil, and service and repair a machine so that it works perfectly (with lots of his help and labor) and never needs replacing. This will leave you with an outdated and labor inefficient machine, that is in too good a repair to justify scrapping.
A lazy mechanic, on the other hand, doesn't want to spend his day oiling and repairing and servicing. So he will use his mechanical knowledge to alter the machine to make it more efficient, (expending extra time at the beginning), so he needn't work on it for the future. He will also ignore doing any kind of servicing that isn't actually necessary to the operation of the machine. In short, he will expend his energy on making it a better machine, rather than maintaining an inefficient status quo.
This is one of life's important lessons. If something takes a lot of time, trouble, and effort to do, when it is something that should be simple, chances are that the system is set up wrong. In this case you need to apply your effort to finding a better system that works faster, rather than simply dumping all your effort into forcing an inefficient method to work for you. This will take extra time at the beginning, and save you time in the long run.
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