GenDigital

MTV Orders Up HS Newspaper Reality Series

Beginning in the first quarter of 2008, for those of us who watch MTV, we might, just might get the opportunity to see some future Pulitzer Prize winners when they were just a bunch of kids as the cable network unveils its latest reality series. Currently in development, the new reality series will be called "The Paper." The show hones in on "The Circuit," the school newspaper for Cypress Bay High School, which is located in Weston, Florida, near Fort Lauderdale. Obviously MTV dev guys did their homework on picking the right high school to focus on..."The Circuit" has won numerous awards, including best overall high school newspaper. As the synopsis goes, apparently there is a lot of tension and stress in the newsroom (how many high schools have a newsroom let alone still publish a paper nowadays, but that is neither here nor there), and through the initial eight episodes of "The Circuit" we all will be treated to a big hunking slice of that drama. Based on the geographic location of the show, it might end up being the intellectuals version of Laguna Beach, sorry, I mean Newport Harbor, they were kicked out of Laguna last season. Who knows, but it's definitely worth catching the first episode.

Yet Another One Joins Online High School Sports Coverage

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery right? If that's the case than Fox Interactive Media must be madly in love with Hearst Argyle's High School Playbook, CSTV's MaxPreps and independent Takkle. This is almost getting kinda of boring at this point. Yes, according to reports, with the help of Fox Interactive Media, Fox's affiliate tv stations have launched localized versions of a new site, dubbed Fox Hilites (real original name by the way) that will feature...you guessed it, video highlights of local teams. We just took a quick run through of a few of the market sites (Orlando and Philadelphia) and unfortunately, did not have a great experience on either site. The video library was almost non-existent on the Orlando Fox Hilites site with the exception of some football clips, while the videos on the Philadelphia market site crashed two of our computers. In case you haven't noticed, this field has quickly become more crowded than Las Vegas during New Year's. It seems everyone with a national or regional media franchise that has local outposts wants to be in this game. Clearly there will have to be a shakeout because there is not enough eyeballs for each of these properties to be successful. As of today with the addition of the Fox affiliates, you know have operators including Hearst Argyle, Belo and Emmis joining CSTV's MaxPreps and indy Takkle. After perusing through each of the sites, you should quickly see that HS Playbook and MaxPreps stand head and heels above the others. Please, no need to anyone sites to this already way overcrowded niche...

Tween Star Efron Rules Teen Choice Awards

Move over Justin Timberlake, the teen audience has spoken, and they have chosen their latest star. Star is probably somewhat of an understatement in this case. The funny thing is, the star is best known for reaching teen's younger siblings: the tween segment. But no matter, Zac Efron is taking stardom to new levels through the recording breaking performance of High School Musical 2, the highest rated movie in cable television history, not a bad thing to put on the ole resume. At last night's Teen Choice Awards, the young Hollywood heartthrob grab the ultimate "hottie" title and his movie grabbed the year's top honor as "best TV movie." The jarring screams of young adolescent teen girls for Effron was reminiscent of four lads from across the pond from an earlier era, a much earlier era. Tween stars seemed to rule the roost at this year's show, with Miley Cyrus, star of hit show Hannah Montana, walking off with two awards, including "best comedy TV program." The results of the awards show begs the question: should the Teen Choice Awards re-brand itself as the Tween Choice Awards, or should we be more liberal when defining the "teen" audience. Clearly all of the momentum is on the side of Hollywood's youngest celebs, and given the fact that there will be a third installment of High School Musical (on the big screen next time), is there any reason to doubt that young people will be all about the "young" for the foreseeable future?

Hills Premiere Provides Much Needed Boost For MTV

Question for you...what was MTV's most watched show last summer? If you said "The Hills," then you are absolutely correct. We posted back in April of this year that MTV opted for a third season of the Laguna Beach spin-off. Last week's season premiere was huge for MTV. According to Nielsen ratings, the 3rd season premiere episode of "The Hills" was up 44% compared to last year's debut. The strong results landed "The Hills" as cable television's most watched show last week among the youth audience, ahead of stalwarts like "Family Guy" on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim and MTV's other hit show "The Real World." Teen and young adult viewers that tuned into the premiere were eager to see the interaction between the star Lauren Conrad, better known to friends as L.C. and her former-best-friend-turned-super-ultimate nemesis, Heidi Montag, with accusations swirling around a possible sex tape of L.C. and her former boyfriend. Apparently the conflict (which the entertainment tabloids have been covering non-stop) was exactly the stimulus MTV needed to have the season 3 premiere come in as the network's most watched show of the year to date. When the August edition of our Top Ten List Report comes out next week, we expect to see "The Hills" land in the top 3 favorite television programs among female respondents. More to come on that next week... 

What Were They Thinking: Did You Hear About The 600 Page iPhone Bill?

Just when it seemed the pressure was coming off AT&T Wireless after announcing what was initially regarded as underwhelming results for sale of its iPhone (Apple announced iPhone sales about a week after AT&T results came out and its results, based on sales of the iPhone at its retail stores calmed analysts and the media down quite a bit), it seems another little quirk has come about and this not so little incident could result in widespread customer backlash. Newly minted iPhone customers started receiving their first bills from AT&T Wireless last week, no big surprise, right? (This next part is where I am having a hard time understanding how in the world they didn't see this coming). Well it turns out for those iPhone customers who actually use the features and functionality of the iPhone, like...uh, texting!?!? the bills they've have been receiving are bordering the point of obnoxious. Some customers reported receiving 300 page double-sided bills detailing every single 1K data transfer. Oops. I don't know where to start...Not exactly great timing given the emphasis Fortune 500 corporations are putting on environmental responsibility and sustainability--300 page bills certainly killed more trees than necessary. What's more, I can't believe that the back-office guys could not have envisioned this coming. I am a Verizon Wireless customer, so I can't confirm this, but if you are a AT&T Wireless customer and you have a BlackBerry, you don't receive 300 page bill every month...right? So, why would you receive one if you own an iPhone. Clearly, someone or some people missed this big time. If nothing else big pops up today or tomorrow, this story will definitely get a lot of play.

One Plus One Might Not Equal Two For MTV's Urge and Real Network's Rhapsody

According to a report yesterday, MTV has struck a deal with Real Networks to merge its digital music service, which has yet to gain any real traction, with Rhapsody, the digital media service operated by Real Networks with a hope of posing some sort of challenge to category killer iTunes. The service will get a big push starting with MTV's Video Music Awards on September 9th. In case you can't tell, we're skeptical on a positive outcome for the deal. Granted, MTV's service has been bundled with Microsoft's Windows Media Player for quite some time now, and the reality is that it has had very little impact on usage to date. The fact remains they are chasing down a competitor that has 90%+ market share so going after less than 10% seems more like a pipe dream than a sound strategy.

Sponsored Wal-Mart Page on Facebook Creates "Enlightening Conversation" Among Members

In the midst of the super critical back to school season, marketers and retailers pull out all stops in hopes of effectively capturing a greater share of dollars from student shoppers and their parents. As a sign of the times, marketers are shifting some of their ad dollars towards emerging media platforms, namely social networking sites like Facebook. One of our proprietary panelists sent us a link to this sponsored page that Wal-Mart currently has on Facebook promoting its suite of products for back to school and already it looks like some mainstream media outlets, including Business Week have already picked up on what is sure to be a future case study on the ins and outs of marketing on social networking sites. The sponsored Wal-Mart page on Facebook has 840 members as of this morning, and many of these members aren't exactly pro Wal-Mart if you know what I mean. In case you haven't seen firsthand what the whole notion of social networking marketing and participatory media can look like, I would strongly encourage you to peruse through the site. There is a chorus of negative comments from Facebook members regarding Wal-Mart, clearly the folks at Bentonville are well aware of is. At the same time, there has been seem overwhelming positive comments left on the page by members as well praising Wal-Mart for their community and outreach efforts. Look folks, (and this is something we have been speaking with our clients now for over two years) marketing on social networking sites is no joke and certainly not for the faint of heart. This audience is not shy about expressing their feelings when it comes to corporate America or price of gasoline for that matter. I look at the this as a huge litmus test for Wal-Mart and other major corporations who for one reason or another tend to generate controversy. The fact that Wal-Mart has kept the page up there even as some members essentially pummel them I believe is actually quite remarkable. They are opening up the door and stimulating valuable conversation among the Facebook member base, and I really hope they don't take it down. It is our belief that the conversation that is being generated will end up benefiting Wal-Mart in the end with respect to this audience segment. A lot of these students are posting what we consider to be thoughtful and sincere commentary. No one ever said social network marketing was going to be easy (certainly we have stressed this to our clients), but the reality is we wholeheartedly applaud the world's largest retailer for keeping the page live and not folding.

Superbad Headlines Youth Dominated Media Weekend

This past weekend was a perfect storm of action for young people ranging in age from as young as six or seven all the way up through age twenty four. Last Friday night, August 17, will most likely be confirmed today or tomorrow as one of historic proportions for the Disney Channel as well as all of basic cable. Early reports have the premiere of High School Musical 2 drawing some 17.2 million viewers, which would make it the most watched television show or movie in the history of basic cable. Not a bad way to start off the week for the folks over at Disney. Luckily, I was able to see firsthand how members of the tween and young teen audience were acting in anticipation of the premiere. I think it was brilliant ploy by Disney to feature the countdown clock to the premiere, it only got your viewers even more excited. What's more, I think it is more than fair to say that there were quite a few "viewing parties" taking place this past Friday, I politely and stealthy crashed one of the them. Now that it is over, it's always about what's next with this audience. If you saw (or heard) the reactions of some of the tweenie boppers faces when I told them that the next time they saw a High School Musical movie (the third iteration) it would be on the big screen, well, all I can say is, my hearing is almost back to normal, but not quite there yet. If that's any indication of what's to come for Disney, we should expect the billion dollar franchise to grow into a multi-billion dollar franchise. Switching gears to the teen and college aged segment...Give it up for Sony's opening weekend performance of Superbad, who boldly jumped over Rush Hour 3 and Bourne Ultimatum to secure top spot of the box office. Seriously, it is any surprise who drives July and August theater visits? In the spirit of Borat, Superbad was made relatively inexpensively, and will most likely turn out to be extraordinarily profitable for Sony-owned Columbia Pictures. It's really a winning formula with a few twists here and there...a couple of hormone crazed high school guys on the prowl for alcohol and girls, not necessarily in the that order...

Mixed Signals on Back to School Shopping Remain

There seems to be a lot of contradictory information out there regarding the current back to school shopping season. Back in early July, we expected teens and college students to increase their back to school related spending by upwards of 7 to 8 percent to $512. Although our Back To School Retail and Shopping Report won't be completed for another week, it's clear that spending on technology and communications as well as clothing and apparel still looks to be up from last year. This news comes as some major retailers ranging from Wal-Mart to Target have posted some initial results that are considered lackluster. So, what is the disconnect? Our hunch is that some back to school purchases that occurred in June or July of '06 are being put on hold or potentially being put off indefinitely until later this year. At this point, we probably have to go into a wait and see mode until sometime in mid to late September. Is it that much of stretch to think the for one reason or another that parents could wait until the very last minute to make some of the bigger ticket item purchases like computers and other digital consumer electronics devices? We don't think so. In terms of retail, we continue to see a push towards specialty clothing retailers who hawk lower price fare like H&M and Forever 21. That in itself could explain some of the lower figures the huge discount retailers like Wal-Mart and Target are reporting. During a very recent shop along with teens in Southern California, we heard over and over again how they preferred lower priced specialty retailers like the aforementioned stores over staples like Target. Typically, what happens on the west coast heads east, so don't be surprised if this current retail trend only gets larger.

Time, Inc To Focus on Social Networking For Companion Web Sites

It's no secret that the major traditional print media publishers like Hearst and Conde Nast have been beefing up their Web proprieties in the past year in order to adjust to a world where more advertising dollars are being directed to the Internet. We've posted extensively about Time, Inc's interactive efforts in particular over the past year. They have tried created web exclusive properties (remember OfficePirates.com?), they've made digital investments and acquisitions (with Takkle and FanNation). Now, word is out that Time, Inc is poised to expand its social networking capabilities for its host of companion magazine web sites, most likely starting with its two premiere properties: Sports Illustrated and People. Needless to say, we think it will be an uphill battle to say the least. Although online magazine readership has grown significantly over the past year and half, it still remains relatively small in the whole scheme of things. Only 17% of teens and college students (20% of males and 13% of females) report visiting a magazine's web site at least once in the past month compared to 88% who visited a social networking site like Facebook or MySpace. The question is will adding social networking applications be the essential ingredient in the secret sauce to cause the much needed traffic spikes Time, Inc (and other publishers for that matter) is seeking? The initial reaction is no, but we'll go on the record and say we'll take a wait and see approach for now.