AT&T’s WarnerMedia saw the number of activations on its HBO Max streaming platform double in Q4 to 17.2 million from the third-quarter of 2020, thanks in large part to the success of “Wonder Woman 1984.” During its earnings call on Wednesday, AT&T said that the total number of domestic HBO Max and HBO subscribers topped 41 […]
WarnerMedia’s wide range of shows, personalities and topics means the company can create vastly different types of branded content. Data plays a key role in matchmaking between the advertiser’s target audience and the content and delivery those potential customers like best. The teams using Launchpad, WarnerMedia’s insights tool, start their sales pitch by showing how […]
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Reclaiming The News CNN is launching a digital news aggregation service. The news company will pay other publishers to feature both subscription and ad-funded content on the still-unnamed service, called “NewsCo” internally, The Information reports. Like News Corp, which announced its Knewz aggregation platform […]
WarnerMedia’s announcement Wednesday that three of its top sales executives would leave as part of a reorg reflects changing times in the business of network TV. Donna Speciale, president of ad sales, Dan Riess, EVP of Turner Ignite, and Frank Sgrizzi, EVP of portfolio sales and client partnerships, are leaving WarnerMedia one year after its […]
Updated 8:00 PM EST to reflect a statement from WarnerMedia CRO Gerhard Zeiler WarnerMedia’s president of ad sales, Donna Speciale, is leaving the company as part of a broader ad sales reorg. The Information first reported the development. Speciale, who has been president of Turner’s ad sales business for seven years, took on the role […]
WarnerMedia has exited the OpenAP Consortium. It’s a major blow to the TV industry’s attempt to jointly promote audience-based buying on television by creating standardized segments and measurement across their networks. Turner was one of the consortium’s original members in 2017, along with Fox and Viacom. NBCU joined the following year. But now that WarnerMedia […]
Cords are getting cut left and right, but TV still works … right? “We all know that TV does drive ROI, but there haven’t really been any proof points like there has been in digital,” said Donna Speciale, Turner’s president of advertising sales, at AdExchanger’s Industry Preview event in New York City on Wednesday. That’s […]
Why is the industry still talking about linear vs. digital when to consumers, it’s all just content? That’s the question Donna Speciale, president of ad sales at Turner, is asking to galvanize long-awaited changes to how network TV transacts media. “At some point, we’re not going to say linear or digital,” she told AdExchanger. “We’ll […]
Turner inventory will soon be available through the AppNexus ad platform, AT&T top dog Randall Stephenson said at an event Wednesday. Speaking at Goldman Sachs’ Communacopia conference in New York, Stephenson also told attendees how he hopes to expand HBO viewership and said that federal authorities must codify rules around privacy and net neutrality. Advertising is […]
While Turner divisions like CNN and Bleacher Report have been producing podcasts for years, the broadcast giant never formalized a podcast sales strategy across its network. But with podcast advertising poised to double to $659 million by 2020, according to the IAB and PwC, it made sense for Turner to extend the reach from its […]
By Sarah Sluis, Ryan Joe, Allison Schiff, Alison Weissbrot and Rae Paoletta Programmatic is expanding, becoming a glossier way to transact and add value to both the buy and sell sides. “We are moving rapidly into a programmatic-first world,” said Sal Candela, president of enterprise partnerships at Omnicom. “There is a surge of quality inventory […]
At Turner, Jesse Redniss is the data oracle. As newly appointed EVP of data strategy and product innovation, Redniss leads a team armed with 35 data scientists. Their job is to collect the increasing amount of data generated by viewers of Turner content and to translate it into insights as the broadcaster works to navigate […]
NBCUniversal has joined the TV consortium OpenAP. Launched just over a year ago, OpenAP is a joint effort by broadcast networks Fox, Turner and Viacom to create a common data standard and provide a more accurate representation of advanced TV audiences across platforms. Through a multiyear agreement, NBCU will license its data platform Audience Studio […]
TBS and TNT try to be “brands that live outside of television,” said Karina Kogan, SVP of digital media and products for the two networks. Beyond its owned-and-operated networks, sites and apps, Facebook, YouTube and Snapchat are the networks’ workhorses for driving engagement with viewers – and acquiring new ones. “We start with who’s watching […]
Amit Chaturvedi, EVP of revenue and operations and product management for Turner, will speak at AdExchanger’s Programmatic IO conference on April 10-11 at the Marriott Marquis in San Francisco. At Turner, Amit Chaturvedi’s job is to support ad sales and drive revenue. He’s the guy responsible for vetting vendor partners and building a stack to ensure the […]
As the value of long-tail ad inventory supply decreases, Turner wants to be there to grab the budgets of brands moving toward safer environments. “The murkiness of the long tail in terms of brand safety, along with Safari 11 killing cookies after 24 hours, is going to force a contraction of money that’s spent on […]
TBS and TNT’s new CMO, Michael Engleman, is on a mission to make the networks’ brand marketing engine much more agile. Engleman, who helped rebrand the Sci Fi Channel as SyFy during his time at NBCUniversal, thinks broadcasters will be forced to adapt as new content producers and channels compete for consumer attention. For years, […]
It’s still unclear how 360-degree video or virtual reality will affect media and advertising long-term since many brands and networks are still in the experimental stage. But CNN and Volvo hope to up the ante during next Monday’s solar eclipse. The news broadcaster and automaker collaborated on four pieces of branded content that will live-stream […]
By Sarah Sluis, Kelly Liyakasa and Alison Weissbrot Some publishers excel in programmatic in ways that make buyers take notice. The best way to stand out in programmatic is by integrating sales teams so it’s easy to buy programmatically and direct with a single conversation. Smart publishers don’t create incentives that make salespeople push direct […]
Like the packaged products he helps market, Omnicom Media Group Chief Research Officer Jonathan Steuer wishes data segments disclosed their ingredients on the side of the label. “You really have to dig to figure out what’s in [a segment] right now,” Steuer said Monday at the Advertising Research Foundation’s Audience Measurement Summit in Jersey City. […]
Unlike the NBC upfront, which touted TV’s edge over digital, Turner Broadcasting took a different approach at its upfront Wednesday by emphasizing the “omnichannel experience.” “We reach 125 million viewers now across linear, OTT and mobile devices every month,” said Kevin Reilly, president of TBS and TNT, and chief creative officer for Turner Entertainment. “We’re […]
During Bleacher Report’s flashy NewFront late last week, CEO Dave Finocchio made the following pitch to advertisers: “Use us to maintain your relevancy all year long.” Millennials, he added, aren’t watching three- to four-hour live sports broadcasts anymore and big tentpole commercials alone won’t cut it. Whereas previous generations got their news and information from […]
Unlike in digital, where marketers can buy across multiple publishers, TV planning is largely limited to a single broadcaster’s inventory. Fox, Turner and Viacom have jointly formed an advanced audience platform called OpenAP, which will roll out to media agencies and advertisers in early April, to try to solve that challenge. While each network has […]
Turner’s revenue analytics team wasn’t always quickly able to answer questions like whether the presidential inauguration affected advertising revenue. The publisher couldn’t collate data more than weekly or monthly because it worked with more than a dozen programmatic partners, each with their own user interfaces, which supplied ads across Turner’s multiple sites – from CNN […]
TV buying is becoming more data-driven, even on the linear side. But buyers and sellers are questioning whether audience targeting works on the medium. “’Should TV be bought on an audience basis?’ is still an outstanding question,” Donna Speciale, president of ad sales at Turner, said Wednesday at AdExchanger’s Industry Preview conference in New […]
CNN sees a future where brand activations include everything from linear TV to custom-built mobile apps. The Turner-owned broadcaster built an app for CNNMoney called CNNMoneyStream that allows users to follow and personalize a feed of companies, influencers, news and market data. CNN borrowed the concept from Turner sports property Bleacher Report. E*Trade, one of […]
Turner will speak at AdExchanger’s PROGRAMMATIC I/O Conference in New York on Oct. 27. Turner took a bold position when it promised that by 2020 more than 50% of its inventory would be transacted against audience guarantees. Since then, CNN, TNT and TruTV’s parent broadcaster has grown its data management and marketing services business, to […]
Social data is emerging as a way for traditional TV players to start moving beyond age and gender targeting. For a recent movie release, Turner ran a month-long ad campaign during shows where an audience segment built from social media behavior was predicted to appear in high numbers. That audience segment, built by cross-screen data […]
While early social analytics tools measured likes, shares and sentiment, they didn’t capture total consumer engagement with brand or publisher content. It’s a problem social TV tool Canvs has teamed up with Turner Broadcasting and other media companies to solve. The premise of the partnership, revealed Tuesday, is that consumers are more apt to read […]
Turner-owned Bleacher Report is going all-in on social platforms because the chance to set roots in social broadcasting before ESPN does, whether or not reliable platform monetization is a mirage, is too tempting to ignore. Bleacher Report’s future success will “key off our ability to leverage the social graph,” said Rich Calacci, Bleacher Report’s CRO […]
