Adbiz

If you were wondering where one big auto insurance specialist has been of late, perhaps it was simply in production on new creative to freshen up its 2021 marketing and advertising slate. Flo, Jamie and the rest of the Progressive insurance stars are back at spot radio -- and in a big way.

A noted on-air talent, PD and GM, Bob Lawrence is probably best known for his 14 years of duty at The Radio Advertising Bureau and his past six years at Revenue Development Resources.

LG Electronics has made "a significant investment" of nearly $80 million in a company dedicated to "make TV an even better advertising medium for brands, agencies and networks."

Until recently, Liberty Mutual Insurance was a fan of spot cable, using regional efforts to help build its brand. Its "LiMu Emu" spots aimed to attract Millennial and Gen Z consumers, and gain awareness in an ultra-competitive category. Now, it has turned not only to radio, but to Spot TV.

While it's certainly exciting that a big user of Spot Cable has now appeared at Spot Radio, heating up the auto insurance category, the presence of a popular language-learning online platform in the top three advertisers by play count is perhaps the biggest takeaway of the latest Media Monitors Spot Ten Radio report.

Linear TV accounts for roughly two-thirds of all viewing, and its combination with streaming planning and buying can maximize reach and optimize frequency, particularly with the inclusion of first-party data. That's a key takeaway from a just-released report from Comcast-owned FreeWheel's "Council for Premium Video," which is full of insights for advertisers.

In just days, the much-anticipated -- and heavily marketed -- discovery + OTT platform bows. How is Discovery telling consumers about its pending debut? Ironically, it is using cable TV to push viewers away from MVPDs and toward its soon-to-debut streaming service.

At Spot TV, GEICO is most certainly one of the stalwarts with respect to ad activity by commercial count. Indeed, it is No. 2 for the week ending December 27. But, there's a big new No. 1, and it is a germ-fighting brand.

For years, it was safe to say that GEICO was the biggest user of broadcast and cable to reach consumers, given their dominance at spot radio, spot cable and spot TV according to Media Monitors. That's not true today, as one of its auto insurance competitors has surged to the top of the latest Spot Radio report.

Nielsen Audio's 2020 radio market survey rankings by frequency, type and population -- by rank and by market -- are now available for public viewing. There's also Total Survey Area Population data, and Television DMA regions, for those interested in this information.

The Comcast-owned multi-platform video advertising unit known as FreeWheel has agreed to purchase a software as a service (SaaS) advertising company in a move that expands FreeWheel’s current programmatic marketplace capabilities across all forms of television and video advertising, including Connected TV (CTV) and Set-top Box Video on Demand (STB VOD).

A partnership that enables "a new way" to measure TV marketing has been brought to market. And, it is being billed as a "first-of-its-kind solution" that combines MarketCast's data science expertise and Kinetiq's ad detection platform to measure competitive benchmarking for tune-in TV attribution.

Media ad sales platform Matrix has formed a group of thought leaders from across the industry, including some of its own executives, to identify outcomes and workflows that will advance how television will be bought and sold within the next three years.

Take a look at the latest Media Monitors Spot Ten TV report, and you'll immediately notice one big difference from the Spot Ten Radio report for the week ending December 13. Big retail stores are present at spot TV; they're absent at radio.

Christmas may less than two weeks away, but that doesn't mean key retailers are putting their dollars at CHR ... or any other radio formats. What are the big categories? Pharma, and financial, are in the lead.