Intelligence Briefs

I attended CES recently with 150,000+ others including an estimated

Over the last few years, consumers have increased, not decreased, the time they spend watching television content. This might sound like good news for advertisers, save for two important caveats. First, while attention time dedicated to TV content has been rising, this is not the case for people actually paying attention to the ads on the screen. Second, when consumers are watching TV they are increasingly dividing their attention between the TV set and other devices, particularly tablets and other mobile devices. A 2011 Nielsen Co. survey showed that as much as 40% of time watching TV is spent on such media multitasking activities, and it’s likely that this behavior has accelerated over the past three years. While many advertisers are rightly nervous about multitasking, there could be new opportunities to benefit from this trend. My recent working paper with researchers Jura Liaukonyte and Kenneth Wilbur tries to pinpoint what, exactly, these benefits might be – and how they can be achieved.

John Poray, Society of Broadcast Engineers Executive Director, presented a paper at the NAB in 2012, which cited the “age bubble” as one of the greatest challenges to the broadcast engineering profession. In his paper titled, “The Shortage of Broadcast Engineers – is there, or do we just need to know where to look?” he compared 2001 SBE membership statistics to 2011. Poray’s paper indicated that in 2001, 33% of SBE members were between ages 45 and 56 while only 16% were between ages 55 and 65. At the end of 2011, 32% of SBE members who were currently employed were between 45 and 56 years of age. SBE members between 45 and 66 years old made up 65% of membership at that time. Only 8.4% were under age 36.

With the number of natural disasters and other large-scale emergency situations on the rise around

Answer my quick quiz… Who are the two US Senators from your state?

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is considering an end to the regulatory support of

The A&E Network just announced that they were lifting their suspension of Duck Dynasty’s Phil Robertson and bringing him back less than a week after suspending him for remarks he made in GQ in regards to homosexuals and African-Americans (as I had predicted they would last week). One could hear echoes of Claude Rains’ famous quote in Casablanca of ‘I am shocked, shocked, shocked that gambling is going on (after pocketing his winnings) with the announcement. Nobody is shocked. The decision was inevitable. Duck Dynasty is the network’s number one rated show and in many ways there is no network without Duck Dynasty. This crisis showed totally the power of social media.

Five years ago I attended a media think tank hosted by the management of the Boston Red Sox at Fenway Park. The guest speaker was Bill Keller who was then the executive editor of the New York Times, a position from which he stepped down in 2011 to return to becoming a full time writer for the Times. The eruption of the financial crisis facing many papers across the nation was gaining full force at the time of Keller’s talk. The Boston Globe, which was then owned by the Times (Now owned by a group of Red Sox principals) was in particular financial stress as was the case at the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times and many smaller newspapers throughout the country. Draconian cutbacks were taking place in newspaper newsrooms, and those cutbacks and closings continue today. During the Q&A following Keller’s talk I asked if he felt a possible solution to maintaining strong print editorial departments was collaboration with television stations and local cable news channels in the local marketplace. Would the sharing of personnel allow for a bolstering of local news coverage and investigative reporting in both mediums?

As we approach the one-year anniversary of the Newtown tragedy, and nearly eleven months have passed since Joe Biden’s much-touted

Recently, I attended my first Techonomy Conference. Beyond the awesome venue, Dove Mountain outside of Tucson, Arizona