NEW YORK--Broadcast network CBS will be advertising its fall TV season with a video-chip ad embedded in an issue of Entertainment Weekly.
The September 18 issue of the Time Inc.-owned magazine will feature the first video ad to appear in print, George Schweitzer, CBS marketing president, said Wednesday at a press conference at the company's headquarters here.
The ad with embedded video.
(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET)The ad will be launched in partnership with PepsiCo to promote Pepsi Max soda and the TV network's Monday prime-time lineup. Not everyone will be seeing it: the ad will appear in a magazine insert sent to subscribers in the New York and Los Angeles areas--an edition without the video chip will be sent to subscribers elsewhere and show up on newsstands.
The technology for the battery-powered ads was manufactured by a Los Angeles-based company called Americhip, and each ad can handle about 40 minutes of video.
Here are some more details about the Americhip technology: the screen, which is 2.7 millimeters thick, has a 320x240 resolution. The battery lasts for about 65 to 70 minutes, and can be recharged, believe it or not, with a mini USB cord--there's a jack on the back of it. The screen, which uses thin film transistor liquid crystal display (TFT LCD) technology, is enforced by protective polycarbonate. It's a product that has been in development at Americhip for about two years, spokesman Tim Clegg told CNET News via e-mail.
"It's leadership in innovation, which we really stress at CBS in every part of our company," Schweitzer said of the ads, which were developed with the collaboration of the Ignition Factory, a division of the Omnicom Group's OMD media agency.
PepsiCo has been experimenting with edgy, experimental ads for some time now, distributing millions of 3D glasses for its SoBe LifeWater Super Bowl ad earlier this year. It more recently launched a new Mountain Dew flavor by inviting prominent Twitter users to a party at a trendy Brooklyn venue.
Pepsi Max is the company's new diet soda geared toward men, advertised earlier this summer with bold print ads that declared, "Save the calories for bacon."
"The evolution of marketing television in the fall--it used to be as simple as this," Schweitzer said, holding up a vintage copy of TV Guide. "It was axiomatic in those days. If you took an ad in TV Guide, people watched your program. Not anymore."
Disclosure: CNET News is published by CBS Interactive, a unit of CBS.
This post was updated at 1:38 p.m. PT with more details about Americhip's technology.
A look at the new Last.fm homepage.
(Credit: Last.fm)Social music site Last.fm has unveiled a new look: a slick new design, an iPhone app, a partnership with Logitech to stream music to compatible home stereo systems, and a host of new features.
With the new features, members can receive music recommendations instantly by naming a few bands and artists they like. Previously, they had to hook up their music libraries so that the site's engine, or "scrobbler," could read and analyze what songs they'd listened to recently. The site's music charts now also update in near-real time.
Unfortunately, when I tried to load the new Last.fm, the site had crashed. TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld said he experienced problems, too. (Update at 12:33 p.m. PDT: the site loads but unreliably.)
That said, we certainly have seen recently that server outages aren't limited to Twitter. Ironically, I managed to get Last.fm's iPhone app working just fine.
(Disclosure: Last.fm is owned by CNET News parent company CBS Interactive.)
Back in January, social music service Last.fm announced that it would be launching something called the Artist Royalty Program that allows unsigned artists to reap royalties each time one of their songs is played through the site's ad-supported streaming music feature or Web radio. (They just have to upload their music first.)
On Wednesday, the service announced that the Artist Royalty Program had gone live and that more than 450,000 tracks have been uploaded in conjunction with it.
"We're leveling the playing field by offering them the same opportunities as established bands to make money from their music," Last.fm co-founder Martin Stiksel said in a release Wednesday. "The young musician making music in a bedroom studio has the same chance as the latest major label signing to use Last.fm to build an audience and get rewarded.
It's also an incentive for them to promote Last.fm as a promotional hub for their music, potentially eating into a market dominated by News Corp's MySpace.
Disclaimer: Last.fm is owned by CBS Interactive, which also owns CNET News.
This post was updated to clarify the size of Imeem compared to Last.fm.
Music videos from Universal Music Group's artists are now available on social music site Last.fm, the companies announced Tuesday.
That will make ad-supported videos from artists like the Killers, Jay-Z, Snow Patrol, and Amy Winehouse available on Last.fm, which already had a partnership to stream Universal's music catalog.
It's the first time Last.fm is bringing music videos to its site, which began offering original video programming last month.
"We want to offer a video library that rivals our unparalleled music catalog, as we work towards Last.fm becoming the only place you need to go to for all music-related content," co-founder Martin Stiksel said in a statement, "and this deal marks the first step towards that goal." Rival Imeem, a start-up that focuses more on playlist creation than music discovery and which pulls in either comparable or greater traffic than Last.fm depending on which metrics source is used, has also been inking video deals, and the far bigger MySpace offers music videos on its MySpaceTV player.
However, the Universal Music announcement comes just a week after Warner Music Group, another major label, pulled its catalog from Last.fm's music service. CBS Interactive, which acquired Last.fm last year, said that a new contract is under negotiation.
Disclosure: CNET Networks, parent of CNET News.com, is set to become part of Last.fm parent company CBS in an acquisition expected to close in the third quarter.
Heavy, a niche video content company focused on the "dude" demographic, is slimming down.
The company said Wednesday it will spin off Husky Media, its video advertising platform, into a separate company. It'll remain under Heavy's oversight alongside the Heavy.com portal, but will be run by a different team.
Husky Media operates a technology called Video-Skin, which lets bloggers and other publishers "wrap" any video player in Husky ads and then pull in revenue. Husky also runs a Video Guide that offers publishers a library of video content in exchange for splitting ad profits.
Also on Wednesday, Heavy announced that its Burly Sports Show program will be syndicated on CBSSports.com, with ads served by the Husky platform.
Disclaimer: CBSSports.com is owned by CBS, which has agreed to acquire CNET Networks, publisher of News.com. The deal is expected to close in the third quarter.
Last.fm, the music-focused social site , announced Wednesday the launch of a project called "Last.fm In A Box," which distributes the site's ad-supported streaming radio services to partner companies.
Launch partners include a variety of social networks, personalized home page services, and music sites, like the AOL-owned Bebo, Billboard.com, Break Media, subscription service eMusic, Frengo, Gigya, iGoogle, concert promoter Live Nation, Meebo, MP3.com (owned by CNET News.com parent company CNET Networks), Netvibes, Ning, Pageflakes, the News Corp.-owned Photobucket, Piczo, blogging platforms Six Apart and WordPress, teen site Stardoll, Wayn.com, as well as CBS properties CBS Television Stations and CBS Affiliates.
Last.fm audio content is already distributed on CBS Radio's online stations. The music service announced earlier this year that it had deals with all the major music labels to offer ad-supported streaming music to its members.
The "In A Box" project follows a distributed model slightly similar to the one that CBS Interactive has adopted for online video with the CBS Audience Network, which makes the company's television and other video content available on partner sites like AOL, Veoh, and now Yahoo TV.
Last.fm is owned by CBS, which is set to acquire CNET News.com parent company CNET Networks in an acquisition expected to close in the third quarter of this year.
Impeccably timed to suit president Sue Decker's keynote at the Advertising 2.0 conference in New York, Yahoo announced Wednesday that it has inked advertising deals with two major clients: discount retail giant Wal-Mart and interactive ad agency Havas Digital. Terms of neither deal were disclosed.
The company has also signed on as a partner in CBS Interactive's CBS Audience Network of online video distribution partners.
Sue Decker, president of Yahoo
(Credit: Yahoo)For Wal-Mart, Yahoo will handle display and video advertising on the Walmart.com site as part of a multi-year agreement. Walmart.com will also become part of Yahoo's upcoming AMP advertising management platform, which was originally unveiled in April.
Through the agreement, Yahoo will be the exclusive reseller of Walmart.com ad inventory.
Havas Digital will also be a part of the AMP platform, per Wednesday's announcements. The agency has agreed to work with the Right Media ad exchange, which Yahoo acquired last year, to develop its own inventory-trading platform. It's not the first agency partnership for Yahoo in recent weeks; last month, Yahoo signed a Right Media-related deal with several subsidiaries of ad powerhouse WPP Group.
On the content side, Yahoo's membership in the CBS Audience Network will put it alongside the likes of AOL, Microsoft, Comcast's Fancast, and Veoh. CBS' video catalog will be available on Yahoo's Yahoo TV product, which already has content from Fox and NBC as well as about a dozen cable networks.
Yahoo already had deals with CBS to stream content related to its 60 Minutes news program, as well as local news and sports videos from 16 metro regions.
Decker also announced in her keynote at Advertising 2.0 that the company has launched a newspaper marketing program called Yahoo Circular, in which retailers can take advantage of user interest to target them with personalized newspaper circulars. And the participant count for Yahoo's local Newspaper Consortium advertising project is now up to 779 publications; members of the consortium will be the first to use Yahoo's AMP technology when it debuts later this summer.
Disclaimer: CNET News.com parent company CNET Networks has a content-sharing deal with Yahoo. CNET Networks is also expected to become a CBS property as part of an acquisition offer set to close in the third quarter of 2008.
Looks like offering old episodes of Star Trek and MacGyver proved successful: CBS Interactive announced this week that it has added a selection of new "classic TV" content to its CBS Audience Network of online video partners.
Full episodes and clips of select seasons from Twin Peaks, Beverly Hills: 90210, The Love Boat, Family Ties, and Perry Mason are now available on CBS' 300-plus partner sites, which include downloadable video service Joost, AOL and its newly acquired social network Bebo, video-sharing site Veoh, and a few hardware partners like Slingbox. CBS has also added more seasons of MacGyver, The Twilight Zone, and Hawaii Five-O to complement what it first started offering in February.
CBS has not signed on to Hulu, the joint online-video venture currently run by NBC Universal and News Corp., but CBS Interactive President Quincy Smith has said that it's still a possibility.
Disclosure: News.com is published by CNET Networks, which is a current CBS Audience Network partner and is expected to become a part of CBS in an acquisition set to close in the third quarter.
Last.fm, the social music service that CBS Interactive acquired last year, is venturing into original content for the first time with a new video series called Last.fm Presents.
The series consists of interviews with popular and rising bands and artists; among the first artists featured are techno legend Moby, rising alternative-pop singer Santogold, and popular indie band Spoon. Last.fm has also made a selection of live concert footage available on its site to complement the interviews.
Members can sign on to Last.fm Presents as they would with any other group on the social network. The videos will also be syndicated across the "CBS Audience Network" of content partners.
A number of social-networking sites have ventured successfully and semi-successfully into pop-culture content: News Corp.'s MySpace.com, which rose to fame as a promotional tool for independent artists, has launched a number of video shows, entertainment programming, and a live concert series as well as an ad-supported music service that will likely compete directly with the one Last.fm announced earlier this year.
Several smaller social-media sites also have begun to expand into original content with the aim of seizing the digital age's equivalent of the pop-culture niche that was occupied by MTV before the rise of the Web. Streaming media site Imeem has started to syndicate video content from partner companies, and Buzznet has acquired a handful of influential music blogs to beef up its editorial offerings.
Last.fm, still headquartered in London, continues to expand--one might say it's moving into MySpace territory. It promoted a number of concerts in the U.K. last year and plans to back new events in the U.S. and Europe soon. Earlier this week, CBS announced that Last.fm would be powering AOL Radio's online stations in Europe.
CBS Interactive, the media giant's digital division, has announced the opening of a Silicon Valley office and an executive reshuffling to focus on growth, President Quincy Smith announced Thursday.
The CBS Interactive satellite office in Menlo Park, Calif., has opened, with its eye on tech partnerships and acquisitions. The Valley branch will "allow the company to better facilitate existing partnerships in the area, and future ones as well," a release from CBS explained.
Smith is himself a Valley veteran, with a mergers-and-acquisitions background that involved the sale of Delicious to Yahoo, and Netscape to AOL. CBS hired him after his stint at investment bank Allen & Co.
CBS Interactive encompasses CBS.com, CBSSports.com, CBSNews.com, the CBS Audience Network video syndication service, the CBS EyeLab site, a number of mobile properties, and digital-media acquisitions like music service Last.fm and video series Wallstrip (along with its sibling show, Moblogic.tv, which launched after the CBS acquisition).
In conjunction with the new Valley digs, CBS Interactive restructured its management: Bryon Rubin, formerly a senior executive in CBS's corporate development and mergers and acquisitions group, will become CBS Interactive's chief financial officer; Yahoo veteran Michael Marquez has been promoted to executive vice president of strategy and corporate development; and a number of senior employees have been named general managers.
Anthony Soohoo, who joined CBS Interactive when it acquired celebrity gossip site Dotspotter, will oversee CBS Interactive's entertainment unit--the Audience Network, Wallstrip and Moblogic, CBS.com, and forthcoming original programming ventures. CBSSports.com's Jason Kint will also manage CBSNews.com, Jeff Sellinger will remain at the helm of CBS Interactive's mobile operations, and Last.fm's founding team will remain intact.
