Month: May 2024

This week’s Future of TV Briefing looks at what TV and streaming companies’ latest quarterly earnings reports indicate about the state of the TV and streaming ad business.

• The Q1 check-in
• TV networks’ new audience pitch, streaming movies’ diverse viewership and more

The Q1 check-in

As this year’s annual upfront advertising negotiations get underway, the traditional TV ad market is still in recovery mode, while the streaming ad market remains in growth mode but still has catching up to do, according to TV and streaming companies’ latest quarterly earnings reports for the first three months of 2024.

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For as many jokes that were made about X (formerly Twitter)’s proverbial funeral when Elon Musk bought the platform, the bird app has yet to see the final nail in its coffin.

Back in 2022, on the heels of the platform’s fallout in the Musk era, a number of competitors sprung up, looking to cash in on the platform’s fledging audience. Initially, there was significant momentum built around decentralized social media platforms like Bluesky, created by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Mastodon. Threads, Meta’s direct response to X’s flailing, was said to be the app that would outright kill X.

Back then, marketers weren’t sold, saying that no other platform could recreate the monoculture moments and town square nature that Twitter instilled in users. Today, that still stands as part of the media mix, useful for social listening and organic strategy, especially around live, mass-watched events like the Super Bowl, Olympics or major award shows.

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As of 2024, prominent “Super Smash Bros.” player Juan “Hungrybox” Debiedma has been a member of Team Liquid for over 10 years. The decade-plus collaboration shows how gaming creators have benefited from esports organizations’ long-term approach to talent management.

Last month marked Debiedma’s tenth year as a member of Team Liquid, a Dutch esports organization that boasts a worldwide fan base. After joining the team in April 2014, he spent years as the world’s best “Super Smash Bros. Melee” player, then leaned into content creation to grow his following on Twitch to nearly 500,000. In 2021, he became a part-owner of Team Liquid after purchasing a minority stake in the company.

At the moment, Debiedma is one of the longest-tenured creators on the roster of any major esports organization. To learn why he’s stuck with Team Liquid for so long, Digiday spoke to the Twitch streamer for an annotated Q&A.

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Some digital-only publishers, Complex and Nylon, are bringing back their print magazines this year after multi-year hiatuses. But their big returns — quarterly and biannually, respectively — are rooted more in special editions and collectables rather than traditional weekly or monthly runs.

And the magazine publishers, like Time, that have been regularly operating print businesses in these modern times, may have proven that this model is the way to go, especially when prioritizing newsstand distribution. 

Take Time, for example, which is ramping up its special edition “bookazine” business and collectible covers in order to earn more reader revenue generated from newsstand, retail and direct-to-consumer sales.

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As they battle each other for ad dollars and elbow their way to secure a chunk of media planners’ TV budgets, the two principal cinema ad firms are collaborating to get their data streams back in front of those planners, Digiday has learned. 

National CineMedia and Screenvision lost their access into Nielsen’s data feeds shortly after the pandemic started when the ratings firm dropped all out-of-home data input from its principal ratings feed with little notice, according to both ad firms. It was a setback at an already tough time for both, when movie theaters had closed and their businesses were operating on life support.

Now the two have partnered with cloud-based mobile and location tech firm The People Platform to integrate their joint cinema audience data into Nielsen’s Respondent Level Data (RLD) feed for the first time.

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Look who’s talking: newest spots feature barbecue guests in conversations with franks flapping their buns.

YouTube’s Playables “app store” of free, “lightweight, entertaining” games, launched to paying subscribers late last year, is rolling out to all users on the Google-owned video-sharing platform and
bolstering new competition in the mobile gaming world.

Amrapali Gan, founder of agency Hoxton Projects and former CEO of OnlyFans, talks about why the creator economy is out and community is in, how brands can adapt and how creators may be influenced by
a TikTok ban in the United States, and more.

A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit alleging that Caesars Entertainment violated a federal video privacy law by sharing data with Meta Platforms via its pixel tracking code.

They’ll be originating an episode of their well-known podcast New Heights from Stagwell’s Sport Beach venue at the festival. Other podcasts will be on hand as well.