Televisionation

You will truly enjoy this #100th Episode of The Friday Fireside with the Brilliant and Entertaining Mike Bloxham, EVP of Global Media and Entertainment for Magid. Mike was also at the birth of The iTV Doctor, as a guest on the first The iTV Doctor column in May, 2009. Starting with a history of interactivity in entertainment (going back to the audience throwing cabbages at Bill Shakespeare), Mike provides real recommendations for how advertisers can take advantage of today’s smaller but HIGHLY FOCUSED audiences for effective and profitable branded interactive experiences. Sadly, we lose Mike’s signal at the end of the chat, so we’ll just have to pick the conversation in a future episode of The Friday Fireside.

This episode features Nathalie Bordes, EVP of Measurement for Marketers at the ANA. Among other things, she explains the goals of the ANA and her own role at that organization; outlines ongoing challenges facing the audience-measurement industry; and describes the ANA’s work on enabling unduplicated reach and frequency, developing a “virtual people ID” methodology, and implementing its Cross-Media Measurement initiative.

Carri Twigg is deeply engaged with content that takes on the urgent cultural questions confronting America and the world. After 10 years in politics, including serving as Special Assistant to President Obama and Director of Public Engagement for then-Vice President Biden, she is focused on challenging status quo media narratives. As a founding partner and the head of development for Culture House Media, a women of color-owned, premium documentary production house, Carri brings untold stories to the foreground. Selected current projects include a nonfiction series about race and gender in America for Netflix, a series about Black beauty and hair for Hulu with Oprah Winfrey and Tracee Ellis Ross, and a show about a progressive adolescence for Disney+ with Brie Larson and Yara Shahidi.

Prior to joining Culture House Media as a Founding Partner, Carri built and consulted on strategic cultural movements, including the California-based Schools Not Prisons Tour and the SuperPAC Save The Day. She worked with VH1 to reprise its iconic “Behind The” franchise, writing and hosting a series looking at issues impacting the 2016 Presidential election titled #BehindTheVote. Her work has been featured on MTV, VH1, AwesomenessTV, Complex News, :ATTN, AwesomenessTV, The Young Turks, and Refinery29.

In this episode of Screen Culture, Carri shares her journey from the White House to Culture House. She explains how her experience working in the Obama administration taught her the importance of using storytelling to enable political and societal change, the “cultural scaffolding” of a progressive future America.

Carri and Lisa also cover:

How Carri connected with her Culture House partners, Raeshem Nijhon and Nicole Galovski
Their latest projects, including “Hair Tales” for OWN and Hulu and a documentary based on “A People’s History of Black Twitter” with Wired Studios and Conde Nast
How she hopes to impact screen—and political—culture in the long term
Follow Carri on Twitter @carritwigg.

https://itvt.com/televisionation

This week’s Friday Fireside welcomes Rob Bochicchio, President of Marketsmith. Rob will share how smart marketing can turn a challenger brand like Shark Ninja into a $3.5 billion market leader. It’s all about outsmarting (not outspending) your competition, and keeping your people connected, motivated and balanced during the pandemic! There is a lot to learn here.

This episode features VAB President and CEO, Sean Cunningham. He discusses the organization’s criticisms of Nielsen’s audience-measurement methodology and why it believes there is a “crisis in confidence” in panel science; explains why VAB is calling for “an open system, trustworthy partners, transparency, verification, disclosure, competition, [and] innovation;” and outlines the organization’s goals for the coming year, and how it views viewer privacy concerns, new regulatory efforts and more.

If you can hear the opening music for “Car Talk”, “Morning Edition” or “All Things Considered,” you gotta know that being the Chief Marketing Officer for NPR like Michael Smith, my guest on the Friday Fireside this week, is the coolest job in the world! And after 20 years at Scripps Networks Interactive (acquired by Discovery Inc), Michael has a LOT to say about where Warner Bros. Discovery is going, along with Paramount Plus, HBOMax and Peacock.

This episode features animation historian and journalist, Nancy Denney-Phelps. Among other things, she discusses the difference between US and European attitudes to animation and why the art form receives significantly more public funding in Europe; the impact of Netflix on the animation space; where animation is being produced today and why; the impact of VR on animation festivals and on the art form in general; and more.

Nancy Denney-Phelps’ Animation Blog: https://www.awn.com/users/nancy-denney-phelps

Ben Tatta, President of Standard Media Index, is Rick’s guest on this edition of The Friday Fireside. Ben explains the movie premiere strategy behind Chevrolet‘s brilliant “Sopranos” Silverado EV Super Bowl ad, Peloton Interactive‘s bone-headed reaction spot to the death of Mr. Big, and how today’s addressable adtech can be used to tell sequential stories with TV ads. Ben is a brilliant guest who demonstrates that The Friday Fireside is “the solution to boring business television.”

This episode features Jon Giegengack, Founder and Principal of Hub Entertainment Research. Among other things, he discusses Hub’s two most recent reports, “2021 Video Redefined” and the “Metaverse NFT Mini Report” (both published February 2022); outlines the company’s latest research into how new platforms (e.g. VR, games, e-sports, podcasts and more) are competing for TV-consumer eyeballs; casts light on the challenges facing the TV industry and how to address them; and more.

This week’s Friday Fireside welcomes TVSquared President, Jo Kinsella, fresh off the acquisition of TVSquared by Innovid. Jo (who was our Friday Fireside guest way back in July, 2020) details the process and timing of that acquisition, and explains in detail how the combination of TVSquared and Innovid has generated industry excitement that includes working agreements with the likes of Simulmedia and iSpotTV, as well as accelerating business growth in the advanced-TV advertising space. TVSquared and Innovid together have, in the opinion of the good doctor, The Right Stuff With Scale!