Weekly Roundup – Week of September 16th, 2024

"After a two-week channel blackout, Disney and DirecTV have a deal in principle.
The deal comes in time for college football games set to run on ESPN Saturday, as well as the Emmy Awards on Sunday night and Monday Night Football.
The agreed-upon points include the opportunity to offer DirecTV customers genre-specific bundles, sports, entertainment, kids and family, which also incorporate Disney’s linear networks, as well as Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+. DirecTV will also have the right to distribute Disney’s upcoming ESPN flagship streaming service to its customers for free upon launch."

Our Take: Audiences can finally relax - they can now watch The Emmys on DirecTV. Just kidding! Football is, once again, the centerpiece of these discussions, specifically college football and Monday night football.

"Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Rep. Paul Tonko (D-N.Y.) have introduced a bill banning bets during live sporting events and proposition bets on college athletes, aiming to protect consumers by requiring states that offer sports betting to comply with certain federal standards.
The legislation, dubbed the Supporting Affordability and Fairness with Every Bet (SAFE Bet) Act, intends to address what the lawmakers said were public health concerns surrounding the legalization of sports betting and potential increase of gambling addiction by setting standards in advertising, affordability and artificial intelligence."

Our Take: Pols on Capitol Hill feel that the major sportsbooks are being too brazen in their goldrush.

"Jimmy Pitaro was asked to name the most important move he has made in his six-plus years on the job.
“The launch and success of ESPN Plus,” he said without hesitation, “from a tech perspective and a product perspective.”
Asked where the collection of sports rights he has signed during his tenure — long-term accords with the NFL, SEC, NHL and NBA — fits in, Pitaro replied just as quickly, “That’s a close second.”
These, then, are the two pillars of ESPN’s business plan: Collect as many of the best sporting events on the calendar as possible and figure out how to get people to pay for them in as many ways as possible, including through cable subscriptions, streaming, new digital bundles and anything else that may come along."

Our Take: ESPN’s streaming journey demonstrates that companies cannot simply onboard their cable operations onto streaming platforms and expect immediate success.

To answer these questions and concerns from buyers, iSpot ran a survey with more than 24,000 consumers modeled to be representative of US population demographics.
According to the survey, 23% of Americans say they’re annoyed by political ads, but their annoyance doesn’t carry over to brand ads that surround political campaigns. In contrast, 15% reported increased annoyance with all ads when political campaigns are running, and 10% said they trust brand messaging less when political ads are also present."

Our Take: Research shows that brands shouldn’t be cautious when it comes to putting ad spots next to potentially controversial media, especially in election season. Consumers have the brainpower to separate your brand from political content.

"While about half of Americans say they are following political news “extremely” or “very” closely, about 6 in 10 say they need to limit how much information they consume about the government and politics to avoid feeling overloaded or fatigued, according to a new survey from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and USAFacts."

Our Take: After over 30 years of political research, Harker Bos Group finds that while people may report ‘news fatigue’, they will still consume it in large quantities, despite saying they are not happy about their news consumption habits.

"Today’s teens are seldom using Google as a verb, according to Bernstein Research, and it’s a sign they’ve fundamentally changed how they interact with the internet.
“Younger audiences are ‘searching’, not ‘Googling’,” Bernstein analyst Mark Shmulik and colleagues said in a note published Friday. “And they increasingly head to social media like TikTok for restaurant recommendations, directly to scaled aggregators like Amazon for retail, and Generative AI search like ChatGPT to get their homework done.”"

Our Take: While people may be 'googling' less they are still bingeing Alphabet's other little product called YouTube. This is a 'kick Google when they are down' moment - but they are not down, they are very much at the top. Virtually everyone watches YouTube almost all the time.

Harker Bos Group and Crowd React Media are proud to announce the release of the video edition our State of Media Spanish-language report for this year. In this report we cover everything from cable to streaming to YouTube along with vital viewership analytics of the fastest growing demographic in the US.