“The View From the Phlipside” is a media commentary program airing on WRFA-LP, Jamestown NY. It can be heard Monday through Friday around 7:30 AM. The following are scripts which may not exactly match the aired version of the program. Mostly because the host may suddenly choose to add or subtract words at a moment’s notice. WRFA-LP is not responsible for any such silliness or the opinions expressed. You can listen to a live stream of WRFA or find a podcast of this program at wrfalp.com. Copyright 2013-17 by Jay Phillippi. All Rights Reserved. You like what you see and hear? Drop me a line and we can talk.
Programs from week of December 3, 2017
This Week’s Podcast
My name is Jay Phillippi and I’ve spent my life in and around the media. TV, radio, the movies and more. I love them, and I hate them and I always have an opinion. Call this the View from the Phlipside.
Commercial Month
I am looking forward to February more than usual. February, despite being cold and too often gloomy, has two traditional events in it that I enjoy. The first is my birthday. The second is far more important to the concept of this program, it’s the Super Bowl. And most especially, since the game too often is a bore, the Super Bowl commercials.
I am, as is well known here, a fella who likes a well-crafted television commercial. And the Super Bowl is the showcase for the advertising world’s most creative attempts. Yes, some of them are flops. But they are glorious, extravagant, over the top flops. Advertisers are always looking to bring their best game to the Big Game.
There’s a reason for that. Super Bowl ads are expensive. The thirty-second rate is the standard of comparison in this contest, and it’s expected to bump up a couple of percentage points over last year. So call it a little over five million dollars per spot. Call it one hundred sixty-six thousand, six hundred-sixty-six dollars a second. Give or take.
All of that creates a three hundred fifty million dollars in ad revenues from those ads. There is some growing pushback on further growth of the price tag from some big advertisers, but that won’t affect this year’s bottom line.
But the Super Bowl happens every year, and I said that I was looking forward to February MORE than usual. So what else is up?
Well, the Winter Olympics begin just four days later. And there’s a lot of advertising headed for that event as well. NBCUniversal, the network carrying both events, expects to see “low double-digit” growth on the eight hundred million dollars made on the Sochi Winter Olympics.
And there’s some new stuff coming our way, too. Because some of our American athletes will have direct sponsorship for the Olympics. When the idea of amateur competition pretty much a stake driven through its heart a couple decades back, athletes picked up sponsors. This is a little different because Comcast, a U.S. Olympics Committee partner, has agreements with thirteen Olympic hopefuls to support them during the games. Through their X1 technology, the cable giant is planning to bring a whole new level to Olympic (and Paralympic) broadcasts.
The Olympics aren’t quite this “appointment viewing” for advertising that the Super Bowl is. Of course, the Olympics are almost always filled with excitement and wonder so we can call it a push.
For the fan of television advertising, February promises to be a month to remember.
Two Birds
At a time when the Trump administration is looking at ways to further deregulate media ownership rules, a previous “winner” in media deregulation is in court asking for bankruptcy assistance in dealing with its massive corporate debt.
Once upon a time, there were strict limits on the number of radio or television stations any one person or company could own. Under the Clinton administration, those ownership cap numbers were eliminated for radio and greatly loosened for television. The current FCC is looking at further reducing the rules on ownership of multiple television stations in a single market or cross-ownership of TV stations, radio stations, and newspapers.
While industry sources tout the change as a great boon for the media in general and corporate ownership in specific, I’m not convinced. Beyond my concerns for local broadcasting, which I’ve discussed many times here, there’s a track record that would indicate that bigger isn’t always better.
When the first round of deregulation went into effect, companies began spending enormous amounts of money to buy as many radio stations as they could. This had the effect of pushing prices up for those properties. For the old line owners, that was a boon, putting more money in their pockets at the sale. But since the regulations put no limits on national ownership numbers, the corporate owners began to devour one another. This consolidation of ownership meant that the debt incurred to buy all these properties also became consolidated. The idea was that all of those stations would generate enough money to pay off the debt.
It hasn’t always worked that way. Last month, the second largest radio ownership group in the United States, Cumulus Media, filed for bankruptcy, after defaulting on twenty-four million dollars in payments. They are seeking to reorganize over two billion dollars in debt.
There have been consistent concerns going back over a decade about whether deregulation actually helps broadcasting or the public. As more and more of the media is owned by fewer and fewer corporations, programming diversity has declined. You’re going to hear pretty much the same music, the same news and the same point of view anywhere on the dial.
A survey done fifteen years ago by the Future of Music Coalition showed eighty percent of the public asked opposed further consolidation of media ownership.
If being the second largest radio owner in the nation, with some of the biggest stations in the biggest markets can’t put black on the bottom line, maybe it’s time to reconsider the wisdom of rules that encourage companies to keep on growing.
So What’s Real?
The folks behind the huge augmented reality hit, Pokemon Go has announced that their next major project will be a Harry Potter based game. Niantic Labs is working with Warner Brothers to bring the wizarding world to a smartphone near you. No details yet on when this will all happen, other than the title Harry Potter: Wizards Unite. There is a promise that more details will be forthcoming in 2018.
The game has been rumored for quite a while, and it was even labeled a hoax by the folks at Snopes.com, so this announcement from the company is pretty big news.
Thinking back on the furor that surrounded Pokemon Go, I have started thinking about just how big the Potterverse version might be. While Pokemon has a dedicated following in certain ages groups, the Potter fandom is bigger by several degrees. That means that even more people may be wandering around casting spells and fighting legendary beasts.
At the moment there isn’t much that can be said about the potential impact on productivity, there are some other studies about Pokemon Go that will inevitably come to the surface. The most common one at the moment is a study done by Purdue University that claims that Pokemon Go may have caused almost one hundred fifty thousand automobile accidents in the first five months or so so of its lifespan. Which, one might extrapolate, be a tiny blip compared to the what could happen with a Potter game.
There are a few caveats in all this. The actual study only looked at Tippecanoe County in northwestern Indiana. That happens to be the county where Purdue is found. It’s not particularly representative of the nation as a whole, so spinning out national numbers based on these statistics may be a reach. It’s also worth noting that traffic accidents had been declining for twenty-five years up until 2011. They have been increasing since that year. Our use of apps has increased in the same time period so there may be an overall connection between the two. An equivalent study was done in Japan and it found no significant effect of the game on traffic deaths there.
In the end, it is not the game that causes the problem. It is the users playing the game at inappropriate times. Tweeting, or reading e-mails, or face timing is every bit as dangerous while driving as playing an augmented reality game. Niantic Labs took steps to curtail playability while moving at vehicle speeds.
My hope is that both the creators and the players will learn from their previous experience when the new game launches.
Call that the View From the Phlipside
Copyright Jay Phillippi, 2017
Theme music for “The View From the Phlipside” and “TVFTP – Podcast” is “Hustle”
Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
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