Aug 01 2019
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Anthony Bourdain, No Reservations, and the Most Palate-Pleasing Binges on TV

By clypd Blog, Throwback Thursdays No Comments

The 1993 debut of the Food Network came 30 years after Julia Child prepared her first meal on public television for the Boston market. The hunger for food and cooking shows grew at a slow simmer for years. Fast forward to today and two cable networks, the Food Network and Cooking Channel, are devoted to cooking and food. Meanwhile, ABC, Bravo, Fox, PBS, and streaming services are serving up many hours of the genre as well.

Food-related programs represent the biggest sub-genre in the reality, unscripted TV genre, and there are more courses to come. This year, more than 30 new food-related series will premiere, and more than double that number are in production across cable and broadcast networks, as well as streaming platforms. Read More

Jun 27 2019
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Watching the Man on the Moon with Uncle Walter, 50 Years Later

By clypd Blog, Throwback Thursdays No Comments

On July 20, 1969, three American men landed on the moon. As we approach the 50th anniversary of this giant step forward for mankind, there will be no shortage of TV specials looking back on the day. CNN, Discovery, National Geographic Channel, PBS, and the Smithsonian Channel are just some of the networks planning specials. It is only fitting that TV networks will mark the achievement in the weeks leading up to the anniversary, given the role TV networks played in bringing the nation together in the summer of 1969.

Expect to see a lot of Walter Cronkite, CBS News’ anchor of the era, in the lookbacks. When Apollo 11 launched, he was host of the top-rated broadcast news program, having eclipsed longtime NBC rivals Chet Huntley and David Brinkley. In fact, Cronkite’s CBS audience for the moon landing was more than the combined total for NBC and ABC that day, further cementing his legacy as the leading TV newsman for the next decade and “the most trusted man in America.”

Cronkite grew his leading viewership base in the decade leading up to the moon landing via his coverage of President John Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, followed a few years later by his reporting on the deaths of Robert Kennedy and then Martin Luther King in 1968.   Read More

May 30 2019
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Stranger Things Have Happened, But Not Often: the Reintroduction of a Failed Soda

By clypd Blog, Throwback Thursdays No Comments

On April 23, 1985, the Coca-Cola Company debuted New Coke, replacing its flagship and market-leading soda, then called Coke.

Blind taste tests, a market research strategy employed by chief rival Pepsi, indicated that consumers overwhelmingly preferred the sweeter New Coke. So confident were Coke executives in the new flavor, they discontinued production of Coke the same week that New Coke was release. They evaluated releasing New Coke as a brand extension to Coke, but with bottlers were already pushing back after the launch of Cherry Coke, they preferred to shut down Coke production. New Coke’s introduction was an epic mis-read of consumer sentiment, and the original flavor was brought back to store shelves quickly, with production restarting just 79 days after New Coke’s launch.

This was not just a footnote in the summer of 1985. It was a sonic boom within the Cola Wars, evidenced by ABC News’ Peter Jennings interrupting daytime soap “General Hospital” with the special report. Read More

Apr 25 2019
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Earth Day (b. April 22, 1970)

By clypd Blog, Throwback Thursdays No Comments

This past Monday, April 22, marked the 49th Earth Day. The evergreen idea was led by environmental activists Denis Hayes and Wisconsin Senator Gaylor Nelson. But without branding help from a Mad Man in the Copywriting Hall of Fame, it was doomed for a fragile existence.

Julian Koenig, who died in 2014, was the copywriter behind many legendary ad campaigns including VW’s “Think Small” and “Lemon,” Timex’s “It takes a licking and keeps on ticking,” and the naming of Earth Day.

Following his 1941 graduation from Dartmouth, Koenig did not take a straight path to advertising. He served a few years in the Army, spent a short time at Columbia Law, worked for the Yonkers Indians, a semi-pro baseball team, and set out to write novels. But then he stumbled in to advertising, and after impressing founder Bill Bernbach with a spec ad, he landed at Madison Avenue’s legendary Doyle Dane Bernbach in the 1950s. The spot that got him hired which never ran, was for Hires Root Beer. It featured a little boy holding a bottle of the soda with caption ”the finest beer I never tasted.” Read More

Apr 11 2019
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SpotX and clypd Bridge Audiences between National Linear TV and OTT

By clypd in the News No Comments

Discovery and Fox among the first partners to deploy new data-driven cross-platform advertising solution

BOSTON and DENVER — April 11, 2019 — SpotX, the leading global video advertising and monetization platform, together with clypd, the leading audience-based sales platform for television advertising, today announced a plan to integrate their platforms and build products that focus on audience efficiencies and solve for the current state of media fragmentation across linear TV and over-the-top (OTT).

The collaboration allows for the unification of audience segment definitions across disparate channels, forecasting audience viewership, transactions, and reporting across linear TV and OTT. One key value of the solution is the ability to enable the extension of audience reach across both TV and OTT holistically within a campaign. This offering provides publishers with an end-to-end cross-platform ad sales solution to earn more revenue by tapping into the growing demand for cross-platform opportunities from traditional TV and digital budgets. Read More

Mar 28 2019
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March Madness: A Slam Dunk for Advertisers

By clypd Blog, Throwback Thursdays No Comments
Roughly 100 million people will tune in to the 68-team March Madness college basketball tournament this year. Played across three weeks, in 14 cities, from the first play-in games in Dayton, OH, to the Final Four in Minneapolis, fans, cities, colleges, and broadcast partners all benefit from the plentiful madness.

The first NCAA basketball tournament tipped off 80 years ago, in 1939, and Oregon came out on top of the eight-team event, beating Ohio State in the final game, 46-33. In 1951, the field doubled to 16, and in 1975 doubled again to 32 teams. It was not until 1985 that 64 teams made the dance. The current 68-team format was adopted in 2011. Read More

Feb 28 2019
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Lincoln and Washington: Still Marketing Gold

By clypd Blog, Throwback Thursdays No Comments

Presidents’ Day weekend is intended to honor both George Washington and Abraham Lincoln and provide a three day break. More of us know it as a long weekend filled with mattress and appliance sales.

The origin of Presidents’ Day dates back to the 1880s, when the February 22nd celebration of Washington’s birthday was first named a federal holiday. Disneyland capitalized on the day off, releasing a print ad using cartoon characters playing the fife and drum to invite families to spend the day at Disneyland. Read More

Jan 31 2019
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I Wish I Were an Oscar Mayer Wiener…Mobile Driver

By clypd Blog, Throwback Thursdays No Comments

Since German immigrants Oscar and Gottfried Mayer opened their small meat market on the north side of Chicago in 1883, they have been leaders in many forms of advertising and communications – including sponsorship of Polka bands in the 1890s, label enhancements, radio and TV ads, and for the last 83 years, the iconic Wienermobile.

Oscar was known to have had a flair for marketing, and launched early brand awareness of the meat market by sponsoring polka bands in German neighborhoods throughout Chicago, and with a sponsorship of a German exhibit in the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. Read More

Jan 24 2019
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Bringing Consistency and Transparency to Data-Driven Linear

By clypd Blog, Product No Comments

Over the past several years, the TV industry has begun to embrace advanced audience buying and data-driven linear. The majority of the larger Media Owners have developed internal advanced audience targeting capabilities and actively pitched those solutions (Discovery Engage, Disney Luminate, Fox AIM, A+E Precision, Turner Ignite, Viacom Vantage) in last year’s upfront. With the 2018-19 broadcast season demonstrating a strong uptick in data-driven linear transactions, the need for industry standards and transparency has become more important than ever to ensure alignment.

While clypd has been providing tools to allow sellers and buyers to define, transact, and report on advanced audiences on a single platform, several consortia of television buyers and sellers have emerged. These consortia helps to further facilitate advanced audience buying in linear, working to address issues that have been holding back the industry from fully embracing advanced audience buying. Read More

Dec 20 2018
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Dick Wolf’s Journey from Toothpaste to Police Procedurals

By clypd Blog, Throwback Thursdays No Comments

The clypd holiday party a few weeks ago featured an 11-question TV trivia quiz, befitting of a company rooted in the TV business. One of the questions: name five detectives from any season of the Law & Order franchise. Participants had more than 30 names to choose from, an indication of the longevity of the franchise.

As I Googled the series the next day to get reacquainted with more actors’ names, I learned more about its creator, Dick Wolf. Coincidentally, it’s also Wolf’s birthday today- he was born on December 20, 1947.

Dick Wolf’s parents met while working at NBC, and his father later went in to advertising, as a producer. Dick took the opposite route, starting out in advertising as a copywriter at agency Benton & Bowles and later switching to TV. Read More