This is the model for more CBS radio/TV markets to come. Moonves says “We’re confident we have a terrific formula” that will be “rolling out to other markets.”

Read more at radio-info.com

The advertising recovery at CBS’ local radio and TV stations led the overall growth at the media giant, which reported second-quarter revenue of $3.33 billion, a gain of 11 percent compared to a year ago.

Local broadcasting increased 17 percent to $678.2 million, with TV stations up a whopping 31 percent to $337.9 million, driven by categories such as auto, telecom, retail and entertainment. Radio revenue gained 6 percent to $322 million, with stations in the top 10 markets up 10 percent.

What’s more, there doesn’t seem to be any slowdown for the rest of the year, with advertisers booking dollars further in advance of campaign airdates. CBS expects political to approach $200 million for the year.

“Third-quarter pacing is as good as second quarter, if not better,” said Les Moonves, president and CEO of CBS.

The media titan enjoyed increases across all its segments, with entertainment up 10 percent to $1.67 billion, cable networks ahead 12 percent to $368.8 million and publishing (Simon & Schuster) up 5 percent to $189.7 million. CBS Outdoor revenues grew 5 percent to $456.3 million, led by a 9 percent increase in the U.S. and a 14 percent gain in the United Kingdom.

Read more at adweek.com

LOS ANGELES (AdAge.com) — CBS Interactive is rolling out a web series whose entire narrative will depend exclusively on the two most hard-to-find attributes in digital entertainment: sponsors and active fans.

Luckily for CBS, the former is already taken care of when it rolls out “Around the World for Free,” an online spinoff of “The Amazing Race” that makes its debut July 26 on CBS.com and other CBS Interactive properties.

The series will chronicle the real-time travels of Jeff Schroeder, a veteran of CBS reality shows “Big Brother” and “The Amazing Race,” as he attempts to globe-trot without so much as a dollar to his name, relying on strangers and online viewers to dictate and potentially accommodate his every move — all with the aid of integrated sponsors AT&T, to connect Mr. Schroeder to his fans, and American Airlines, to fly him to his various destinations.

Read the full article>>>

Contrary to popular belief, video didn’t kill the radio star, YouTube didn’t knock off TV and Twitter didn’t shut down blogging. However, in each case the steady advance of new technology definitely forced the incumbents to evolve. One can argue, for example, that some of the more established blogs on the web benefited greatly from building content strategies that engender massive link sharing on Twitter. Much the same, TV ad creative has changed to facilitate additional exposure on YouTube.

Enter e-mail marketing, which, to some degree, has been beaten down by regulation, and has taken a backseat to social networking. Nielsen revealed last week that e-mail’s share of time declined 28%, putting it in third place, while social networking, the leader, climbed 43%.

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Once again, CBS has the strongest fall lineup, with an abundance of hit scripted comedies and dramas and quality non-scripted hours Survivor, The Amazing Race and Undercover Boss scheduled appropriately across the week. The Eye net has, in fact, led in total viewers for seven out of the last eight seasons and there is every reason to believe its winning streak will continue. 

But not every hour on the schedule looks like a winner, as the critics question the merits of the five upcoming new series—sitcoms Mike & Molly and $#*! My Dad Says; and dramas The Defenders, Blue Bloods and the revival of Hawaii Five-O.

Of the five new series, the new Hawaii Five-O generated the most number of questions, with the “darkness” and excessive violence a potential concern.

“We’ve basically deconstructed the elements of the original show, looked at the characters, retooled the franchise a little bit, and reassembled it in a great, hip, smart, fun character show,” said Nina Tassler, president, CBS Entertainment.  “It’s still a small island. Everybody there knows each other—good guys, bad guys.  I think those story engines are still very much a part of the series.”

Read more>>>

If there was a single familiar refrain from digital shops over the past decade, it was that their older, traditional-agency brethren “didn’t get it” when it came to digital. But lately, that widely acknowledged gap has begun to narrow to the point where “older” agencies can claim more success in some areas of digital marketing.

Take the recent Old Spice “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” digital campaign, an effort that is already a textbook example of how an advertiser can make itself a vital part of digital culture. The campaign didn’t come from any of the digital-agency stalwarts like R/GA, AKQA or Razorfish. Instead, it came from Wieden + Kennedy, a shop not long ago often labeled as wedded to TV and print.

The Old Spice success followed a strong showing for non-digital specialists in this year’s awards shows. At Cannes, for example, top honors in the Cyber category went to Wieden for Nike Livestrong’s “Chalkbot” and DDB Sweden for Volkswagen’s “Fun Theory.” The Cyber Agency of the Year Award went to Crispin Porter + Bogusky.

Thanks to social media, the biggest challenge for brands is often less about creating the kind of technically sophisticated “immersive experiences” that digital shops have specialized in and more about crafting engaging content that people are likely to share with each other. In the words of Internet guru Clay Shirky, “Communications tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring.”

“Digital used to be this thing that was a little more computer and Internet based. You had to know coding, Flash and HTML,” said Edward Boches, chief creative officer at Mullen. “Now, what you have to understand is how consumers behave in relationship to content, community, technology and media.”

It is now common for traditional shops to have developers sitting among creatives. Wieden now has developers, designers and coders on staff. They are also bringing on well-known talent from digital shops to help translate their strengths in storytelling and brand building into the digital world.

“Historically, digital specialty shops have been called on to bring technical knowledge, and the brand shops have brought ideas,” said Renny Gleeson, global director of digital strategies at Wieden. “The technical knowledge deals well with the rational, and the brand knowledge deals well with the emotional.”

Crispin Porter + Bogusky has focused on interactive for years and now boasts 400 people in interactive, according to Winston Binch, a partner at CP+B who joined the agency from R/GA. It has even begun working as a solely digital agency for a few clients, including Vail Resorts.

At the same time, digital shops are trying to improve their brand capabilities. Bob Lord, CEO of Razorfish, said the gray area is growing thanks to digital tools and platforms simplifying.

“I don’t believe I’m in the business of creating brand perception,” he said. “I’m in the business to create brand reality. Hopefully that feeds back into the brand perception, but I’m not in the business to create that. There are a lot of other companies to do that.”

Yesterday we reported on CBS Radio and CBS Interactive’s ambitious new integrated streaming platform Radio.com (RAIN coverage here), that ties together hundreds of online radio stations from CBS, AOL Radio, Yahoo Radio and Last.fm. It’s a ton of content and the site succeeds overall in organizing those hundreds of stations.

Yet, though it may be inevitable that the “KydzRadio” or “AOL Traditional Gospel” channels get buried, I wonder how someone specifically looking for such channels would ever find them — at least on the homepage. Once you actually start listening to a station, a handy search bar appears that instantly found AOL Traditional Gospel with a search for “gospel.” Why isn’t this on the homepage?

That said, listeners can set favorites for easy access to channels. That’s just the tip of the iceberg for interactivity on Radio.com, too. The player window displays recent tweets about the currently playing artist, artist bios, the ability to scrobble the track, rate it, buy it, share it (displayed below) and even discover similar artists and other stations that play that kind of music.

It’s clear CBS is trying to keep Radio.com a “lean in” experience by pouring in such content and interaction. Sometimes though, it feels a bit too crowded, (I spent a few seconds thinking, “how do I just skip the song?”), but listeners will certainly appreciate all the options.

The site is also ad-optimized. New banner ads are displayed on nearly every track and most channels I launched started with a pre-roll video ad. Notably on launching “AOL ’00s Indie,” I had to sit through a video ad and 6 audio spots before hearing a music. Hopefully it was just a glitch, but it would have been enough to turn me away.

So Radio.com may still need some work, but the feat of organizing hundreds of streams from 4 different services into one easily-understandable website is impressive. — MS

CBS Radio has relaunched its online streaming media player, offering an immersive multimedia environment for users and more capabilities and placement opportunities for advertisers.

The move comes as traditional radio broadcasters increasingly look to the Web as a key driver of future revenue growth, and follows close on the heels of CBS Radio’s re-launch of 90 music station Web sites in April.

The new version of the Radio.com platform gives users a single point of access to streaming media from over 600 stations — including 130 CBS Radio stations and hundreds of affiliated online-only radio sites. It also has news feeds and blogs maintained by celebrities, reporters and pundits from the worlds of music, news, and sports, and links to all CBS Radio’s individual stations.

The relaunched media player offers more artist information, including biographies, photo galleries, touring status and a list of similar artists listeners might like, powered by Last.fm. It also enhances and integrates “scrobbling,” allowing users to share their personal music listening habits and preferences with Last.fm database.

Users can share artists, songs, and stations they like with friends via email and social networks Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and Linkedin, among others.

Finally, it aggregates blogs, news feeds, and video and audio clips from every CBS Radio station. Currently, 25,000 content posts are populated across the network of sites on a monthly basis.

On the ad front, the player offers advertisers new features including “leave-behind” display units for in-stream advertisements — on-screen visual messages which remain visible after the streaming audio message ends. The redesign also creates new ad inventory in the form of a visual history of audio spots heard during the audio stream.

Like other traditional radio broadcasters, CBS Radio has invested heavily to expand its online offerings and capabilities, in the expectation that online radio will be a key source of ad revenue growth in coming years.

The online play is especially important in light of the steep decline in broadcast radio ad revenues during the recession. According to the Radio Advertising Bureau, total radio ad revenues declined 32% from $21.7 billion in 2006 to $16 billion in 2009.

Online advertising remains a fairly small part of the overall business, with digital revenues of just $480 million in 2009 — 3% of the total.

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — The 186 responses that Old Spice pitchman Isaiah Mustafa recorded for fans of his beauty, intelligence and outstanding physique took just a week to eclipse the original TV ads themselves in total views, according to new numbers from Visible Measures.

Those video responses, recorded in seven-minute spurts over several days last week, have accumulated 42.3 million views so far and more than 35 million last week alone, a Viral Chart record. The TV spots have also done well on the web, but have accumulated only 34.7 million views since “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” was first posted online in February.

The responses, of course, wouldn’t exist without the original TV ad, but they’re extending the reach of the campaign a lot farther than the two TV ads, as well as the “Odor Blocker” ad ever could, even though those had a several-month head start.

For those keeping score, total views on the Old Spice campaign including all original spots and responses stands now at 113 million views. Here’s how it breaks down:

• “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” (launched Feb 4): 22.3 million
• “Different Scents for Different Gents” (launched Feb 5): 4.2 million
• “Where Freshness Smells From” (launched March 15): 2.6 million
• “Odor Blocker” (launched March 31): 29.2 million million
• “The Return of the Man Your Man Could Smell Like” (launched June 29): 12.4 million
• “Old Spice Responses” (launched July 13): 42.3 million

Last week’s top top 10 is below, including an amusing new spot from Rhett & Link for Dentyne and Blendtec’s grisly test on the iPad. Also new from Blendtec — what else? — blending an iPhone 4.

Shared links have a longer shelf life on Facebook than Twitter, and Buzzfeed sends more traffic through re-shares than direct clicks. That’s two of the things my agency learned when we launched a stealth social-media experiment through a site we created called Jerzify Yourself.

Jerzify Yourself was created in January of this year, a week after the season one finale of the popular MTV show “Jersey Shore” that attracted an audience of 4.8 million. The site, written in a few days in Flash, allows users to upload their headshot onto a stylized body and morph themselves into a Jersey Shore “Guido” or “Guidette.” Or as New York’s Village Voice put it: “The gist is Snooki-grade simple: upload a medium-size jpg, scale the image to fit, choose your spray-tan shade, pick your pose — and holy Freckles McGee, you’re magically recast as a human meatball.”

Why did we do this? To evaluate the power of social media and spreadable content. As an experiment, Jerzify Yourself was highly successful in adding the much needed texture to our knowledge of how content gets passed along online. One obvious caveat here is that the observations below are based on a single experiment, so please treat them as such and not as some kind of immutable laws. That said, we hope our findings will add a new angle to the collective thinking behind online content dissemination.

Here are five social-media learnings that grabbed our attention:

1. The Invisible Impact. If you find yourself measuring the value of referral sources for your campaign, consider their total impact via re-shares in addition to the direct traffic they send your way. Counting only the direct clicks from any site is likely to underestimate the site’s total value; five out of six sites on our top referrers list sent almost as much traffic through re-shares as through direct clicks. It would make for an interesting follow-up experiment to see if this difference holds up for paid campaigns as well as for “organic” content. If it does, and this difference is measured, it would have important implications on how we plan media buys.

2. If It Doesn’t Spread, It’s Half-dead. Dr. Henry Jenkins once made this now-famous remark about the destiny of content in the age of social media: “If It Doesn’t Spread, It’s Dead.” Having looked at the data, we can now say with a degree of confidence that you’ll still get viewers if your link gets picked up by major online publications, but content that’s designed to be spreadable can nearly double the referred traffic through re-shares.

3. Some Sites Are Read By More Active Spreaders Than Others. Some sites on our top list turned out to be a lot more spreadful (for lack of a better word) than others. Buzzfeed, in particular, sent more traffic — twice as much! — via re-shares than through direct clicks. In fact, the number one direct referrer, collegehumor.com, will come last if we re-rank the sites by “boost.” These observations along with our understanding of the reasons behind the differences will influence the way we design online properties meant to encourage content sharing.

It would also be interesting to see if there is a difference in the length of pass-along chains between different sites. On average, the link traveled down two or three generations of users before the chain broke, and we’ve seen chains as long as seven users, but we couldn’t produce a more precise analysis for a technical reason.

4. The Speed of Content Depends on the Medium Through Which It Travels. You know how the speed of sound depends on the medium through which it passes? It’s like that with Twitter and Facebook, and probably other social networks. To repeat an observation made earlier: in our experiment, shared links had a much longer gestation period but also a longer shelf life on Facebook than on Twitter. For the entire January-May period, Facebook has referred 12,789 visitors, 83% of them after the first week. Twitter has referred 10,549 visitors altogether, 97% of them during the first week. This difference probably has to do with how people access the news feeds on these sites. On Twitter, the single stream of news quickly washes away older items. On Facebook, older news can still be the front-page material on the individual slower-moving walls. If you find yourself choosing between the two sites for your next campaign, be aware of this difference.

5. Don’t Reach For the Off Switch. As the 404 errors on formerly popular viral branded destinations demonstrate, it might be tempting to kill the destination site some time after the traffic has peaked. I’ve argued elsewhere that abandoning old microsites in their Long Tail phase means leaving money on the table, and our experiment has demonstrated that not only do off-peak sites attract healthy traffic, these visitors can also be more valuable than the rush-hour crowd.