Guest Feature
Q&A WITH DAVID LAFOUNTAINE
David LaFountaine is Senior Q : Why did you choose Teletrax ?
Vice President, CBS Television
Distribution (CTD), a unit of CBS A : Teletrax was right for us in a number of ways. They
Corp. and a leader in world- have a much deeper reach into a number of markets,
wide television syndication. which is a big advantage for us. Their web-based interface
Teletrax and CTD announced an with almost real-time data is really useful as well. Being
agreement in November where- located in Los Angeles, the ability to track our east coast
by Teletrax will use its digital stations on the same day is a big plus.
watermarking and broadcast
tracking services to electronically We also produce shows in New York, Chicago and southern
monitor and evaluate usage of CTD’s broadcast mar- California, so we have a large number of people interested
keting and promotional content. Under terms of in tracking results in different ways for different shows.
the agreement, Teletrax will monitor the promotions This system allows us the ability to export those results in
of CTD’s top syndicated series including “The Oprah Excel documents or send as frame grabs via e-mail to various
Winfrey Show”, “Wheel of Fortune”, “Jeopardy!”, executive producers or salespeople. We have a wide variety
“Entertainment Tonight”, “The Insider”, “Judge of types of clients, from co-op advertisers to sales force
Judy”, “Judge Joe Brown”, “Inside Edition”, “Half to senior management, and the ability and ease of struc-
& Half”, “Montel Williams”, “Dr. Phil”, “CSI : turing the data in the way they want is a great benefit.
Miami”, “Everybody Loves Raymond”, “Rachael Ray”
and “Star Trek”. VISION sat down recently for an inter- Q : How would you assess the current television landscape ?
view with Mr. LaFountaine.
A : This is a tremendously challenging period for our
Q : What need or issue caused you to pursue a broadcast industry. How we deliver programs to our audience in the
verification service ? future, is of utmost importance, and seeing how the
Internet will continue to change the business is something
A : We are the largest distributor of syndicated TV pro- that nobody, I think, can accurately predict at this point.
gramming in the country, with eight of the top 10 shows
and over 80,000 hours of programming in our library. For decades, this was a fairly predictable kind of industry.
We have programs on virtually every commercial TV station We’re clearly at a period of the most change any of us
in the U.S., and we have a number of agreements with has seen ever in terms of the business model, and we all
stations for promotion levels or co-op advertising deals have to adapt to it. It’s not clear, to me at least, how this
that are contingent on the stations providing a certain will end up. It really is up for grabs. That being said, the
level of promotional support. broadcast model still is drawing hundreds of millions of
people to their TV sets.
Q : How long was CTD’s process of seeking out the right
verification service to meet your and your clients’ needs ? The nice thing is that CBS has a tremendous amount of
product, and however it’s distributed, we’ll be happy to
A : We had been tracking this for well over a decade with share it with our end users.
another vendor, but only for the largest markets. We had
been looking at the situation for a long time, discussing
what was right for us, which was a more complete coverage.
Group M has forecast that spending on Internet advertising in the UK
will surpass spending on TV ads in 2009 - making the UK the first of the
world’s major economies to see TV spending overtaken by the Internet.
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