CareerTV's Fox Business Network show covered in Mediapost, paidcontent.org, NewTeeVee, mediabistro, Talking Biz News

Fox Business News Picks Up Web Show




Offering the right product at the right time, recruiting media company Career TV has scored its first national TV syndication deal with the Fox Business News channel.

For the past years, Philadelphia-based Career TV has produced a monthly half-hour Web series for 18- to-25-year-old job seekers, which streams online at CareerTV.com and is carried on about 400 college campus networks nationwide.

More recently, the dire national job market has generated a great deal of interest in the company, while increasing traffic to the site from 300,000 to over 1.3 million unique monthly visitors in less than a year.

"Right now, there are a lot of people looking for help," said Sean O'Grady, a senior producer at Career TV who will anchor the show. "Fox Business will help us reach an audience of 44 million nationwide." Named "Career TV," the Saturday afternoon show is expected to make its debut on Fox in early April.

Along with producing the shows, Career TV has brought on several multichannel sponsors, including Lockheed Martin, Verizon Business, Ernst & Young and Accenture. Meanwhile, PriceWaterhouseCoopers will be a "name sponsor" for a segment called "Feed Your Future."

"These are all advertisers that are looking to connect with job seekers, particularly at an entry level," O'Grady said.

Career TV--a subsidiary of Universum Inc., a Swedish-based international marketing company--also works with clients like CBS Interactive on an individual basis to produce and distribute local recruitment videos.

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CareerTV jumps to Fox Business News: The half-hour recruitment and job-focused online series will air once a week on Fox Business News; the first episode airs April 4 at 2pm. CareerTV is produced by Philadelphia-based CareerTV.com, a division of talent management and recruiting company Universum; the show also streams at about 400 college campuses nationwide. CareerTV.com also produces recruiting videos for companies like CBS Interactive, P&G and T-Mobile.

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How Do You Find A Job? Watch Career TV

We hear a lot about random YouTube stars or web series making their way across the digital divide and finding a spot on network television. Well how about a news organization picking up a web series? Pretty crazy?! Well that's just what happened to Career TV.

The monthly web series, produced out of Philadelphia and dedicated to helping recent grads navigate the job market, scored its first national TV syndication deal with the Fox Business News channel, reports MediaPost News.

While streams of the show appear on about 400 college campus television stations, the program began to gain national traction online this year, growing from 300,000 unique monthly visitors to over 1.3 million.

"Right now, there are a lot of people looking for help," said Sean O'Grady, a senior producer at Career TV who will anchor the show. "Fox Business will help us reach an audience of 44 million nationwide."

The Saturday afternoon show is expected to make i ts debut on Fox in early April.

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Mediapost writes about a new weekend show coming to Fox Business Network (not "News"). CareerTV.com, which produces a monthly half-hour job related We b series, will begin a "Saturday afternoon show...expected to make its debut on Fox in early April.

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Career TV Picked Up by Fox Business News; bad job market is good news for the half-hour web series as it scores a national TV syndication deal. (MediaPost)




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Career show coming to Fox Business

March 20th, 2009

Gavin O’Malley of Online Media Daily writes about a new show called “Career TV” that will begin airing on the Fox Business Network next month on Saturday afternoons.

O’Malley writes, “For the past years, Philadelphia-based Career TV has produced a monthly half-hour Web series for 18- to-25-year-old job seekers, which streams online at CareerTV.com and is carried on about 400 college campus networks nationwide.

“More recently, the dire national job market has generated a great deal of interest in the company, while increasing traffic to the site from 300,000 to over 1.3 million unique monthly visitors in less than a year.

“‘Right now, there are a lot of people looking for help,’ said Sean O’Grady, a senior producer at Career TV who will anchor the show. ‘Fox Business will help us reach an audience of 44 million nationwide.’ Named ‘Career TV,’ the Saturday afternoon show is expected to make its debut on Fox in early April.

quadrantONE featured in Mediapost's "Newspapers Expand Digital Platforms"

NEWSPAPERS EXPAND DIGITAL PLATFORMS

Unfazed by the sharp economic downturn and their own financial woes, newspaper publishers are pushing ahead with initiatives to expand their cooperative digital distribution and ad sales platforms. On the sales side, the latest round of expansion comes at QuadrantOne, a company formed by four major newspaper publishers for online ad sales, while Yahoo's newspaper consortium has recruited new members.

QuadrantOne, a national network for online display ads formed by Tribune, Gannett, Hearst and The New York Times Company in February 2008, announced a slew of new hires as well as some promotions in recent weeks.

At the top level, the company hired Monika Belur as marketing director; previously, Belur marketed media brands like the Travel Channel, Discovery and TLC. She has experience in consumer, sales, online, and traditional direct marketing. In New York, the company also hired Stacy Freedman as the East Coast account executive for entertainment and Melanie Pursglove as Midwest account executive for entertainment.

Around the country, it hired Carolyn Goldfarb as sales development manager for the central region, based in Chicago; Matthew Aporta as the West Coast account executive for entertainment, based in Los Angeles; Maria Caruso as sales development manager in San Francisco; and Danielle Morris as sales development manager for the Central region, based in Detroit. Finally, Kim Ripps was promoted to East Coast sales manager....

The digital expansion comes on the heels of good news for newspaper Web sites from Nielsen Online, which tracks Web site traffic for the NAA. According to Nielsen, in January the number of monthly unique visitors to newspaper Web sites increased 7.9 million to 74.8 million, a jump of 11.9% over the same month in 2008. Per the same measurements, 44% of all Web users visited newspaper Web sites in January, an increase of 7.3% over January 2008. The number of page views generated increased 15.4% to 3.7 billion.

CareerTV's new Fox Business Show appears on Cheezhead recruiting news site

career tv on fox business news

CareerTV, a global television programmer and interactive web site designed to help college students and young professionals reach their career goals, will be launching on Fox Business News beginning Saturday, April 4th from 2 - 2:30 pm EST.

The half-hour program will provide job seekers with a steady stream of employer profiles, salary reports, resume tips, interview coaching, employee testimonials, industry outlines, and the latest career news.

In addition to premiering on Fox, the program, anchored and executive produced by Sean O’Grady, is also streamed on the Web and is shown on about 400 campuses nationwide.

According to a CareerTV spokesperson, one new program will air each month and repeated the following three weeks. The show is taped in Philadelphia and various corporate HQ locations around the country.

Some companies who have been interviewed on CareerTV include Deloitte, Apple, Sony, Starbucks, and UPS, to name a few.

In the NY Post, Cramster.com announces the NYC-area colleges with biggest student membership

OH, U. CHEATERS!

COLUMBIA KIDS SNEAKY SITE'S TOP USERS

Columbia University's walls may be covered with ivy - but its halls are allegedly filled with cheaters.

The people behind a college "study" Web site, where users can pay a $9.95 monthly fee and get all the answers to their homework, said yesterday that they have more users from Columbia than from any other university in the nation.

Cramster.com said it named the prestigious college's student body the No. 1 customer after spotting a high number of users with Columbia e-mail addresses.

"Not only do we have the most users there, but they are the most active," said Aaron Hawker, the site's CEO. Nationally, Columbia bested schools like Ohio State, LSU, the University of Southern California and UCLA to be the top Cramster user.

In the New York area, it leads a list that includes No. 2 SUNY-Stony Brook, No. 3 NYU, No. 4 Yeshiva University and No. 5 St. John's University.

Cramster bills itself as a place where students can participate in an innocent virtual study hall, working out answers online like any dorm-room cram session of old.

But the site contains hundreds of textbooks with answers included. And critics charge that many users simply copy all the information without doing any work.

"I really dislike Cramster.com. Essentially, online study groups are great, but they need to be moderated by the instructor, not convert to a pure copy solutions place, which Cramster is," said SUNY Buffalo Professor Arnd Pralle, a leading opponent of the site.

Yesterday, students at Columbia said using the site wasn't wrong.

"It's not cheating, it's awesome," said Daniel Gray, a 20-year-old major in physics and film. "Those who rely on it [for answers] get screwed. It's to help students who want to learn, and it helped me."

Hawker said that, despite having textbook answers readily available, the site does not condone cheating.

CareerTV's Sean O'Grady interviewed for ABCNews.com unemployment story

Unemployment: Companies Cut Pricey Older Workers

High Health Care, Salaries, Pension Trump Experience and Wisdom, Say Experts

[EXCERPT]

Jobs for Qualified Young People

"There are still budgets to hire a limited number of college students," said Sean O'Grady, executive producer of CareerTV USA, a Philadelphia broadcaster that provides online services to hundreds of colleges around the country.

"Companies are using the recession to restructure their work force and they need to bring in new employees to fill these voids," O'Grady told ABCNews.com.

"No one directly says person X is taking person Y's job, but the layoffs are happening and a select number of the most qualified college students who are ready to hit the ground running are still finding opportunities," he said.

But according to a 2006 study commissioned by AARP, additional health care costs associated with older workers are "far offset by institutional knowledge, loyalty and other positive factors," taking into consideration the training of new workers.

CareerTV featured in the front of Philadelphia Inquirer's Sunday business section

Where layoffs hit hardest is hard to gauge

By Jane M. Von Bergen

Inquirer Staff Writer

Every day there's another layoff announcement, so Sean O'Grady finds himself confused about why his Philadelphia-based recruiting company, CareerTV USA Inc., is doing so well.

"We had to shake our heads at that," he said, "because we're doing our best sales ever, and we had our best quarter at the end of 2008."

So O'Grady started asking his clients to explain why they are bothering to recruit in these times, even when, in some cases, they are cutting back on hiring.

What he learned and what he is seeing "is the layoff of the baby-boom generation. Companies are filling those holes with bright-eyed, bushy-tailed college graduates.

"They are essentially trying to hire people they can pay less and get a lot of energy and enthusiasm," said O'Grady, 26, a senior producer at CareerTV.

CareerTV's clients are companies that want to recruit recent college graduates.

They hire CareerTV to make company recruitment videos aimed at the college-graduate demographic. CareerTV is a subsidiary of Universum Inc., a Swedish-based international marketing company with its U.S. headquarters in Philadelphia and a focus on college graduates.

CareerTV also produces a monthly half-hour television show distributed to career centers on 400 campuses. The show adopts a blithe tone, with features on companies and on occupations. One recent report: How to be a ski instructor.

"There is so much pressure on these students to get a job and pay off college loans that they are going to jump at these opportunities," O'Grady said. "The victims are those who are 15 to 25 years deep into their companies and have become too expensive."

The truth of O'Grady's assessment is hard to pinpoint.

On Friday, the Labor Department reported that the nation's economy shed 651,000 jobs in February, boosting the unemployment rate to 8.1 percent.

Looking strictly at age, teenagers 16 to 19 in the job market are faring the worst, with unemployment at 21.6 percent. Baby boomers actually have the lowest unemployment rate at 5.6 percent.

The unemployment rate for workers between the ages of 20 to 24, including college graduates, is 12.9 percent.

BrandIndex's post-holiday ranking of retail buzz takes up full page in WWD

Please click to enlarge.

Client INVIDI featured on front page story of New York Times business section

Cable Companies Target Commercials to Audience

The advertiser’s dream of sending a particular commercial to a specific consumer is one step closer to reality as Cablevision Systems plans to announce the largest project yet using targeted advertising on television.

Beginning with 500,000 homes in Brooklyn, the Bronx and some New Jersey areas, Cablevision will use its targeting technology to route ads to specific households based on data about income, ethnicity, gender or whether the homeowner has children or pets.

The technology requires no hardware or installation in a subscriber’s home, so viewers may not realize they are seeing ads different from a neighbor’s. But during the same show, a 50-something male may see an ad for, say, high-end speakers from Best Buy, while his neighbors with children may see one for a Best Buy video game.

“We have, as an industry, been talking about this since the beginning of time,” said Matt Seiler, the global chief executive of the media firm Universal McCann, a part of the Interpublic Group. “Now we’ve got it in 500,000 households. This is real.”

The potential of customized ads worries some privacy advocates, despite the assurance of cable companies that they maintain anonymity about the households.

“We don’t have an objection to advertising that is targeted to demographics,” said Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a civil liberties group in Washington. But, he said, there is a need to show “that they can’t be reverse-engineered to find the names of individuals that were watching particular shows.”

Cablevision says it segments its subscribers only by demographics, so that an advertiser can divide ads among various groups: General Motors, for example, could send an ad for a Cadillac Escalade to high-income houses, a Chevrolet to low-income houses, and one in Spanish to Hispanic consumers.

Cablevision matches households to demographic data to divide its customers, using the data-collection company Experian.

Experian has data on individuals that it collects through public records, registries and other sources. It matches the name and address of the subscriber to what it knows about them, and assigns demographic characteristics to households. (The match is a blind one: advertisers do not know what name and address they are advertising to, Cablevision executives said.)

Advertisers can also give their existing customer lists to Experian, and Experian can make matches — so G.M., for example, could direct an ad based on who already owns a G.M. car.

Advertisers are willing to pay premiums for ads that go only to audiences they have selected.

Cablevision tested the technology by promoting its own services with targeted and untargeted ads. In the eight-month test, the targeted ads brought in new subscriptions at a significantly higher rate than untargeted ads.

“The revenue opportunity for the various constituents within television is enormous,” said Irwin Gotlieb, the global chief executive of GroupM, the media division of WPP Group. (WPP is an investor in the targeting companies Visible World and the Invidi Technologies Corporation.)

That is money the cable companies are eager to have. “Penetrations have flattened out, and cable companies need a way to grow,” said David L. Kline, the president of the Rainbow Advertising Sales Corporation, Cablevision’s ad unit.

Cablevision has been testing the system in about 100,000 Brooklyn households over the last year and a half. By summer, Cablevision plans to have it in 500,000 households, and, if the introduction goes smoothly, to extend it to all 3.1 million of its cable subscribers.

Visible World, the New York-based company working on the Cablevision project, was founded in 2000. It initially worked on showing versions of ads based on the weather or general location. Then, Visible World began working on the capability of sending different ads to specific households, starting with Brooklyn.

Cablevision is not notifying customers about the targeted advertising specifically. It last sent its privacy policy, which included information about ad targeting, last May, said a spokesman, Jim Maiella. The privacy policy is also available online.

Jeffrey Chester, the executive director of the privacy group Center for Digital Democracy, said this was not enough. “They need to be very clear to the consumer what’s being collected,” he said. “Give people a choice.”

One thing Cablevision will not be doing is sending ads based on what shows a consumer is watching.

But a competitor of Visible World, Invidi, is conducting a test with the cable company Comcast and will soon work with Verizon. It uses data from remote controls to follow what a person is watching, then matches that with ratings information and program guides to infer that person’s gender and age. It can use census data or data sources like Experian for further refining. Then, it shows an appropriate commercial.

Eventually, said Michael Kubin, the executive vice president of Invidi, the company will be able to identify who is watching based not just on what they are viewing, but also how they watch it: whether they channel change frequently or not at all, or immediately turn to CNN or to Bravo. That will help it show the right ads in households where multiple people watch television.

Mr. Kubin said Invidi did not have the capability to store any data, and could not, even if subpoenaed, tell what programs someone was watching.

But Invidi’s access to data has raised some concerns among even its advertisers. In late 2008, Invidi began conducting a test in Baltimore with Comcast, with about 70,000 households.

Comcast sent letters to all households in the trial area when the test began, alerting them to the trial and giving them an option to decline participation.

Advertisers wanted even more caution. While Invidi could have used the remote-control data to target ads, Starcom MediaVest Group, a media unit of Publicis Group, asked it not to.

“We want to make sure that we took a very conservative approach toward data usage until we have an opportunity as an industry to understand the consumer’s desire for more relevant advertising,” said Tracey Scheppach, senior vice president and video innovations director at Starcom Worldwide.

While advertisers are pushing the cable industry to begin offering targeted advertising, it has been a slow process. Cable companies control only a portion of advertising — the bulk is sold by the networks, like ESPN or MTV.

To coordinate their efforts, last year the six largest cable companies announced they had created an entity called Canoe Ventures. It is trying to get national distribution for the targeting technologies, to ensure the networks support targeted ad sales, and to come up with industry standards.

“Television was always big and dumb,” said Seth Haberman, the chief executive of Visible World. “Now, hopefully, we can be big and slightly smarter.”

BrandIndex's consumer perception research on credit card companies appears in Adweek and Mediapost

Visa Says Plastic Beats Paper


The new work claims, 'More people go with Visa'

NEW YORK The No. 1 brand of credit card, Visa, has a new take on using plastic. In a global campaign breaking March 4, Visa tells consumers credit cards aren't about spending more money. Rather, "More people go with Visa" touts plastic as a better way to spend than paper cash and checks.

The campaign, created by TBWA, plays up the security, control and convenience of using a Visa card. The first two U.S. ads, "Let's Go" and "Aquarium," will debut on American Idol on Wednesday. In the coming weeks, print ads will flag the benefits of the Visa Check Card.

Visa also launched microsite Visa.com/go. It invites consumers to submit pictures and provide recommendations about different experiences to try along with offers from various merchants. "Visa gives people the ability to take action, the actions that are most important to them," said Visa CMO Antonio Lucio in a statement. "The 'More people go with Visa' campaign is an invitation to make the most out of life every day, a powerful message. It's not about spending more, it's about using Visa for those things that are important to you every day."

The campaign is meant to be optimistic "yet grounded in the reality that people are seeking to live both in the moment and within their means," per the company. Visa is also touting its range of payment product s while giving financial education information and providing money management tools at Visa.com/goresponsibly.

Such a change in positioning is important for the brand, per Ted Marzilli, global managing director for BrandIndex. According to its poll of consumers during the first two months of the year, consumer perceptions of credit card brands has been plummeting. Visa's overall buzz score fell 5.7 percent while MasterCard and American Express each dropped nearly 10 percent. "Everyone has been trending negatively because credit limits have been reduced, cards are being canceled," said Marzilli. "Visa is focusing on less ostentatious spending. It's not put the card down and make big purchases. That's counter-intuitive because they know people are cutting back on spending."

The prior campaign, "Life takes Visa," ran for three years. Visa spent $350 million on U.S. media, excluding online, last year, per Nielsen Monitor-Plus.

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AmEx, Visa Look For Ways To Build Image

It's no wonder that American Express is retrenching its strategy, and Visa is launching a new image-building ad campaign: The perception of credit card companies in the U.S. is dropping swiftly.

According to YouGovPolimetrix's Brand Index, the Buzz Index for all four major credit card companies--Visa, MasterCard, American Express and Discover--has dropped steadily since the beginning of the year. Given the economy, the drop is not particularly surprising, says Ted Marzilli, senior vice president and general manager of YouGovPolimetrix.

"A lot of people are having their credit limits reduced or their cards canceled," Marzilli tells Marketing Daily. "There also may be a backlash because these are companies that encourage [personal] deficit spending."

In the survey of 5,000 consumers, American Express suffered a 10-point drop in buzz score, which measures positive versus negative perceptions, over the two-month period. American Express was the only one of the four brands to have a negative buzz score as of Feb. 24.

"In the most recent couple of months, American Express announced it would be having layoffs, and that never helps a brand," Marzilli says. "The average consumer may not have as much of a history with American Express as Visa and Master Card, which also helps those brands."

According to a story in Monday's Wall Street Journal, American Express- -after launching more typical debt-carrying credit cards to average consumers--is retrenching its strategy and going back to targeting affluent consumers with charge cards that are paid off every month.

Discover Card, which usually has the lowest buzz scores of the four major credit card companies, started to make some positive gains toward the middle of February, and ended the period with a higher buzz score than AmEx. The company has recently been heavily running a television advertisement that showcases its Spend Analyzer tool available to Discover Card holders. Given the times, the message would likely play well with consumers, Marzilli says.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Visa--which had the highest buzz scores of all the credit card rankings-- announced Monday that it would launch its first-ever global marketing campaign with the tagline "More People Go With Visa." The effort is intended to encourage people to use their Visa cards in place of cash or checks for their purchases. In a press release about the campaign, the company's Chief Marketing Officer, Antonio Lucio, made a point of saying the campaign was "not about spending more, it's about using Visa for those things that are important to you every day."

While the campaign--which breaks in the U.S. on Wednesday--is not a factor in Visa's buzzmetrics, Marzilli says the message will be one worth checking in later surveys. "They're betting that the message they want to have come through will come through with consumers," Marzilli says. "If people misjudge the ad or judge it as saying something it's not, then there's a concern."