NFL to Stream Football

SportsBusiness Journal reported on July 28 that the NFL will stream football action to the web.

The NFL will stream 17 regular-season games live this season, marking the first time regular-season action will be broadly streamed in real time in the United States.
Starting with the NFL Kickoff game on Thursday, Sept. 4, between the Washington Redskins and New York Giants, the league plans to stream NBC’s prime-time schedule on NFL.com and NBCSports.com...

The online video will consist of NBC’s broadcast feed, with the call by Al Michaels and John Madden. The league has not decided how to treat the ads, but the most likely scenario will strip NBC’s ads out of the broadcast, with the NFL and NBC selling new online ads and sharing the revenue.

The move is significant for the NFL, as it continues to ramp up its digital offerings and open its content on more platforms...

Now it will be interesting to see if America’s most valuable television sports property, already bringing in more than $3 billion a year from its television partners, can find value on the Web without harming its lucrative TV contracts.

ROI Revealed

Ben Comer from Medical Marketing & Media reports that Wolters Kluwer Health and Nielsen have joined forces to combine "de-identified patient prescription-related transaction data" from Wolters Kluwer Heath with "consumer purchasing, attitudinal and behavior information" from Nielsen (quotes from a company press release).

This will provide outstanding metrics to measure the impact of targeted medical marketing. The goal has always been to influence prescribing physicians; this gives the ability to track with great sophistication the results of drug marketing efforts.

Drug companies have to spend less and get better results. Webcasting has been proven to be an extremely effective marketing vehicle that provides data about audience views far beyond the capability of traditional media. With the ability to accurately track shifts in prescription behavior and cross reference with webcast attendance, it seems clear that more money will be spent on webcasting for medical communications.

Amazon Plans an Online Store to Stream Video

The New York Times reported on July 17 that Amazon.com will introduce a new online store of TV shows and movies Amazon Video on Demand.

Customers of Amazon’s new store will be able to start watching any of 40,000
movies and television programs immediately after ordering them because they
stream, just like programs on a cable video-on-demand service. That is different
from most Internet video stores, like Apple iTunes and the original incarnation of Amazon’s video store, which require users
to download files to their hard drives.

CinemaTech highlights this quote from the Times article:

The video store will be accessible through the Sony Bravia Internet Video link,
a $300 tower-shaped device that funnels Web video directly to Sony’s
high-definition televisions. That is an awkward extra expense, for now. But
future Bravias are expected to have this capability embedded in the television,
making it even easier to gain access to the full catalog of past and present TV
shows and movies, over the Internet, using a television remote control.

Secret Sauce of Viral Video

Kevin Nalts is a marketing director at a Fortune 100 company who moonlights as a YouTube comedian. He has posted more than 670 short videos on YouTube.

YouTube invited him to speak at conference about viral video. Here is a link to his presentation.

YouTube is a great resource: they will host your content for free, people are accustomed to going there - as it is the dominant provider of internet video content, and all you have to do to get people to watch your video is compete with the other content.

Of course, a webcasting service offers benefits that YouTube cannot. YouTube does not provide metrics about who watched your videos and for how long. It does not offer branding on the access page or on the player. Nor can they secure your video so it only reaches a designated audience. It does not allow the audience to complete a survey or take a test.

Pfizer Will No Longer Fund CME Through Med Ed Firms

Medical Marketing and Media magazine reports that Pfizer will no longer fund CME through medical education and communications companies.

This announcement comes days after the same magazine wrote about a letter Senator Herb Kohl (D-WI) wrote to ACCME chief Murray Kopelow about a CME event that recommended testing all pregnant women for herpes. Senator Kohl contends there is no medical evidence that supports this recommendation, which calls into question the motives of the event grantor, GSK, which is the maker of Valtrex (a herpes drug).

Since Pfizer alone spent $314 million on CME in 2005 - some of that on web-base streaming media - it is clear that this vertical will be undergoing significant change.

New Era of Medical Media

An article that appears in the May Medical Marketing & Media magazine called: "Report Indicates Shift in Strategy" shows that medical communications - Direct to Physician Marketing and Direct to Consumer Marketing - is experiencing the same trends and forces that we see in advertising as a whole.

There is more pressure on expenditures, and there is a greater focus on rich media to improve the ROI of these communications.

A follow up article in the June 2008 issue of Medical Marketing & Media magazine called: "Surviving the Shift" declares:

Heads are rolling on sales forces as the buildup of the detailing Cold War
years is abruptly reversed, and even many DTC channels are feeling the pinch.
Forced to do more with less, media planners and buyers are looking for ever more
targeted opportunities and pharmas are warming to online media (even if banner
ads are down). Welcome to a new era of medical media—one in which thrift and
creativity are rewarded.