Weekly Spots

POSTED: December 24, 2012

(White Plains, NY) December 24, 2012 – According to Arbitron, Cincinnati, OH is the 29th largest radio market with a population of 1,768,600. They were the 28th largest radio market a year ago.

• Cincinnati is considered to have been the first American boomtown in the heart of the country in the early nineteenth century to rival the larger coastal cities in size and wealth.
• Cincinnati is also known for having one of the larger collections of nineteenth-century German architecture in the U.S., primarily concentrated just north of downtown and listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
• Cincinnati is home to the University of Cincinnati and Xavier University, among other colleges and universities.
• Cincinnati has eight sports teams: two major league teams; the Cincinnati Reds baseball team and the Cincinnati Bengals football team, plus six minor league teams, and five college institutions with their own sports teams. The Reds were named for America's first professional baseball team, the Cincinnati Red Stockings, who in 1869 were undefeated and remain the only professional baseball team to do so in the history of the game.
• Some famous Cincinnatians include: Doris Day, actress and singer; Stephen Spielberg, film writer and producer; Hal Sparks, actor and comedian; Nick and Drew Lachey, singers and actors; and of course, Jerry Springer, who was mayor of Cincinnati for a short time.

CINCINNATI SPOT TEN

In the Queen City last week the #1 radio advertiser was REMKE MARKETS BIGG’S with 640 spots. TIRE DISCOUNTERS took #2 with 596 ads, while SPEEDWAY was #3 airing 570 spots. THE HOME DEPOT landed in #4 running 507 commercials and MIKE'S CARWASH parked at #5 with 457 spots. SEARS soared from #21 to #6 with 448 ads, while AT&T WIRELESS connected at #7 with 436 spots. MEIJER moved from #10 to #8 with 429 spots and KROGER dropped from #4 down to #9 with 418 spots. Coming in #10 was GEICO running 413 spots.

CONSUMER ELECTRONICS SPOT TEN

NATIONAL STATISTICS -

In consumer electronics the #1 radio advertiser was HHGREGG with 4,287 spots. BEST BUY was #2 with 2,859 spots, while INTERSTATE BATTERIES was #3 with 2,796 ads. TIGERDIRECT was #4 with 2,365 spots and CONN'S captured #5 with 2,091 commercials. ROKU was #6 airing 1,990 spots and AUDIO EXP MOBILE-ONE TX QUALITY AUTO landed in #7 with 1,604 spots. VIDEO ONLY was #8 running 1,385 spots, while SLING MEDIA moved into #9 with 1,093 spots. Solid at #10 was ABC WAREHOUSE with 745 spots.

NATIONAL SPOT TEN

NATIONAL STATISTICS -

GEICO returns to #1 last week with 41,949 spots. THE HOME DEPOT fell to #2 with a very respectable 40,766 ads, while STAPLES soars from #46 to #3 with 35,668 spots. MCDONALD'S was solid at #4 airing 28,366 spots and #5 was AT&T WIRELESS with 27,900 spots.

Posted: December 24, 2012

Kmart was born more than one hundred years ago. Sebastian Spering Kresge opened a modest five-and-dime store in downtown Detroit and changed the entire landscape of retailing.

The store that Kresge built has evolved into an empire of more than 1,500 stores and an Internet presence that reaches millions of customers. The Kmart name has become a symbol of Americana, standing for quality products at low prices.

When Kresge opened his first store in 1899, he sold everything for 5 and 10 cents. The low prices appealed to shoppers and allowed him to expand to 85 stores in 1912, with annual sales of more than $10 million.

By the mid-1920s, the S.S. Kresge Company was opening locations that sold items for $1 or less, a precursor to the current dollar discount stores seen in every corner of America.

Ten years later in 1937, Kresge opened a store in the country's first suburban shopping center -- Country Club Plaza in Kansas City, Missouri.

In 1959, it was evident that the company needed a change so Harry B. Cunningham became Kresge’s president. Under Cunningham's leadership, the first Kmart discount department store opened in 1962 in Garden City, Michigan. Seventeen additional Kmart stores opened that year, leading to corporate sales of more than $483 million that year.

Just four years later in 1966, sales in 162 Kmart stores and 753 Kresge stores topped the $1 billion mark. In 1976, S.S. Kresge made history by opening 271 Kmart stores in one year, becoming the first-ever retailer to launch 17 million square feet of sales space in a single year.

In 1977, nearly 95 percent of S.S. Kresge Company sales were generated by Kmart stores. To reflect this dramatic impact, the company officially changed its name to Kmart Corporation. Ten years later, Kmart sold the remaining Kresge stores to fully concentrate on discount merchandising.

Life for Kmart continued to improve until 2002 when they were forced into bankruptcy. They emerged from Chapter 11 in May of 2003 and in 2004 announced that they would purchase Sears Roebuck. Under the merger agreement, they agreed to change their name to Sears Holdings Corporation.

Sears has 2,248 stores, while Kmart has 1,331 locations. According to the latest Sears Holdings annual report, they created $41.57 billion in revenues while producing a net loss of -$3.11 billion.

The parent company Sears Holdings has 293,000 employees and there is little data on how many Kmart employees, but figures before the merger were 133,000 people.

On Local Cable, Kmart ran 339,367 spots in the last 12 months. As a matter of fact, 50.90% of all their spots ran on Cable. Their strongest month was last month, November 2012, when they cleared 77,459 spots.

On the Radio, Kmart seems to be just kicking in now. They ran 79,798 spots in the last 12 months with their biggest month being November 2012 when they ran 31,258 ads.

On Broadcast TV, Kmart ran 247,620 spots in the last 12 months with their biggest months being December 2011 with 35,804, August 2012 with 32,641 ads and last month, November 2012 with 37,279 spots.

POSTED: December 24, 2012

Paramount Pictures Corporation is an American film production and distribution company, located in Hollywood, California. They were founded in 1912 and is are currently owned by media conglomerate Viacom. Paramount, the oldest existing Southern California film studio, (beating NBC Universal's Universal Studios by a month) is ironically, the only film studio actually located in Hollywood proper.

Paramount Pictures began in May, 1912, as the Famous Players Film Company. Founder Hungarian-born Adolph Zukor, observed that movies appealed to working-class immigrants, so he invested in nickelodeons; small theaters that showed movies for a nickel a ticket.

The driving force behind Paramount's rise was Zukor, as he built a mighty theatrical chain of nearly 2,000 screens, ran two production studios and became an early investor in radio, taking a 50% interest in the new Columbia Broadcasting System in 1928 (later to become CBS).

By the early 1960s Paramount was affected greatly by the high-risk movie business and their theater chain was long gone. Paramount’s investments in DuMont and in an early pay-television idea failed. Even the flagship Paramount building in Times Square was sold to raise cash. In 1966, a sinking Paramount was sold to Charles Bluhdorn's industrial conglomerate Gulf and Western Industries.

Paramount Pictures got into the music business when it purchased the rights to use Paramount Records' name (but not its catalogue) in the late 1960s. This group was later sold to ABC Records in 1974.

In 1993, Sumner Redstone's entertainment conglomerate Viacom made a bid for Paramount; this quickly escalated into a bidding war with Barry Diller. But Viacom prevailed, ultimately paying $10 billion for Paramount.

Paramount Pictures is now lumped in with MTV, BET, and other highly profitable channels owned by the new Viacom.

Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation is a subsidiary of Fox Inc., which is owned by media mogul Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation Ltd. Throughout its long history, the company has enjoyed a reputation as a major Hollywood motion picture studio. It produced some of the more prominent box-office hits--such as The Sound of Music and Star Wars--and has expanded into related areas of the entertainment industry through the development of subsidiaries such as Fox Animation Inc. and Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment.

In 1904 William Fox, a 25-year-old Hungarian immigrant, bought his first nickelodeon, an early form of movie theater, in New York City. Within a few years Fox and two partners, B.S. Moss and Sol Brill, had parlayed their success into a chain of 25 nickelodeons.

After several years of steady growth, the company experienced a series of shake-ups beginning in 1927, and in 1930 a group of stockholders ousted William Fox. Fox was replaced by Sidney R. Kent in 1932, and two years later Fox Film Corporation merged with Twentieth Century Pictures.

In 1933 Darryl F. Zanuck, head of production at Warner Brothers, had joined 20th century and created two monster hits, The Grapes of Wrath in 1940 and How Green Was My Valley in 1941.

In 1953 Zanuck began producing all the studio's films in wide-screen CinemaScope, but the attraction of this technology did not compensate for the lack of box office hits. Frustrated, Zanuck left the company in 1956 to become an independent film producer in Paris. Zanuck came back to 20th in 1962 after the studio lost a ton of money on the film Cleopatra.

In 1971 Dennis C. Stanfill was named chairman and CEO, and through a wide-ranging diversification program into the record business, broadcasting, film processing, and theme parks started to rebuild the studio back to its greatness.

In 1977, Star Wars became the biggest box office hit in film history and made over $200 million by the end of its first year. During the next five years, company profits quadrupled and its movies were nominated for 33 Academy Awards.

In March 1985, Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch advanced Twentieth Century Fox $88 million after buying a half interest in the company for $132 million. Murdoch assumed an active role at the company from the beginning. He acquired seven television stations from Metromedia, Inc. for $2 billion with the intention of drawing on Twentieth Century Fox's extensive library of films and TV shows.

In 1998 Twentieth Century Fox Film, with Paramount, experienced one of its greatest successes to date, producing the Oscar-winning disaster picture Titanic. Breaking all box-office attendance records, the movie opened a merchandising treasure chest for the studio, which licensed merchandise, such as costumes and life jackets, to be sold through the catalog firm of J. Peterman.

A Hollywood institution, Twentieth Century Fox Film is likely to produce its share of blockbusters in the future.

On Local Cable the two movie giants are running neck to neck. Paramount ran 517,854 spots in the last 12 months, while 20th Century Fox ran 521,273 ads. Paramount’s biggest month was December 2011 with 84,786 spots and 20th was hottest the same month with 78,206 spots. As we all know, December is the biggest month for new releases.

Radio, once a real weapon for the movie industry, seems to be playing second fiddle to video platforms. Paramount ran 47,596 spots in the last 12 months, while 20th Century Fox ran only 38,168 spots in the same period. Paramount cleared the most spots in January of 2012 with 9,082 ads, while 20th ran hottest in July with 11,467 spots.

On Broadcast TV, Paramount had a slight edge airing 188,832 spots in the last 12 months compared to 20th Century Fox at 177,365 ads. 20th ran hottest in December 2011 with 34,146 spots, while Paramount also topped out at 36,974 in the same month. Of note, Paramount ran 30,474 spots last month, November, which was twice what 20th Century Fox Films ran.

Posted: December 24, 2012

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