Telemundo Media to Offer Bilingual Approach to Advertisers

September 30, 2012, 9:11 pm

By TANZINA VEGA

In a move to increase its reach with both English- and Spanish-speaking Hispanic consumers, Telemundo Media will announce on Monday a new advertising platform in conjunction with Comcast Spotlight, an advertising unit of Comcast. The initiative will be called Telemundo Plus and will allow advertisers to show ads in either language throughout the NBCUniversal, Comcast and Telemundo networks.

A major part of the strategy includes extracting the vast amounts of user data the companies own, said Andrew Ward, group vice president of Comcast Media 360, a division of Comcast Spotlight. Mr. Ward said the company was able to combine subscriber data with third-party data like voter registration files and census da ta, as well as data from companies like Experian, which collects credit scores, and Polk, which collects automobile data.

For now, advertisers will be able to specify an audience by neighborhood, but the aim is to approach the same level of precision available to marketers who run digital campaigns.

“What we want to do is maximize relevance,” Mr. Ward said. “When you put the right message in front of a right audience that level of engagement comes through.”

Dan Lovinger, executive vice president for advertising sales at Telemundo Media, said the new platform would help advertisers reach Hispanic audiences of all types. “Not just Spanish-dominant speakers, not just English-dominant Hispanics, but all of them,” Mr. Lovinger said. “When you look across Hispanic Americans, the 50 million don't all look alike, speak alike or come from the same socioeconomic platform.”

Advertisers will be able to focus their ad buys on specific geographic ar eas of Latinos, like a neighborhood of English-speaking Hispanics in New York or a neighborhood of Spanish-speaking Hispanics in California. Advertisers will also be able to show an English-language ad during Spanish-language shows and a Spanish-language ad during English-language programs.

So far, just a handful of advertisers have signed up to test the platform, including T-Mobile and Toyota. A third advertiser declined to be named, and representatives for Toyota were unavailable to comment. Toyota has run ads for its Camry in both languages using the new platform, said Chris Traina, a spokesman for Conill, the agency that worked on the ads.

E-Books Expand Their Potential With Serialized Fiction

September 30, 2012, 9:05 pm

By JULIE BOSMAN

Could serialized fiction finally force the e-book to evolve?

Various ventures are trying to satisfy a common complaint about e-books: that they are simply black-and-white digital reproductions of long-form print books, flat and unoriginal in their design and concept. One variation, what publishers call enhanced e-books, with audio and video elements woven throughout the text, has largely fallen flat with readers.

But serialized fiction, where episodes are delivered to readers in scheduled installments much like episodes in a television series, has been the subject of an unusual amount of experimentation in publishing in recent months. In September, Amazon announced Kindle Serials, stories sold for $1.99 and published in short episodes that download onto the Kindle as the episodes are released. Three of the first eight serials were produced by Plympton, a new literary studio.

In August, Byliner, a digital publisher, announced that it would begin a new digital imprint devoted to serialized fiction, with work by Margaret Atwood and Joe McGinniss at its start.

One of the most talked-about new experiments is taking serialized fiction a step further. Set to make its debut on Monday, it is a novel called “The Silent History” that is available on the Apple iPhone and its iPad. It includes interactive, user-generated elements.

The app itself is free, but readers pay for the book's content, which arrives in daily installments of about 15 minutes' worth of reading.

Eli Horowitz, a former publisher of McSweeney's, said the project grew out of his despair over the state of e-books when they began to emerge in earnest several years.

“It was a lit tle bit of a depressing moment,” Mr. Horowitz said last week. “We spent a lot of time making these print books into beautiful objects. And it seemed depressing to just squeeze them into a device. The prettiest e-book was still a little uglier than the worst book.”

He created “The Silent History” with Russell Quinn, a co-founder of the digital studio Spoiled Milk; Kevin Moffett, the author of “Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events,” a story collection; and Matthew Derby, an author and designer.

They wrote a 160,000-word book and, using the iPhone for inspiration, created a “scavenger hunt” element allowing readers to see more story lines by visiting specific locations - like China and Washington, D.C. - that are outlines on a map within the app. Users can also add their own story lines.

The whole idea, Mr. Horowitz said, is finding ways for devices like the iPhone to tell a story in a way that a print book could not.

“It's a w ay to create a communal reading experience, so people can experience it in a certain time span together,” Mr. Horowitz said. “What we tried to make was something that allowed for the reader to approach it in his or her way. We wanted to allow for all levels of interest and obsession.”