NBCUniversal is giving its advertising strategy a makeover. The network vowing to reduce its ad load and planning to roll out new ad formats in the third and fourth quarters. Jason Lynch, Senior Editor of Television at AdWeek, was with us to explain why the move is the first of its kind.
NBCUniversal announced the length of ad time will be slashed 10% across the board. This is a response to the environment built by disruptors such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. Viewers are becoming accustom to these models that have no ad breaks at all, said Lynch. He added that we've seen experimentation with cutting back on commercials, but this is the first time we've seen something on this level from a traditional network.
NBCUniversal, along with several others in the industry, are committing to audience-based targeting, said Lynch. He said advertising used to be bought on age and gender demographics, but now data will be leveraged to target viewers based on deeper information such as whether they are searching for a home.
TC BioPharm, a biopharmaceutical company focused on developing cell therapy products targeting, went public on the Nasdaq in January. CEO Bryan Kobel joined Cheddar to talk about the company's IPO launch, its cancer-fighting therapeutics tech, and its potential for using its research to treat COVID-19. "The opportunity here for us is to really get safety data and covid and expand into other areas," Kobel said. "So from COVID, where we hope to treat patients, hopefully maybe the elderly population, populations that that really can't handle the antivirals because they're too hard in the system, well then we'll expand out into maybe severe influenza Ebola, other viral and viral infections where we think we can be helpful."
The gaming industry has been under the spotlight so far this year following some big mergers and acquisitions. This week featured earnings of three major gaming companies, but also Meta and for the latter, things are not doing too hot. Joining Cheddar News to break it all down was Kenny Rosenblatt, President and Co-Founder of Arkadium.
Following the surprising big beat on estimates for the January jobs report, William M. Rodgers III, vice president and director of the Institute for Economic Equity at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, joined Cheddar News to break down the data. “We ended 2021 with a strong crescendo to a recovery that had taken hold, and we started 2022 in good fashion." He also discussed the dueling pressures of wage growth and inflation.
While it was a volatile week in tech as Meta experienced the biggest one-day drop in the history of the U.S. stock market, industry giant Amazon reported 40 percent growth — largely on the strength of the cloud. Dan Ives, managing director of equity research at Wedbush Securities, joined Cheddar News to break down how the e-commerce company stock managed to pop despite headwinds against its core retail business. "It's all about cloud because of sum of the parts, you could argue, amazon could be $3,500/$4,000 stock just based on cloud," he said. Ives also addressed the apparent the differing impact of Apple iOS changes on Facebook and Snapchat.
Following Ford's earnings miss, the stock price dropped despite a bullish outlook from the auto giant. Karl Brauer, an executive analyst with ISeeCars.com, joined Cheddar to break down why investors may not be sold on the carmaker because of the ongoing factor of supply constraints. "The product is not an issue. There's really good product coming from them, including the electric vehicle side, and the demand is not an issue. There's plenty of demand, but nobody really has a solid grasp on when we're going to get past the supply chain issue," said Brauer.
