Below is my final analysis of Time Warner, Inc. for the Media Management and Leadership, Fall 2015.
Analysis Time Warner Inc. consists of hundreds of content and distribution properties spread across four business units. Even though Pan and Jupiter Ascending posted huge losses, the Warner Bros. business unit was the most successful this year (Kalogeropoulos). The runaway success of the division, including an 11 percent jump in sales, has been attributed to new products like video games. While the Warner Bros. division is the only division growing its total sales — e.g. market size — the Turner and HBO divisions posted the top profits for the company in 2015. This year, Time Warner Inc. piloted new advertising strategies (during a cable broadcast of Family Guy on Adult Swim); earned exclusive rights to air top sporting events (NCAA basketball, NFL and NBA); piloted a streaming service for watching people play video games (called eLeague); and was considering expanding its stake in Hulu (Seeking Alpha). Despite measurable success and pilot projects in 2015, Time Warner Inc.’s stock price is currently hovering around $64 per share — as low as it has been all year. Macroeconomic conditions for cable networks are weighing heavily on its valuation in spite of $5.5M profits in 2015. This has lead analysts at Credit Suisse to name TWX as one of its favorite consumer discretionary stocks of 2016 (Schultz). Favoritism aside, Time Warner Inc.’s stock price is riding the wake of Q2’15 earnings reports from MVPDs like Dish Network. In the second quarter of this year, Dish lost an estimated 151,000 pay-TV customers (Flint). Declining cable subscribership means loss of per-subscriber affiliate fees as well as unfavorable changes to advertising rate cards for cable networks. Time Warner Inc., which depends so heavily on its cable networks for revenue, will need to begin making changes now to ensure viability past the decline of pay TV.
Ravioli began as a conversation about movie reviews. After Time Warner Inc. EVP of International and Corporate Strategy Olaf Olafsson visited The New School in November, an idea started to gel. He told the combined Media Management and Leadership and Media Industry Perspectives: Digital Media classes about watching Downton Abbey with his daughter. Olafsson explained that he struggles to find even the content he already knows he wants. Is Downton Abbey on Netflix or Amazon Prime? The latest season can only be streamed from the PBS app on Roku. Finding content recommended from friends and family, without explicit instructions, is nearly impossible. As the use of digital streaming services expands and the ecosystem for content licensing fragments, it’s an issue we will all face.
Below is an overview of my contribution to a group final in Media Economics, Fall 2015. Below, I've included my portion of a group project for Media Management Leadership, Fall 2015.
Summary Bonnier was founded in 1804 and is the oldest publishing house in Scandinavia. In 2012, its businesses included a host of newspapers, television channels and movie theatres in Sweden as well as nearly 40 special interest and “action-sports” magazines such as Popular Science and TransWorld Snowboarding. As of 2012, Bonnier comprised 175 firms operating in 16 countries. Though the rise of digital technologies through the 1990s did not have an immediate effect on print media, the emergence of “Web 2.0” in 2003 began to dramatically shift the customer relationship to content (Applegate 2). This shift, paired with recession and an industry-wide decision to post content online for free, caused newspaper and magazine companies like Bonnier to lose circulation numbers, subscription income and advertising revenue at prodigious rates. “Where the online services had all paid newspapers and other publishers for content, and had charged consumers for a combination of the ability to get online and to make use of that content when they did so, now the businesses of access and content diverged. And on the web, much of the content ... was offered without charge” (Tofel 49). I am actually really interested to learn the perspectives of our European and Scandinavian classmates. It seems that funding for public media in those countries is much more robust. As of 2011, U.S. per capita spending on public media was just $4. The federal government funds the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which in turn gives money to organizations like National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service.
The federal allocations support broadcast TV and radio stations on the state and local level. Much of the funding is used for operations, while some is dedicated specifically to programming. There are places in my home state that really receive no commercial attention from broadcasters (extremely low population density in poor, rural areas). Without OPB (Oregon Public Broadcasting) radio and television stations, these people would receive even less information. And there have been a few big wins. NPR — only 5.8% of NPR funding is from the federal government — is known for quality, consistent journalism that does hold those in power accountable for their actions. PBS, on the other hand, is known for robust children's "E/I" (educational and informational) programming (under the brand name PBS Kids). Studies have shown that more robust public funding creates better engagement and more diverse programming. Below, I've included my portion of a group project for Media Management Leadership, Fall 2015. Summary David Ogilvy took pride took pride in unorthodox eccentricities — he was described by his peers as “quirky.” In 1948, Ogilvy founded a small advertising agency and invited “trumpeter swans” to join him in his mission to “sell — or else.” He led the company through 1975, an era when ad budgets went unchallenged and the Madison Ave. “Mad Men” were commoditizing the world. Though the next four chairmen of Ogilvy and Mather International were unimaginative, the company continued to grow unimpeded through the mid-1980s. Though the company was eventually able to recover from the losses it faced through 1992, failure to adapt, a toxic corporate culture, failure to revitalize the corporate vision, failure to roll out updated policies and tools, and a corporate structure with misaligned incentives slowed the eventual success of Ogilvy through 1994.
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