It could well be said that Chris Boothe has only himself to blame for the biggest challenge he faces as president/chief activation officer at the media communications agency Starcom USA.

He has demanded more information on what TV viewers are watching and he has gotten it from Nielsen and others.

“We’ve seen an inordinate amount of new data and new ways to look at the data,” he says.

“As we move more into the local arena, where we’re doing more deals locally, it’s going to be more challenging. But it’s a good thing.”

The “activation” in Boothe’s title refers to his mandate to strike deals with media partners that will provide Starcom's clients with accountable results.

One result of that surfaced during the last upfront, when his team scored 16 deals with networks based on minute-by-minute ratings guarantees—more than any other media-buying organization, according to Boothe.

Working on behalf of a long roster of clients that includes Allstate, Nintendo, Kellogg's and Miller Brewing, Boothe led Starcom to become TiVO’s first partner in its Power Watch Consumer Panel last November. The surveys provide demo and viewing behavior data based on answers from a panel of 20,000 households.

Boothe was also instrumental in a deal with TNS Media Research, which supplies Starcom with second-by-second information on TV viewing behavior.

In this interview with TV NEWSDAY Contributing Editor Janet Stilson, Boothe talks about what TV stations can do to improve their proposition to advertisers on both a local and national spot basis, how the transition to digital next year provides an important advertising opportunity and how the next upfront market will be different than those in the past.

Are TV station groups and rep firms doing enough to make national spot an attractive proposition for your clients?

I’ll answer that in two ways. We don’t see local TV stations going away. I mean, a lot of our clients will always have a desire to go down locally, especially as we see different nuances in each market, and we find different targets for our clients’ products. It makes a heck of a lot of sense.

As TV becomes digital a year from now, in February of ’09, we think that there’ll be even more opportunity for those stations to set themselves apart and sell big ideas to national advertisers. And there’re certainly local-only dayparts, like sports and news, that you can’t get nationally. So in terms of customized messages, in terms of calls-to-action, local makes a lot of sense.

But as to what station groups and rep firms can do to make [spot] more attractive: their national counterparts have made so many more inroads, in terms of getting more precise measurements. So, pushing Nielsen for more accurate ratings measurements locally is one thing.

The second thing we might want to do is embrace transaction technology. As you know, local is very labor-intensive, and anything they can do to streamline those transaction processes to be more efficient, makes it a lot more attractive.

Finally, we can probably look more holistically at what they offer and weave in more digital opportunities, like online and even mobile.

We still think there’s a big untapped opportunity there, where local stations have very strong brand recognition in the local video space. And we think they have the opportunity to leverage their video content across other screens. So we’re thinking mobile and even out-of-home—gas stations, grocery stores, all that kind of stuff.

When it comes to local online advertising, is any medium getting it right—TV stations, newspapers, radio stations?

It clearly depends on the market. There are some markets that are more advanced than others, as I am sure you know. If there’s real traffic, we’re seeing that clients are interested, because a lot of our clients do a lot of things locally.

Arguably, newspapers beat TV stations online as a source of local news and information, but I think with the increase and proliferation of more online video, TV stations have a real opportunity to capitalize. When the networks do something big promotion-wise, we’re seeing more O&O’s are doing things online with them. So we’re seeing a lot of consistency and integration in driving [promotions] down to the local level.  

When the transition to digital takes place next year, there are some big ideas that stations can take advantage of. What are you referring to?

Today, on my DirecTV, I get ch. 5 [WMAQ]—which is NBC—on a separate station in HD and then I can get ch. 5 news and weather on another station. So those are local marketing opportunities that didn’t exist before. [Broadcasters are] able to repurpose content. So, with the new bands, there’s going to be a lot more opportunities to drive your message further locally.

How has the huge influx of political advertising affected your clients’ strategies this year?

I don’t actually know if it has affected our clients’ ad strategies. I mean, candidates don’t typically spend national ad dollars, as you know. You’ve probably been reading, and we have too, about how this year has been recording-breaking in terms of spending. But we have heard that advertisers with national and local budgets have shifted their mix to varying degrees really towards national.

I read that almost three-quarters of the estimated $3 billion in political spending is expected to be in local. So we’ve advised some of our clients to plan and execute buys early to minimize any impact on schedules and secure the right inventory that they’re looking for. We’ve also talked about maintaining flexibility with makegoods. But a lot is up in the air, in the period leading up to Feb. 5, Super Tuesday, and we anticipate heavy advertising to continue.

How has the writers strike affected the strategies of your clients? Are they doing more online now than they did?

A lot of our clients’ plans were already in place prior to the strike, so right now we’re working just to make sure our clients are getting the eyeballs and the measurements and the things that we were trying to get to them before. And we’re being quite successful with that.

Overall, we want to see the strike resolved, obviously. There are a lot of things that are going on that is really not for us to comment on, but our greatest hope, as the company representing these consumer experiences and perspectives, is that the shows people want to watch make it back to the air sooner rather than later.

Do you consider the situation with makegoods to be a problem? Are they being handled appropriately by the networks?

We’re working with the networks and our clients to ensure that the schedules we got guaranteed are clearly in parity with the schedules that we actually deliver. Clearly that’s not a one-size-fits-all model for clients. We can’t accurately predict that every network will meet every client’s guarantee, but we’re sure they’re doing everything in their power to honor all those agreements that we’ve made with our clients.

There was an interesting article in The New York Times about how a lot of the reality programming that has been on the air in place of a lot of the scripted shows is doing much better than anybody had thought. A lot of them are viable options for some of the things that we had in place earlier.

Do you think we’re going to have an upfront this year, and if we do, how is it going to be different than last year?

It’s still a little early to tell. NBC has been very public about saying we don’t know if it’s going to happen. I read something recently where Univision is questioning it, but it all depends on how you’re describing the upfront because I’m actually going to an upfront presentation by NBC on Wednesday in New York. They’re doing an upfront for all their video out-of-home properties, which has been pretty well publicized. They’re having an upfront presentation on selling video messaging in supermarkets, on gas station pumps, all that kind of stuff. So, a lot of it’s just how you define the upfront.

Concerning the more traditional upfront, what kinds of deals are we going to see this year that are different than last year?

In the past, all the deals were done using the same [ratings] currency. And I think that over the last two years, we’ve evolved. [Starcom] had three deals done on minute-by-minute [guarantee basis] in the 2006-07 upfront, and we increased that to 16 minute-by-minute deals in the 2007-08 upfront. We also included a second-by-second deal in there [with Discovery HD Theater]. We’ve done deals using our TiVO information.

So I think what we’re seeing is that no longer will all deals be the same. As we go into future years, we’re going to be seeing more and more deals done differently based on the individual nuances of that network, what our clients are seeing and how those networks are behaving in the commercial ratings marketplace.

What have you seen so far in terms of results from the TiVO Power Watch Consumer Panel? Have any of the results been particularly striking or surprising?

We don’t have anything from that that we can comment on yet.

Is the emergence of more HD channels an important development for your clients?

Yes. More and more of our clients are shooting their commercials in high def. An interesting dynamic is that most of the high-definition channels are not measured by Nielsen right now. They are measured by the TNS’s data, and they are measured by other things. We did a deal with Discovery HD last year using the TNS data. I think that’s probably the network that you’re going to start to see using even a more granular way of constructing deals.

What’s your perspective so far on the effectiveness of commercial ratings? Any surprises in the results?

Commercial ratings are more precise than program-average ratings. So it’s really not a question of effectiveness in my mind. We’re actually getting a quantitative figure around what our clients are actually doing, versus what the program [rating] is. Once you get into that ocean of data on commercial ratings, and the more you can align it to when that commercial is airing, the better.

Are you finding surprising results in the commercial ratings?

Every network is a little bit different. We look at things differently, we look at genre differently, we look at dayparts differently. We’ve had a lot of data for about three years now. We were the first ones to get the TNS [second-by-second] data. We were the first ones to get the TiVo data. So we’ve been analyzing this for about three years now, and while we haven’t been doing deals for that long [based on commercial guarantees], we pretty much knew where a lot of this was going to shake out.

Is there a “big idea” that hasn’t come into being yet that really excites you?

Well, I would have to say more wholesale acceptance of the second-by-second data. We have been pushing networks; we have been pushing Nielsen.We like to call it “free the data.” The data is out there. We’ve been very aggressive in going around talking to panels, talking to MSOs, talking to everybody. I have a whole team that manages that for me.

We would like to see more vendors embracing the precise data than we’ve seen. Like I said, we went from three deals in 2006-07 to up to 16 based just on minute-by-minute alone. We did more than any other [media-buying] company, but I would have liked to have seen significantly more [networks] doing minute-by-minute deals.

How many minute-by-minute deals do you predict you’ll have by year end?

I’m not sure. I guess that’s hard for me to answer, certainly more than what we’ve had.

What’s the toughest part of your job?

The marketplace is changing at such a rapid pace in terms of the dynamics that we use to pull things together for our clients. So I think that the speed at which the market works is definitely a challenge.

We don’t see that changing. I see more and more and more data coming that allows us to be more precise in terms of measurement, in terms of engagement, in terms of just about everything.