@ EconCeleb: E!’s Kolb: ‘A Lot Of Our Talent Have Gone To Jail And We’ve Been Very Clear On That’
By Matt Kapko - Wed 23 Jul 2008 01:53 PM PST
Here at EconCeleb, Virginia Heffernan, a columnist for The New York Times Magazine, kicked off our first panel of the day with executives from Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) Entertainment, E! Entertainment and Access Hollywood.
Most popular programming for each outlet: Sibyl Goldman, GM of Yahoo Entertainment: For us it was interesting to see what worked once all the Paris Hilton-mania faded last summer. “A year ago, Miley Cyrus certainly wasn’t on my radar,” but Cyrus outperformed Britney Spears recently on their site following her Vanity Fair photo shoot. “That was a scandal made out of what I thought was a non-scandal.” Beyond that it’s the “new up-and-coming people,” and country stars have been performing well for us.
-- Suzanne Kolb, CMO, E! Entertainment and The Style Network; GM, E! Online: Romance and fashion is particularly strong. The latest plots and story lines from TV shows are particularly important to TV fans that check their site. Online is “a different take on celebrity, a different way in.” On air, it’s the usual celebrities. Sending the audience into a short burst of laughter, she threw in: “A lot of our talent have gone to jail and we’ve been very clear on that.”
More from Silverstein and targeting the male demographic after the jump…
-- Rob Silverstein, executive producer, Access Hollywood: “A year ago it was a tsunami of news that really hit everybody.” They decided to begin skewing the show and online property to a younger audience following that. “We’re specifically targeting that so the kids and the parents might tune in together to watch the show.” Most recently, an interview with presidential candidate Barack Obama’s kids was a huge hit. Comprising eight pieces total that aired over a four-day span, the Obama kids’ first-ever interview drove the show’s ratings up 25 percent, but they still weren’t at the level they were at a year ago.
-- How to target a male audience: E! Entertainment doesn’t get as many advertisers trying to reach men online and rarely get advertisers pushing for a purely male perspective. Typically anything that’s targeted to adults will reach both genders well, Kolb said. Yahoo does a lot of work with partners in the entertainment business. For example, they recently ran a promotion for Iron Man online and put galleries up on the site that were sponsored by Paramount surrounding the film’s theatrical release.
-- Weighing the pressure to break news while maintaining accuracy: ”Access Hollywood follows the same guidelines that NBC News follows when it comes to reporting any news story,” Silverstein said, literally waving the NBC policy guide around. “You can’t go with a story that big and not really know and then blow it off like you never reported it.” He said they had the Alex Rodriguez-Madonna story before the competition last week, but decided to hold the story because it came from only one source. Despite their own adherence to accuracy, Silverstein said “people who are into celebrity news, a lot of them at the end of the day don’t care if it’s accurate ... They just want to live through it, it’s not that important ... it’s important to us because we’re going to report on it.” Yahoo’s Goldman backed that up: they see a tremendous amount of traffic on stories that turned out to be false, with many visitors seemingly more interested in reading retractions than the story itself. Access is even considering a regular feature on gossip that isn’t true.
-- International traffic: “For us, it’s all about who clicks,” Goldman said. Yahoo tries to follow stories that have an international flavor and are interested in covering international stars in Latin America and Canada, for example. E! Entertainment gets a few million visits from abroad while Silverstein said Access Hollywood proudly bends entirely toward an American-centric approach.
-- Internet celebrities: Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian are two celebrities that made their name on sex tapes and then went off and did their thing, Silverstein said. Anyone that’s young generates interest and because of that you’ll see Access Hollywood cover anything related to The Hills and Gossip Girl. Kolb noted how “people can truly become celebrities from any number of places” now. Goldman added that although some people criticize internet-born stars for getting famous for doing nothing, they don’t hold that view too high at Yahoo.
Posted in: Companies, NBC Universal, Yahoo, Entertainment, Events, Media, TV, Conferences, EconCeleb
Tags: suzanne kolb, rob silverstein, virgina heffernan, sibyl goldman,
