![]() Must Weep TV: Bringing Ma, Pa and Biological Child Together Come tomorrow afternoon, many of us will congregate with family members we haven't seen in a full 12 months. We'll banter about the weather, feign interest in meandering anecdotes and quietly critique every aspect of each other's being. Come nightfall, we'll embrace warmly and promise to re-adjourn 365 days hence, then set about covering the freshly picked emotional scabs with ointment. But for the next few hours at least, we're all about bringing families together. In that blithely unaware spirit, I heartily recommend ABC's new celebration of unity and forgiveness, "Find My Family". |
![]() Can James Finkelstein and Lachlan Murdoch Save Nielsen's Trade Titles? NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- The Nielsen Company's beleaguered trade publishing unit, including Billboard, The Hollywood Reporter and Adweek, are on the block again. Can a private equity group including the publisher of The Hill newspaper and News Corp. scion Lachlan Murdoch save it? |
Association of National Advertisers Join Protest of Nielsen's Metric Switch NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- The battle for local-media measurement has intensified in the last 24 hours, with the Association of National Advertisers now lobbing a protest against Nielsen's recent decision to incorporate DVR users into its official estimates of how many people watch programming on local TV stations. Just a week ago, the media committee of the American Association of Advertising Agencies sent a blistering letter to Nielsen protesting the switch. |
![]() 'Jon & Kate Plus 8' Airs Final Episode Jon and Kate Gosselin, whose public lives have made them more hucksters than Huxtables for most viewers, had their last-ever episode of "Jon and Kate Plus 8" on TLC Monday night. The series finale delivered a 2.0/5 rating and share in the ad-centric adult 18-49 demographic, which tied it, fittingly, with WWE wrestling on USA as the second highest-rated show on cable (as usual, ESPN's "Monday Night Football" was first with a 4.8/13). |
![]() What Does Black Friday Even Mean Anymore? What does "Black Friday" circa 2009 mean anyway? It's always been a weird marketing construct -- as if consumers ever really cared that the day after Thanksgiving is the chance for retailers to clear the red ink from their ledgers and go into the black (though who knows how realistic that expectation is this year). And while the supposed joy of frenzied bargain-hunting still gets celebrated in the media (shots of bustling mall scenes will surely open local newscasts across the country Friday evening), the darker possibilities, like last year's gruesome Walmart stampede remain an unsettling subtext. , |