CMO Today: The Story Behind Disneyâ€™s Bet on Vice

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CMO Today: The Story Behind Disney's Bet on Vice

By Steven Perlberg

Vice CEO Shane Smith. Jude Edginton for The Wall Street Journal

DISNEY’S ONLY VICE: Disney and Vice go together like Mickey Mouse and an Islamic State documentary. But as The Wall Street Journal reports, their tie-up paved the way for Vice’s nascent TV channel Viceland, raising questions about whether Disney will just end up acquiring the digital media darling. Disney has an 18% equity stake in Vice, whose last funding round in 2015 gave it a valuation of nearly $4.5 billion. Vice Chief Executive Shane Smith says Vice could be worth $50 billion in three or four years, but the possibility of getting acquired by Disney has certainly dawned on him. “If you look at the brands like Pixar, Marvel and Star Wars that have [sold] to Disney, they have all gotten bigger,” he said. The story dishes dirt on Mr. Smith’s introduction to 21st Century Fox’s James Murdoch, Disney’s early reservations about Vice and how a company filled with 20-something-year-old cord-cutters makes TV shows. It also reveals that Viceland has averaged 45,000 viewers in the key demographic of 18 to 49 year olds, a 51% from the A+E channel it replaced.

RIO RATINGS: TV ratings paint a pretty bleak picture when it comes to whether young people, a coveted demographic for marketers, watched the Olympics. In primetime on NBC, the Games averaged 3.6 million viewers age 18 to 34, down more than 30% from London four years ago. But as CMO Today reports, NBCUniversal wants to prove that millennials still cared about the Olympics—they were just watching differently. This was the first Olympics that NBCU aired events on cable during primetime and streamed every sport live online. NBCU said that nearly 50 million viewers streamed 3.4 billion minutes of Olympics content, and more than half of those people were under the age of 35. Still, NBCU is doing some gold-medal mental gymnastics to prove that millennials watched on linear TV in force, arguing that nearly five times as many young people watched primetime NBC Olympics coverage than watched broadcast TV during the most recent season. The Olympics: more popular than a bunch of sitcoms? Of course.

BAD ADS: You know when you’re trying to look at a website on your phone and a giant ad pops up that takes up your whole screen? That’s called an “interstitial,” and publishers may be about to get punished for it—or at least disincentivized. As CMO Today reports, Google product manager Doantam Phan said in a blog post on Tuesday that pages that employ interstitials may not rank as highly in Google’s mobile search results starting next year. “Pages that show intrusive interstitials provide a poorer experience to users than other pages where content is immediately accessible,” Mr. Phan wrote. Consumers are increasingly averse to intrusive advertising these days (look no further than the rise of ad blockers), and pressing a tiny “x” to close out of a large pop-up can definitely feel like a poor experience. Google might be doing readers a solid, but it’s also another example of the influence giant tech platforms have on web publishers.

BUZZ AND FEED: Digital media powerhouse BuzzFeed is restructuring, separating into a news department, BuzzFeed News, and a new entertainment unit called BuzzFeed Entertainment Group, Vanity Fair reports, sparking all sorts of speculation about the broader meaning of the split. BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti said that the move is meant to diffuse its video unit across the entire enterprise, as opposed to having a separate video department, which “in 2016 makes about as much sense as having a ‘mobile department.’” The big winner in the shake-up appears to be BuzzFeed Motion Pictures president Ze Frank, who will run the entertainment division. BuzzFeed has pinned its hopes for growth on video and entertainment, while its news reporting unit boosts credibility, if not its bottom line. Mr. Peretti says the company isn’t retreating from news coverage, though the shift toward video can be “scary for people who write for a living.” I’ll say! “Having really great reporters is something that’s valuable to our video-news operation,” he told Vanity Fair.

ELSEWHERE

The New York Times says its Moscow bureau was the target of an attempted cyberattack, but there’s no evidence that the hackers—believed to be Russian—breached the news organization’s internal systems. [NYT]

Philippe Dauman, Viacom’s ousted CEO, has until Sept. 7 to provide the company’s board with a plan to sell a minority stake in the Paramount Pictures film studio. Meanwhile, Mr. Dauman will receive $75 million in exit payments, but if Viacom’s stock performance turns around after he leaves, it could push that package well past $100 million. [WSJ, Bloomberg]

WPP PLC shares rose this morning after the world’s largest advertising company posted 4.3% growth in comparable net sales, at the top of its peer group. But CEO Martin Sorrell said he remains cautious. Advertisers are cutting costs, the impact of Brexit isn’t fully known and WPP took a write-down on its investment in comScore. [WSJ]

Watchable, Comcast’s online video service, is releasing its first collection of exclusive digital series. Shows have come from Refinery29, Mitu and Cut.com. [The Hollywood Reporter]

Former Fox News host Andrea Tantaros has filed a lawsuit accusing Roger Ailes of sexual harassment. In the suit against the network, Mr. Ailes and several of his lieutenants, Ms. Tantaros claims that she was booted off “The Five” after she refused the advances of the former Fox News chief (who couldn't be reached for comment). [WSJ]

Pinterest has acquired webpage-bookmark app Instapaper for an undisclosed amount. The service was acquired by startup incubator Betaworks in 2013. [WSJ]

Vadim Lavrusik, the former product manager of Facebook Live, has founded his own live video app, called Alively. The service lets users share video with a select group of friends, instead of a wider audience. [WSJ]

Jim Gianopulos, Twentieth Century Fox Film’s chairman and CEO, is leaving the studio Sept. 1, earlier than planned. The studio tapped Stacey Snider this summer as sole chairman and CEO, and Mr. Gianopulos was supposed to transition to a strategic role when his contract expired in June 2017. [Variety]