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Today, Comcast announced it had reached an agreement to acquire movie-ticketing site Fandango. While the deal size was not deemed "material" relative to Comcast’s financial’s and therefore doesn’t require disclosure, it’s likely the purchase prices falls in or near the range of $165m to $180m. That price is estimated based in part on estimated fees from usage (with unique usage numbers used as reported by Comscore) and in part, relative to the multiples (relative to estimated revenue and usage) applied to eBay’s purchase of concert and sports event ticket-seller Stubhub. ( Stubhub sold for $310m earlier this year).

More specifically, the estimated price uses calculations that try to consider i. an estimated closing rate (e.g. what percentage of unique customers complete transactions versus those at the site to just browse concert ticket prices (at Stubhub) or check movie times (at Fandango); ii. recognition that Stubhub sells concert and event tickets for prices of 5x to 10x typical movie tickets and that generates substantially higher fees per transaction than the $1/ticket service fee at Fandango; and iii. that Stubhubs smaller monthly visitor number decreases their share of ad revenue and total transaction volume.

Fandango, which was founded in 2000 by a consortium of movie distributors and investors, sells tickets for more than 1,300 Theaters. Over the past year, Fandango has been fighting with Movietickets.com for the title of being the most-visited online movie-ticket seller (AOL’s Moviefone which does provide links for ticket sales has far greater usage numbers but is not included in the category). In December ‘06, Fandango had approximately 5.8m unique visitors. In February, a slightly slower month in the cyclical movie industry, Fandango had 3.8m unique visitors who generated approximately 39m page views (according to Comscore statistics).

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Seattle based Getty Images continues to pursue an aggressive expansion model by means of acquisition.

Today, in its second acquisition of the year, Getty Images announced that it was acquiring Ireland-based Pixel Graphics holdings for $135m in cash.

Pixel Graphics Holdings is the parent company to Stockbyte and Stockdisk, two royalty-free content providers. The transition will be an easy one: most of Stockbyte’s image collection was already distributed through Getty, and the remainder of its catalog will follow shortly.

Speaking of the transaction, Jonathan Klein, Getty Images’ co-founder and Chief Executive Officer said: “Worldwide demand for imagery continues to grow as our customers increasingly explore new, image-rich communication platforms as a means to break through the clutter. The acquisition is in line with our strategy of acquiring and producing increased amounts of relevant wholly-owned imagery."

The wholly-owned royalty-free content available through Stockbyte is a significant departure from the user-owned royalty-free content delivered through Getty’s other image service: istockphoto.

There is no question, Getty is busy. In addition to this transaction, earlier this year Getty acquired the parent company of Wireimage, which owned the largest celebrity photo and video archive. In March, it also, signed a partnership deal to license and distribute photos and video footage from Warner Brothers Entertainment’s archives. I wonder what is next on the shopping list.

8 Years ago, Best Buy took a Henry Ford like stance on the colors of Apple Macintosh computers being sold in their stores – they told Apple that Best Buy customer’s could have any color Mac they wanted as long as the color was black (Actually, it wasn’t that strict, and Mac’s didn’t come in black anyway….but Best Buy did take a stand and tell Apple that they would only carry popular colors in inventory.  The company wasn’t willing to carry the inventory, or waste shelf space, on colors that weren’t selling for a product, that no matter how superior in design, wasn’t selling that well either.) 

Apple, at the time, was invested heavily in marketing and brand building efforts that focused on the 5 “flavors” of Macs: Strawberry, Tangerine, Lime, Grape and Blueberry.  The two companies took an all or nothing approach to the negotiation.  It ended up being nothing.  April 1999, Best Buy removed Apple computers from its shelves.   

Now 8 years later, in demonstration of Apple’s increasing clout, and testament to Apple’s iPod and iTunes generated relevance and resurgence (and the success of Apple’s 170 retail stores),  Best Buy is again making room on its shelves for the full Apple Computer product line.

Best Buy said Wednesday that it will create store displays and carry the full Apple line-up (iMac, Mac Pro, Mac Mini and Macbooks) in at least 200 of its stores Click to Read More

After 6 months of dating, and tabloid-worthy rumors and speculation not far behind the kind of paparazzi press coverage Paris Hilton and Lindsey Lohan get, Tribune Co. today announced it had settled on a buyer. The newspaper and media giant will be sold to billionaire real estate investor, and local Chicagoan, Sam Zell for approximately $8.2b.

The share price for the purchase will be $34, a premium of approximately 6% over last weeks trading but in line with pricing from September, when Tribune Co. announced it was for sale. That price is less than the average 9.8x multiple of Price to EBIDTA for Tribune’s public competitors.

The transaction will occur in two tender offers, the first for 126m shares will close in the second quarter. The second, for the remaining shares will close in the fourth quarter. The company will borrow the money in two $4.2b increments to buy back the stock.  Merrill Lynch and JP Morgan will finance the deal.

Zell, who recently sold his Equity Office Properties Trust to Blackstone Group for $39b is personally investing $315m and will gain rights to a warrant entitling him to buy 40% of the company.   To reduce the debt load which, including borrowing for the purchase price, will exceed $14b, Zell has announced a plan to sell the Chicago Cubs baseball team at the close of the current baseball season.  It’s also a possibility that Zell will consider selling the LA Times property to Eli Broad and Ron Burkle, the LA-based investors who lost out in their bid for Tribune to Zell.

With Tribune a private company, Zell and his management team, will have a better situation to turn around the company than if it remained public.

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Last week Ticketmaster announced the purchase of a majority stake in Nashville based music marketing/fan-club/fan-ticketing company Echomusic.   The terms of the purchase were not disclosed.

Echomusic, which  provides musician fan-websites, marketing, sponsorship services and direct-to-fan ticketing, will help with Ticketmaster’s (a division of Interactive Corp.) efforts to move into broader promotion, and non-traditional ticket sales (resale, dynamic pricing, direct-to-fan).   It will also give Ticketmaster more tools for building relationships with bands and promotions and  that may increase revenue opportunities from channels beyond the ticket-fee charges that account for the bulk of their revenue.   (Ticketmaster earned $279.1 in revenue for Q4 2006, up 10% over ’05). 

Despite the benefits of the deal, the deal is, arguably, as much defensive  for Ticketmaster as offensive. Click to Read More

High profile executives aren’t unlike many professional athletes when it comes to retirement; neither stay quiet for long.   It doesn’t matter whether departure was voluntary or forced, or whether success was motivated by love of the game, or the ego stimulation of being a celebrity.  The thrill of competition and the excitement of a big deal are powerful stimulants and tempting lures.

On September 30, 2005 Michael Eisner resigned from Disney a year before his contract expired.  Mr. Eisner seems to have spent much of the time since doing the corporate equivalent of autograph signings: he’s been a fixture on high profile speaking tours.  He’s also been host of his own MSNBC talk show.

It now looks like Eisner is quietly setting the stage to get back into the game through his current business entity The Tornante Company.   The small, Beverley Hills based, company seems to be something of a private equity firm focusing on New Media and Entertainment properties.  (Whether Tornante is capitalized solely by Eisner, or with other investors is unclear.)

Since April 2006, Tornante has made two publicly announced deals. Click to Read More

Yesterday I looked at the way marketers have been exploring both interactive tools and user-generated content sites in order to create broad multimedia campaigns.  The couple examples from TV and publishing showed advertisers/marketers creating fake companies, or websites, or aggressively using User-Generated-Content (YouTube etc) sites to hype and promote their products.   There are a multitude of other examples from Film, Television and other products; even luxury car brands like Audi are not immune.   Anheuser-Busch is getting in to the arena too. BudTV, which launched after the Super Bowl, provides several channels of Net TV video content created to help promote Budweiser for user who register to use the site.

The efforts to plug in to the viral marketing benefits of user-generated-content and willingness to embrace new technologies are notable.  Ultimately, I think they help legitimize the technology platforms as much, if not more, than they help promote products. But hijacking sites like YouTube, or MySpace, for advertising purposes (and creating hoax content) borders on problematic.  Today’s focus is those problems:

There is a fine line between content that is entertaining or engaging to fans versus content that irritates potential viewers/customers with misleading information.  Consumers are constantly inundated with marketing materials and have grown sensitive to the tone and nature of what’s directed at them.  A small misstep could significantly harm a campaign, or taint a potential fan/customers reaction.  Marketers needs to ask themselves if their efforts are clearly fun and entertainment, or more likely to be viewed as misleading. 

In 2004, Sci Fi Channel demonstrated what not to do with an effort that was clearly misleading. Click to Read More