Today on the Scroll: What does it take for a media monolith to get good press amidst the doom of autumn 2008? Just tell shareholders that job cuts aren’t in the immediate plan. Astral Media trumpeted 12 straight years of growth Tuesday afternoon in the Art Deco spaceship atmosphere of the Design Exchange, with the confidence that comes with not having recently invested in print publications, conventional television, Web 2.0 properties — or any of the other bloated platforms especially susceptible to shedding. “While we have always closely managed our costs and margins,” said Astral president and CEO Ian Greenberg, “we are now being even more rigorous than usual.” Several unspecified opportunities to improve productivity and efficiency allowed Greenberg to anticipate “significant enough savings to avoid workforce reduction.” Astral have a platform in Toronto like no other — scoring the 20-year contract to supply and maintain street furniture in exchange for selling space helped the company boast of an immediate 45 per cent revenue growth in outdoor advertising. The deal provides them with a safer haven amidst the media atrophy everywhere else. Who needs to gamble on a tired delivery system, or a terminally unproven new one, when you can guarantee reaching demographics with nothing else to look at when waiting for a bus? And new regulations regarding the placement of billboards in suburbia may further boost the bottom line. But what else keeps a company like this relatively confident? The importation of brand names established elsewhere, basically. Virgin Radio, launched in August as a new name for the 99.9 FM frequency Astral bought last year, garnered a good enough response to extend the name to three other Canadian markets in January. But whereas the Montreal and Vancouver stations will be similar rhythmic pop formats as the one in Toronto, the version of Virgin in Ottawa — already saturated with two competing stations spinning the format — will be slapped on a rock station known as The Bear. The future of terrestrial radio must be brand names amorphous enough to mean different things in different cities — but it’s tough to think it has anything to do with local loyalties when the implementation involves replacing more DJs with canned Ryan Seacrest. HBO Canada has been another marketing success for Astral, cashing in on 36 years of momentum built by a premium American broadcaster, long regarded as the final frontier of TV viewing freedom — even if they had to work around rules to bring a version of the channel here. Those same regulations, though, have given Astral a quarter-century-long duopoly that gave them no competition in the business of collecting subscription fees to air last year’s Hollywood output via The Movie Network. The most lucrative kind of media creativity in Canada has been the business of protecting your turf within a stylish package. Quebec specialty broadcasting remains a significant portion of Montreal-based Astral’s business, too, including full ownership of MuchMusic’s former French-language sister station, MusiquePlus — as of September boasting the best logo in Canadian television history.The overhead screen at the Design Exchange featured a collage of images related to Astral’s properties — including, on behalf of movie rerun channel Mpix, the leering face of Jack Nicholson from The Shining. Danger is theoretically good for business, but the approach to original content cultivation in this country remains cautious, if not cowardly. Then again, as the employee bodies hit the floor elsewhere, it seems that much more prescient for Astral to invest in digital channels like Playhouse Disney and Teletoon Retro, geared to audiences either too old, too young, or too exhausted to seek out similar content via their computer. Compare this to three years ago, when Astral was using its winter surplus of billboard space to plug Radiolibre.ca, a streaming audio scheme that boasted of a music recommendation system designed by neuroscientist Daniel Levitin at McGill University, which proved a fast flop.So, this is where it all stands, until risks start getting rewarded again — which could take a while. Several members of the Astral board of directors came to the meeting from the funeral of Ted Rogers, saluted for his pioneering spirit in telecommunications, creating several pipelines that allowed money to be printed. Those who missed the boat can always hope that Astral station Newstalk 1010 CFRB is looking to pay a few more homeless folk to hold up signs reading “Should panhandling be illegal?”The mid-afternoon meeting was wrapped after less than a half hour of formalities. When it came time to open the floor, neither a hundred dapper Bay Streeters nor the half-dozen shareholders who looked more like the clientele of a Coffee Time, had a question to ask. Reality appears to go down more smoothly when the message becomes the medium, instead of having to grapple with the other way around.scroll@eyeweekly.com
Toronto pop culture, updated weekdays. scroll@eyeweekly.com