salt lake city

DealBook: Tribune to Buy 19 TV Stations Amid Groundswell of Consolidation

July 2, 2013 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

KSTU Fox 13 in Salt Lake City is among the 19 local television stations that Tribune is buying, seven of which are Fox affiliates.

8:36 p.m. | Updated

The Tribune Company, known for its newspapers but moving steadily toward television, accelerated its transformation into a broadcasting company on Monday when it agreed to pay $2.7 billion for 19 local stations from Scranton to Salt Lake City.

The deal nearly doubles the company’s television footprint across the country, giving it one of the largest groups of local affiliates in the United States.

Language Programs Flower in Utah’s Schools

April 20, 2013 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

“If I close my eyes, I see a room full of Chinese children,” said Colleen Densley, the principal of Wasatch Elementary School here in central Utah, recalling the words of one amazed teacher. “If I open my eyes I see my American students.”

For generations, Mormon missionaries from Utah have crisscrossed the globe and returned home speaking Tagalog and Xhosa. Now, with hopes of preparing students for a competitive world economy, the state is building one of the largest and most ambitious school-language programs in the nation.

Dual-language classes have existed for years, but they are now growing fast in many states as an outcry against bilingual education fades and educators look for ways to prepare American students for a polyglot global job market. But few have embraced the idea with such unlikely zeal as Utah, a state that passed an English-only law in 2000 and routinely ranks last in the nation on education spending, according to United States Census figures.

In foreign languages, however, Utah now sees a highway to the world economy. Republicans in Salt Lake City, the state capital, have pledged millions for the program. Four years after it began, nearly half of Utah’s 41 school districts offer programs in which elementary school students spend half the day learning in English and half in a foreign language. There are 14,000 students enrolled and 20,000 signed up for next year.

In Utah, where economic growth is being driven by surging exports of gold and silver, airplane engines and computer memory, industry leaders say a bilingual work force could help lure international companies to the state and would make Utah’s graduates stronger candidates for jobs in, say, Beijing, London or São Paulo.

Educators and parents say the program is about academic development, not preparing Mormon students to proselytize overseas. Yet they said Utah’s immigrant communities and the overseas peregrinations of its large Mormon population make it fertile ground to teach foreign languages.

“From the very beginnings of Utah, it’s been part of our culture,” said Gov. Gary R. Herbert in an interview, “the missionary effort of going out and living in foreign lands.”

The dual language programs start in first grade, and will eventually extend through middle school, with students taking advanced placement tests in ninth grade and then studying at a college level through the rest of high school. Right now, they can take classes in French, Spanish, Portuguese and Mandarin. German is likely to be next, and educators have discussed Arabic.

Most of the programs are designed to teach native English speakers. But in corners of the state with more Latino immigrants, the state has also set up classes where Spanish speakers are taught together, in both English and Spanish.

Studies of other immersion programs have found that students do just as well, or better, on standardized tests as students in English-only classrooms, with the added bonus that they picked up a new language while learning state capitals and multiplication tables.

“There’s no way to learn another language as easily or as successfully,” said Myriam Met, a consultant who has worked on Utah’s immersion programs.

The teachers — most of them from other countries — teach regular subjects like mathematics and reading and social studies, only speaking exclusively in a foreign language. At first, they pantomime and use pictures and videos to get their point across, but they say the students can understand them within a few weeks.

Students in the immersion programs are graded normally, and have to take the same standardized tests as their peers. That can pose a problem in areas like science. Schools have to make sure that students who learned the Mandarin words for “photosynthesis” and “chlorophyll” can also recognize the terms on an English-language standardized tests.

So far, however, the program has amounted to a transformation. At Chinese-speaking schools, red paper lanterns dangle from the ceiling like ripe fruit, and maps of China are taped to the wall. Taiwanese and American flags hang in classrooms. Cafeterias serve pot stickers, and schools celebrate the Chinese New Year.

At Lone Peak Elementary in the town of Sandy, students grooved along one morning as their teacher played a Chinese hip-hop song. The school’s principal, McKay Robinson, stood at the back of the classroom, keeping quiet, mindful not to break the rule posted on the classroom door: “No English Please.”At Wasatch Elementary, where 360 of the school’s 860 students are in Mandarin immersion classes, officials made the faculty lounge an English-only zone so all the teachers could understand one another.

Parents, wary at first, have rushed to enter lotteries to place their children in the programs. Some school districts have waiting lists 100 students long. Some parents drive 30 miles to bring their children to class, or have even moved to be closer to an immersion school.

Holli Gardner knew the classes had taken root when her first-grade son, Talan, said a prayer before dinner in Portuguese. Jody Katz’s two sons, Jonah and Simon, will whisper to each other in Mandarin.

“This is something I could never teach my kid,” said Alison Memmott, 41, whose fourth-grader, Ella, has been studying Mandarin since she was in first grade.

A few months ago, Ms. Memmott’s family attended an exhibition by visiting Chinese artists in Salt Lake City, and Ella chatted up one of the artists in Mandarin. Within a few minutes, Ms. Memmott said, all of the artists were laughing and joking with the girl and invited Ella to return to Beijing with them.

“They said there are lots of boys in China she could marry,” Ms. Memmott said. “I said no thanks.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/20/us/language-programs-flower-in-utahs-schools.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Economy News Tagged With: global job market, immigrant communities, salt lake city

Campaign Spotlight: MegaRed Promotes ‘My Healthy Valentine’

February 11, 2013 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

The campaign is for the MegaRed brand of krill oil supplement sold by Schiff Nutrition International in Salt Lake City. The campaign, which is being created by the New York office of MC Saatchi, carries the theme “Whose heart do you love?”

The centerpiece of the campaign is the MegaRed fan page on Facebook, where visitors will find a custom application through which they can request free product samples for “the heart of someone you love.”

In an altruistic touch, those brand fans who request the MegaRed samples for friends, family and other loved ones will receive free samples as well. And in another such aspect of the campaign, Schiff says it will donate $100,000 to the National Coalition for Women With Heart Disease if the company gives away 100,000 samples.

The campaign also includes other social media platforms like Twitter, where celebrities who include Joy Bauer, Toni Braxton and Jennie Garth are posting comments about it on their Twitter feeds, and YouTube, where a fast-paced, lighthearted video clip about the campaign can be watched.

The 60-second video — created by MC Saatchi New York with the help of Stardust, an animation company in Los Angeles — can also be watched on the Facebook fan page.

The budget for the campaign is estimated at $250,000, which includes the cost of the samples; each sample is a single MegaRed pill in a packet.

The timing of the campaign, which began last week, is prompted by Valentine’s Day, arriving on Thursday. The link is underlined in the video clip, which suggests giving whatever heart you love a free sample of MegaRed omega-3 krill oil.

The video offers up a panoply of potential hearts, paired in serious and fanciful fashion. Among them are “a straight heart or a gay heart,” “a gentle heart or a passionate heart,” “a simple heart or a complicated heart,” “a happy heart or a grumpy heart” and “a sweet heart or a tough heart.”

The campaign is among a skein of campaigns with themes related to Valentine’s Day, one of the most popular dates on the marketing calendar each year. Among others with heart holiday campaigns are Banana Republic, the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corporation, Hershey, Kay Jewelers, Jared, Macy’s, Mars, Pizza Hut and the San Antonio Convention and Visitors Bureau. When the word “red” is in the name of a product, the marketers of said product might find it hard to resist running a campaign tied to Valentine’s Day. And when the product is billed as helping promote heart health, such a campaign may seem a slam-dunk.

“The nugget of the idea is relevance,” says Jennifer Steeves-Kiss, chief marketing officer at Schiff Nutrition International, what with February being “heart health month” because of Valentine’s Day.

(Yes, “Kiss” is indeed part of the surname of Ms. Steeves-Kiss, who is based in the Schiff office in Emeryville, Calif. Asked if “Kiss” was spelled as in “hug and kiss,” she replies, laughing, “Or as my husband would say, ‘Like the rock band.’ ”)

Ms. Steeves-Kiss describes herself as always looking “for relevant consumer hooks” for ads, to “make it motivational for the consumer to engage with you” and “accelerate the consumer’s willingness to participate.”

With MegaRed being a relatively new product, only six years old, a primary goal of campaigns for the brand is to raise awareness and “increase trial,” Ms. Steeves-Kiss says.

“We’ve been looking to do that both through traditional media” like print and radio, she adds, “and digital and social channels.”

“We want to start making digital and social a significantly greater priority for us,” Ms. Steeves-Kiss says, for a couple of reasons.

One reason is that when it comes to the MegaRed product category, “people are spending four to five hours a month online researching supplements if they’re supplement enthusiasts,” Ms. Steeves-Kiss says.

The other reason is that “we are in the middle of being acquired by Reckitt Benckiser,” she adds, and executives there “are great proponents” of digital and social marketing.

For ads in traditional media, Schiff works with Karlen Williams Graybill Advertising, based in New York, Ms. Steeves-Kiss says, and for ads in digital and social platforms, “we’ve worked with a variety of partners.”

Schiff had no relationship with MC Saatchi New York before the MegaRed campaign. Executives of the agency approached Ms. Steeves-Kiss on a speculative basis, proposing the social sampling idea for MegaRed, and, she says, she liked it enough to start working with them.

“MC Saatchi has some great skills in this space,” she adds, and “we have a digital effort that’s going to go forward with them” as a result of how the MegaRed campaign has turned out.

MC Saatchi, based in London, had a New York office for several years before closing it in 2007. This Version 2.0 of the office was opened last spring with Jeff Brooks as chief executive; he joined from Euro RSCG New York, now Havas Worldwide New York, where he had been chief executive and chief digital officer.

The outreach to Schiff on MegaRed was done as “part of an exercise where we were looking at various brands that had high growth potential,” Mr. Brooks says, and were in categories like consumer packaged goods and wellness products with which the principals of MC Saatchi New York have experience.

Those principals, in addition to Mr. Brooks, are Pierre Lipton, chief creative officer, and Sveta Doucet, chief strategy officer.

The concept of “framing a health and wellness product around the romance of Valentine’s Day” was unusual, Mr. Lipton says, as was the social sampling aspects of the campaign.

“The creative idea speaks to the higher-level benefit” of MegaRed, he adds. “And we found ‘if you give it to the heart you love’ to be motivating.”

According to the Kantar Media division of WPP, Schiff spent $13.6 million to advertise MegaRed in major media in the first nine months of last year, compared with $5.9 million in the same period of 2011.

The full-year total for 2011 was $10.6 million, Kantar Media reported, compared with $7 million in 2010 and $6.7 million in 2009.

Ms. Steeves-Kiss says she is optimistic that the goal of 100,000 samples will be reached to get the $100,000 donation to the women’s heart health organization.

“Of course we’re going to get 100,000,” she says. “I’m very confident the team is going to work hard to make this a success.”

Ms. Steeves-Kiss calls the campaign “a first effort in what I hope will be an ongoing program” for MegaRed.

“We expect to be engaging with people on a regular basis,” she adds.

Hmmm. Perhaps for St. Patrick’s Day, the next seasonal holiday on the marketing calendar, the brand could be renamed MegaGreen.

***

If you like In Advertising, be sure to read the Advertising column that runs Monday through Friday in the Business Day section of The New York Times print edition and on nytimes.com. And read coverage anytime of advertising, marketing, television, print, movies and new media on the Media Decoder blog at mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/11/business/media/megared-promotes-my-healthy-valentine.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Media Business Tagged With: jennie garth, passionate heart, salt lake city

You’re the Boss Blog: Following Up on a Restaurant’s Unconventional Strategy

August 29, 2012 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

Jeffrey D. Allred for The New York Times Lucy Cardenas and Bill Coker made the unconventional decision to build a second location right next to their first.

Case Study

What would you do with this business?

A year ago, we told you about a dilemma facing Red Iguana, a family-owned Mexican restaurant in Salt Lake City. Its owners, Lucy Cardenas and Bill Coker, were facing a two-pronged problem with their first location. First, a happy problem: their restaurant had gotten so popular after appearing on the Food Network’s “Diners, Drive-ins and Dives” that customers regularly had to wait an hour to be seated. At the same time, the city was about to build a light rail line down the middle of the restaurant’s street, a project that had the potential to force the business to close for several weeks.

To ease the customer wait and protect themselves from downtime, there was little doubt that Red Iguana’s owners needed a second location. But the way they decided to expand was somewhat surprising. Ms. Cardenas and Mr. Coker decided to open a second location with the same name and menu just two blocks from their first, a plan that went against conventional wisdom and was rejected by most of the experts we consulted at the time of our original article.

But the strategy quickly found success. During its first full year, 2010, the new restaurant had revenue of $2.1 million. Still, that was only a little more than half of the original restaurant’s annual take of $3.9 million, which itself was down from $4.2 million in 2009. So, would the new location be able to build on its early success (without cannibalizing the original business)? And what would happen when the construction project shut down the first location?

We recently checked in with Mr. Coker, and the new location seems to have built on its strong start. The original location is on track to bring in $4.2 million during 2012, he said, which would match its income from the height of its popularity in 2009 (when it was the only restaurant). And the new location should pull in about $3.2 million, he said.

“What we’ve seen is that there are a substantial number of our clientele who prefer location No. 2 to No. 1 because when the patio is open, there are more seats, and we have a counter and indoor waiting area and valet parking in the evenings,” Mr. Coker said. “It’s more spacious and quieter than the original, and some people prefer that atmosphere. Others prefer the original. It’s actually turned out to be to our advantage that it’s not a cookie-cutter of the original; we’re able to accommodate two different types of clients. Also in terms of operational ease, it’s a tremendous advantage to our kitchen managers to be able to stabilize food flow by running two blocks to the other restaurant.”

Almost as important, the second location saved the company from what could have been major economic damage caused by construction of the rail line. As a member of a community board advising the city on the construction, Mr. Coker negotiated a deal whereby the street in front of the original Red Iguana would be rebuilt last, so that the construction company could concentrate all of its efforts on the site — thereby turning a three-to-five week job into a weeklong project.

And then, to best use the week during which the original restaurant would be closed, Ms. Cardenas and Mr. Coker — after employing announcement cards, banners, Facebook and Twitter to point their customers to the new restaurant — laid out a seven-day plan to renovate the original location using restaurant workers as labor.

At 9 p.m. on July 8, when the original location turned on its “closed” sign, the city began tearing up the street, and Red Iguana’s staff started dismantling their restaurant. Directed by paid trade contractors, a third of the staff from the original location (including a professional painter and plumber) took part in a $250,000 renovation. Working 24 hours a day, alternating crews of from 30 to 50 people moved the restaurant’s furnishings outside into a circus tent set up for the occasion; laid an epoxy floor; installed $25,000 of stainless steel equipment in the kitchen; and repaved the parking lot.

“Normally I don’t think a restaurant could pull off a $250,000 renovation in seven days, but that’s the kind of experience I have from the entertainment business, coordinating multiple crews simultaneously,” said Mr. Coker, who in the early 1980s had worked as an assistant director and production manager on a series of Burt Reynolds buddy comedies, including “The Cannonball Run.”

At the new restaurant, the owners added 28 outdoor seats, increased staff with another third of the employees from the first location (the final third took vacation), and began offering valet parking at lunch and dinner every day.

And on Monday July 16, one week after it closed, the original location reopened. According to Mr. Coker, even without the seven days of income, the first location took in $282,000 in July, barely $300 less than in July 2011.

Article source: http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/28/a-restaurant-makes-the-most-of-being-forced-to-close/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Small Business Tagged With: food network, lucy, salt lake city

Case Study: Adding a New Restaurant in the Shadow of the First

August 24, 2011 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

THE CHALLENGE To expand to a new location while surviving a disruptive public works project — a light rail line down the middle of Red Iguana’s street — just as the restaurant was experiencing a rush of business from being featured on the Food Network’s “Diners, Drive-ins and Dives.”

THE BACKGROUND In 1965, Ramón and María Cardenas moved from the San Francisco Bay Area, where they were working in a restaurant, to Salt Lake City, where they took over a restaurant called Casa Grande. Their decision to not modify María’s recipes from Chihuahua for the American palate may have slowed growth at first. “People were not used to their kind of Mexican food,” said their daughter, Lucy. In the first years, annual revenue was about $25,000, but María and Ramón gradually built a following.

In 1970, they moved Casa Grande downtown. Revenue continued to grow until urban decay and a recession hit in the early 1980s. By 1984, Ramón was forced to take a cooking job in Park City to make ends meet, while Maria ran Casa Grande. In 1985, Ramón returned to open a four-table restaurant called Red Iguana in Salt Lake City’s working-class west side. The restaurant did so well — it pulled in some $300,000 in its first year — that María was able to close the ailing Casa Grande. After a fire burned down the new restaurant in June 1986, Ramón reopened 10 blocks away at the current location.

Brightly colored with floral tablecloths, the reasonably priced Red Iguana developed a cultlike following. Its revenue grew every year, hitting $1.9 million in 2003. But in 1998, María grew ill and required Ramón’s full-time care, which forced Lucy to make regular visits from Portland, Ore., to oversee the business. After María passed away in 2002 and Lucy’s brother died of a brain aneurysm in 2004, Ramón decided to sell. “He was exhausted and ready to throw in the towel,” said Lucy’s husband, Bill Coker.

It was a delicate moment: Lucy and Mr. Coker wanted to take over the business, but they had to convince Ramón to look past his strict views of gender and family. “Because he was a son, a man, my father would have given my brother the business,” Lucy said. “But we bought it from my dad. We got lawyers and accountants involved.” Plus, she added, “he wanted to sell the business to me, not me and my husband, because it’s family. It was at times painful.”

After paying Ramón $560,000 for the company in 2005, Ms. Cardenas and Mr. Coker sped up an incipient modernization drive, improving the electrical system and buying the parking lot next door. Ms. Cardenas, who had worked as a wait staff trainer at various Hard Rock Cafes, had already brought in a computer system, which had helped professionalize the staff. “I wanted to turn it into full service, not, ‘Wham, bam, here you go, here’s your check,’ like in a diner,” she said. To improve food quality and consistency, she had her father cook each dish in front of her chefs so they could write down the recipes, which they had never done before for fear of recipe theft. Revenue increased to $2.7 million in 2006 and $3.8 million in 2008.

In 2008, the “Diners, Drive-ins and Dives” appearance and news of the coming light rail project changed the business’s direction irrevocably. Scheduled to start in 2010, the multiyear project had the potential to dissuade customers from visiting and, during its most intense periods, to close the restaurant — a huge loss for a one-location business that had been serving 700 people a day, 363 days a year.

THE OPTIONS When Mr. Coker saw the lines outside his restaurant, he thought of Sammy Davis Jr. Mr. Coker, 63, had spent 37 years in the entertainment business, and in the early 1980s he had worked as an assistant director and production manager on a series of Burt Reynolds buddy comedies. On “The Cannonball Run,” Mr. Coker had worked with Mr. Davis, Dean Martin and Roger Moore, stars who had become so popular, he believed, that they had lost their identity. While driving Red Iguana’s branded van around town, he began to hear from locals who had stopped coming to the restaurant because of the long wait and out-of-state crowds. “My experience in the entertainment industry taught me that that kind of popularity can flip and become a negative,” Mr. Coker said, “and once it becomes a negative you become Planet Hollywood.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=3dcb15f5ed9a780335d3febe9f0dec2a

Filed Under: Small Business Tagged With: american palate, salt lake city, urban decay

DealBook: Tribune to Buy 19 TV Stations Amid Groundswell of Consolidation

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A version of this article appeared in print on 07/02/2013, on page B1 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Tribune in $2.7 Billion Deal for 19 Local TV Stations.

Language Programs Flower in Utah’s Schools

Campaign Spotlight: MegaRed Promotes ‘My Healthy Valentine’

You’re the Boss Blog: Following Up on a Restaurant’s Unconventional Strategy

Case Study

Case Study: Adding a New Restaurant in the Shadow of the First

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