Archive for June, 2007

NEW YORK, June 27 /PRNewswire/ — On behalf of Unilever’s Hellmann’s brand, Ogilvy’s Branded Content & Entertainment group has teamed with Rock Shrimp production company, a collaboration between Bobby Flay and Embassy Row’s Michael Davies and Kim Martin, to debut an original web-based series on Yahoo! Food, featuring celebrity chef Dave Lieberman entitled, “In Search of Real Food,” a theme that echoes Hellmann’s “Real Food” marketing position (http://food.yahoo.com/realfood).

Media partner Yahoo! has created a hub that will house the new series of 12 shows that will air on a weekly basis beginning on June 28th. The series will follow Dave Lieberman’s on-the-road travels throughout the country as he seeks out the people, places, and recipes that are at the heart of Real Food in America. A key aim of the program will be to generate a dialogue around what real food actually means to people on an individual level — viewers will be invited to respond to Dave’s blog as well as submit their own videos featuring personal real food stories and recipes. Read the rest of this entry »

Product placement became a hot topic a few years ago with the influx of placement on TV reality shows, taken to its most blatantly obnoxious peak by Donald Trump on NBC’s The Apprentice.

Product placement has been around for decades, perhaps getting most noticed by marketers back in 1982 when Steven Spielberg’s little alien ET expressed his preference for Reese’s Pieces. It could have been M&Ms, Milk Duds or healthy carrot sticks, but for a price — Reese’s Pieces it was. Read the rest of this entry »

Although product placement in major movies is nothing new to consumers, the Transformer movie is set to unleash unprecedented product placement in the form of GM cars.

The movie, produced by Steven Spielberg, is based on the very popular line of toys sold in the 1980s. Fans of the transformer action figures, comics and cartoons have long awaited the release of this major film.

Auto manufacture GM hopes to cash in on the popularity of the film since four models of the company’s vehicles have starring roles in the film. Each model “transforms” into a battle-raging robot that fights the bad guys (not GM models) in order to save mankind from the destruction of their planet.

GM associates are excited about the possibility the movie poses for their company.

“We try to find properties where the cars are the stars, and literally our cars are the stars of this movie.” Said Dino Bernacchi, associate director at GM.

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REMEMBER WHEN THE 30-SECOND SPOT was dead and branded entertainment was the wave of the future? Remember that line of thinking way back on Friday …?
Now, who knows? Certainly, the broadcast upfront throws that into question with networks reporting record volume gains and impressive CPM jumps.
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It’s an encouraging thing to see action movies not explicitly made for kids that nevertheless strive to be family-friendly: no real swearing, no sex or nudity, perhaps a healthy slice of cheese on top. But it’s disheartening to see such a film barely begin to unfold before it devolves into one big crass commercial exercise.

Such is the plight of “Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer,” brought to you by … oh, hell, by everybody.

Granted, the thing’s not supposed to be Shakespeare, and one could easily make the case that it’s not really art in anything more than a technical sense. Few if any superhero movies are. But here we have a movie, not a good movie exactly, but not exactly a terrible one either, and certainly not as bad as its predecessor. It’s a film that appears to strain honorably for an honest-to-God sense of innocence and wonder and idealism, goofy-ass dialogue be damned, only to have each such moment wrung through the meat grinder of way-too-self-conscious product placement.

Logos are everywhere in this movie, not just in billboards or neon signs, but in places where they shouldn’t logically exist. Uber-scientist Reed Richards’ impossibly high-tech PDA, the one he would have had to build for himself? Got a Nokia logo on it. The famous (to us comic dorks of old, anyway) four-pod flying contraption Richards builds for his team to fly around in? It has a Dodge emblem on the hood that gets its own close-up. Not enough? Well, then let’s have the Human Torch ask if it’s “got a Hemi.” Are you serious with this?

Like it or not, we live in the Age of Aggressive Product Placement (TM) now that advertisers are terrified of the Demon TiVo, and perhaps there’s nothing to be done about it, but how long is it before your sense of wonder is brought to you by S.E. Johnson, a Family Company? Or are we there now?

I suppose we should spend a moment on the story. It’s a faithful adaptation of an old Marvel Comics storyline: Planets are sometimes visited by a mysterious silver-colored alien stranger who glides through space on a long platform (a beacon, he explains later, and the source of his considerable power). After a short how-do-you-do, the planet goes boom and all life on it is destroyed to feed an intergalactic monster named Galactus. The aid of the Fantastic Four is of course enlisted by the military to keep this from happening.

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‘Brand experience,’ is an often misunderstood term, typically defined as the interaction of the customer with a product or service. But in The Experience Economy”, authors Joseph Pine and James Gilmore categorize experience as “a new source of value,” “as distinct from services as services are from goods, but one that has until now gone largely unrecognized.” It’s a distinction Hasbro has taken to heart in their search for new ways to boost revenue.

According to an analyst quoted by MSNBC, Hasbro lost $144 million in 2000 due to “an over-reliance on movie-related toys, like tie-ins to the ‘Star Wars’ franchise.”Rather than manufacturing toys based on movies, Hasbro decided to create a movie based on one of its most popular toys, Transformers. Hasbro Chief Operating Office Brian Goldner commented, “In the past, I think that the company may have thought too narrowly about its brands as forms of entertainment.”

MSNBC notes that other companies that have broadened their reach with movie debuts include Marvel’s “Spider Man,” and “X-Men” and the “Fantastic Four,” Mattel’s “direct-to-DVD movies based on Barbie,”, and MGA Entertainment’s “Bratz” A movie, according to Goldner, based on the “experience” of the Monopoly board game might not be far behind.

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It seems hardly a day goes by without a fresh news article or story relating to in-game advertising. Faced with game-changing challenges in almost every aspect of their traditional B2C marketing communications landscape, the foremost brands and agencies are now moving out of the “test phase” with in-game advertising and investing dedicated budgets and infrastructure at a level that will have a measurable impact alongside other core marketing activities.

Early adopters such as Daimler Chrysler, Intel and Red Bull have already captured significant mindshare, but the variety of brands adopting the medium is now as broad as the game genres in which they appear, and every major territorial market is waking up to the unique dual benefits of engagement and measurability that in-game advertising brings.

This first article in a series of three will take a look at the specific categories that exist within in-game advertising, and the ideal uses and benefits of each.

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After pulling from its £3 million sponsorship of Channel 4’s Big Brother earlier this year, Carphone Warehouse is now to back ITV’s X Factor. It’s stepping in to fill the space left by previous sponsor Nokia. The three year deal will see The Carphone Warehouse sponsoring all episodes of the forthcoming series of The X Factor on ITV1, repeats and brand extensions like The Xtra Factor on ITV2. Read the rest of this entry »

 When gamers head to Best Buy, GameStop or Circuit City, this summer to shell out $60 for the “Forza Motorsport 2” Xbox game, they’ll have the opportunity to get a little something extra, compliments of Nissan USA. Starting next month, the automaker is sponsoring free add-ons for the game—players can download a Nissan Sentra SE-R and participate in a high-performance race that will take place on Xbox Live in August.

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Purchasing power of ‘moms’ now being pursued by Networks as younger demo escapes to the Internet.

Ben Silverman, the new boss at NBC was quoted in today’s Hollywood Reporter as saying: “Our mothers are the unsung heroes of American society, and also drive key decision-making in families. I’ve always wanted to produce a show celebrating the American mom.”

Reveille (Silverman’s old company) and Twentieth Television are developing a new syndicated series for Fall 2008 called The Mom Show.  The show will have a group of celebrity mom hosts, who will talk from one mom to another about parenting kids of all ages, financial issues, cooking and other family-related topics among themselves and with guests.

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