Archive for April 11th, 2008

NEW YORK Microsoft Corp.’s Zune has forged harmonious partnerships with Hispanic Web portals MSN Latino and Remezcla.com to connect Latin music artists online with consumers via an exclusive music sponsorship, the company announced Tuesday.

The partnership creates a co-branded digital platform that gives Latin music artists the vehicle in which to reach U.S. Hispanic consumers online. The Web portal will launch on April 15, per a press statement.

For consumers, the online platform allows users to discover new music and artists in a culturally-relevant setting, providing “a convenient and consistent purchase experience via Zune Marketplace” and widening its reach among online Hispanics, per Microsoft.

“Through these business arrangements, Zune will offer Latino music lovers the artists’ information and industry content they care about through Zune, Zune Marketplace and the Zune Social,” said Javier Farfan, Zune’s senior manager of lifestyle marketing.

The deal with MSN Latino gives Zune the exclusive naming rights to MSN Latino’s music channel, which will be rebranded as Zune Musica through 2009, per the Web portal.

Full Story

Share This

Are some franchises cursed? That looks like the implication of today’s article in The New York Times about the intense reactions to The Incredible Hulk, which has divided fans online and elsewhere ever since the trailer came out last month. According to reporter Brooks Barnes, the preview was released “to vanquish memories of the 2003 film.” Instead, it resurrected them with complaints that the character looked too fake. Hollywood has acknowledged pre-release backlash before — remember how Ain’t It Cool News supposedly impacted the reception of Batman and Robin over a decade ago — and they’ve adapted to it, as demonstrated by the way all the anti-Brett Ratner venom leading up to the release of X-Men: The Last Stand didn’t affect its box office reception one bit.

Full Story

Share This

ONLINE VIDEO AD PLATFORM PANACHE will deliver advertising into video on Adobe’s new media player formally debuting today. Panache will serve video ads in CBS shows including “CSI,” “Big Brother,” and “Survivor” which are distributed online using the Adobe Media Player. CBS is one of Adobe’ s media partners, which also include CBS’s parent, Viacom, and PBS.

Full Story

Share This

It took 17 years for color TV to penetrate half of U.S. homes. VCRs took 10. But the DVR became mainstream in less than five years. And when you consider new media behavior, in the scant 18 months that full-length TV programs have been available on the Internet, more than 25 percent of Internet users have reported watching an online episode.

Such rapid change inevitably leads to confusion. But in confusion there is opportunity, and research is the bridge from one to the other. At NBC Universal, we’ve been making substantial investments to provide insights on these issues. I’d like to share with you three areas where research has helped sort out the confusion.

Full Story

Share This

“An Evening with Survivors”? “Apprentice: The Musical”? It could happen under a new pact between reality guru Mark Burnett and AEG to develop live events and TV shows based on each other’s properties.Under the pact, AEG will get first crack at producing stage events developed from Burnett’s catalog of shows. Conversely, Mark Burnett Prods. has a first-look option to create nonscripted programming derived from AEG’s various properties, which range from soccer and hockey teams to the Coachella music festival.

Full Story

Share This

Salon City, Inc. (OTCBB: SLON), the first publicly traded media company to brand its unique content of beauty entertainment to consumers, announced today the debut of its first webisode of 2008. Hollywood CeleBeauty, SCI’s infotainment web series, covers the worlds of beauty, fashion, glamour, and celebrity lifestyle. The program is hosted by E! Online personality Christina Gibson, and is now playing at www.saloncity.com.

Full Story

Share This

A COFFEE BRAND THAT GOT its start nearly 90 years ago is jumping on the non-traditional marketing bandwagon as it seeks to rejuvenate itself by refreshing its Web site, partnering with a design guru and an online wedding site and creating an online contest centered on the number 8.

The “Gr8 Wedding D8″ contest at eightoclock.com offers the winning couple a wedding celebration for up to 100 guests on the most sought-after wedding date of the year, 08/08/08. The location: a multimillion-dollar estate in Southampton, N.Y. The wedding planner: celebrity design guru Evette Ríos, in partnership with theknot.com. In line with the theme, entrants must submit eight sentences describing why they should win the contest.

“We have 8 in our name,” says Alisa Jacoby, senior brand manager for the Montvale, N.J.-based company. “And as we were moving into ‘08, we decided to leverage the power of 8. Eight is also a lucky number in the Chinese culture.”

Full Story

Share This

HONG KONG — Malaysia’s Lion Group will spend $2.4 billion building a film studio and theme park in China. Lion, which has interests in steel and controls China’s Parkson Retail chain, aims to build Dream City in Kunming, capital of Yunnan province in the south of the country, according to Bloomberg reports. Project will be completed in five years, according to a Lion publicist.

Dream City will include a studio, amusement parks, hotels, golf courses and a film school that Beijing U. and the Beijing Film Academy will run together, according to a statement.

Project was initiated by Hong Kong-based helmer Stanley Tong, who chairs China Intl. Media Group.

Full Story

Share This

North American-based companies will spend an estimated $1.04 billion to sponsor music venues, festivals, tours and concerts this year, a four percent increase from $1 billion in ‘07, according to research by Chicago-based IEG Sponsorship Report, which tracks sponsorship spending.

“The four percent growth rate is down from the double-digit increases seen in previous years, due in large part to the slowing economy,” IEG Sponsorship Report’s senior editor William Chipps tells Billboard.biz. “But, by and large, corporate spending on live music remains healthy.” Read the rest of this entry »

Share This

Fox Interactive Media has officially launched MySpace Latino, a bilingual version of its mega-popular social networking hub geared for U.S. Hispanics.

The site, which went live in beta form last year, features a mix of Hispanic-aimed content in addition to a social networking platform which caters specifically to various Latino constituencies, ranging from music lovers and sports fans. Among the site’s initial media partners are ImpreMedia, Spanish Broadcasting System, Billboard en Español and Remezcla.com.

Full Story

Share This