Archive for May 6th, 2008

LONDON — Blighty’s Freesat platform, backed by the BBC and ITV, has finally reached lift off.The new U.K. digital platform, designed to reach those parts of the U.K. that are unable to receive a digital terrestrial signal, bowed Tuesday following several false starts.

The initiative’s managing director Emma Scott hailed the move as “a landmark day for digital TV in the U.K.,” not least because the new service, originally earmarked for launch in 2006, is designed to give a boost to Britain’s somewhat stagnant high definition TV market.

BBC director-general Mark Thompson said: “With the launch of Freesat, all the BBC’s digital channels, including BBC HD, will now be available to all license fee payers wherever they live and however they choose to access them.”

His opposite number at ITV, executive chairman Michael Grade, said Freesat’s arrival represented the “final piece” in Blighty’s digital jigsaw.

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The Dark Knight may still be months away, but planning for a third Batman movie is already happening, somewhere deep in the Warner Bros. lair. Tonight, in a flurry of superhero related messages between me and a long time scooper and friend of the site, we uncovered some of the details about where exactly Batman goes next, after he’s finished with the Joker in Dark Knight.

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Bravo is capitalizing on the success of its reality shows by moving beyond the small screen. Thanks to several new business partnerships, the cable network is extending the Top Chef brand by offering a Top Chef cruise, cooking classes, and a calendar. There are also plans for a fitness DVD starring Work Out’s Jackie Warner.

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NBC Universal is hoping a new approach to advertising sales will extract premium pricing in this year’s upfront ad market by packaging viewers who are watching its shows across various media.

The initiative started by ad sales chief Mike Pilot aims to create the kind of mass reach broadcast networks used to be able to create on their own.

Now NBC Universal is taking the specific target audience an advertiser is trying to reach, finding those individuals across the company’s broadcast and cable networks, as well as the Web, and putting a marketer’s message in front of them.

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Aren’t you glad you bought a mobile phone? How do you use it? You wouldn’t happen to actually be talking to someone, would you? Because there are an ever-increasing number of companies and relationships that are hoping that you don’t want to do something as mundane as communicating by voice with another person.

In the latest group of announcements between movies and mobile, we see Spike Lee hooking up with Nokia to “direct a movie made with cell phone footage from everyday people.” Next up is Paramount and Motorola who’ve announced that they will be working together to bring Paramount films to Moto phones via side-loading (download to PC and move to mobile). Read the rest of this entry »

Automobile product-placement in feature films is nothing new, but lately, it’s positively pervasive: Audi in Iron Man and Mercedes-Benz in Sex and the City and Lamborghini in The Dark Knight. The goal of such big-screen appearances, according to company officials, is something intangible: “brand awareness.” Get the name out there, get the emblem in people’s heads. But can presumptions of brand awareness based on box-office grosses translate to actual car sales? No one seems quite sure.

Audi figured some 55 million people sat through the Will Smith sci-fi picture, I, Robot — and by extension, saw the company’s RSQ concept car (pictured after the break). States a company press release: “The brand’s four-ring logo is visible for a total of almost nine minutes.” Not eight, not ten. Nine.

And now there’s Iron Man, a picture that features a whole showroom of Audi cars. Robert Downey, Jr.’s Tony Stark drives an R8 (pictured above), Gwyneth Paltrow’s Pepper Potts drives an A5. And there’s a Q7 thrown around, too. In an interview with Brandweek, Audi’s Chief Marketing Officer Scott Keogh said of Iron Man, “It’s an adventure movie, which shows that what we want is not just an intellectual, in-the-know audience for our brand. We want America to know about us.” (Is that a back-handed compliment?)

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NBC News on Monday announced the launch of a free online collaborative learning community called iCue. Informed by MIT research, the site incorporates gaming, discussion and video resources.

Created by NBC Learn, the educational arm of NBC News, for students and lifelong learners ages 13 and up, iCue stands for Immerse, Connect, Understand and Excel, inviting users to immerse themselves in self directed and peer-supported active learning using hundreds of videos and other resources from the NBC News archives.

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I’m a movie junkie and I’m so happy the summer movie season is underway. You’ll probably find me at a theater every weekend between now and the end of July–when the movie premiers finally slow down.

And when it comes to summer blockbusters, there’s always one sneaky player no one talks about much: the products that are placed, often for high prices, in key scenes and in close proximity to stars.

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LONDON — “Iron Man” did not buckle under the weight of expectation in its debut frame in Europe, where it got the summer blockbuster season off to a start in some style.Demonstrating its B.O. metal, “Iron Man” comfortably topped the charts in all five major Euro territories.

The best result came in the U.K. where the tentpole pocketed $13.8 million at 500 locations in its opening four days (including previews of $1.3 million taken May 1). The three day weekend figure without previews was $9.5 million.

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NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — TNS, one of the industry’s top research providers, rejected an unsolicited $1.87 billion takeover bid this weekend from ad holding company WPP. The bid came only days after London-based TNS announced a proposed merger with German research company GfK, which would make it the world’s second-largest information group by revenue, according to TNS.

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