Archive for May 14th, 2008

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — TNT and TBS are out to prove they could play with the big boys of broadcast. The Turner Broadcasting properties were the first entertainment cable networks to vie for media buyers’ ad dollars during the week traditionally dominated by the five national broadcast networks.

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ESPN held its upfront presentation Tuesday morning at the Nokia Theater in New York. Anchors Scott Van Pelt and Steve Levy hosted the event as a mock SportsCenter episode. The 80-minute presentation was light on programming announcements, but the biggest news was the addition of a block of live SportsCenters from 6 am to 3 pm/ET, beginning Monday, Aug. 11. A new web site, SportsCenter.com, will also debut in August. It was also confirmed that The Early Show’s Hannah Storm will be one of the new anchors for this block. In other SportsCenter news, a 1 am/ET edition produced live in Los Angeles, will premiere on April 9, 2009.

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NEW YORK Visitors to Pepsi.com will hardly recognize the place.

Earlier this month, Pepsi-Cola North completely renovated its online entity. The goal was to streamline the user experience while making it easier for the beverage maker to swap in new promotions as they arise.

The Pepsi Web site, which launched in 1996, is renovated roughly every two years. It attracts about 1 million unique visitors a month.

Most recently, the site tended to focus on whatever the big promotion of the day was, be it a Nascar tie-in with Jeff Gordon or the chance to redesign its soda can.

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All action, no Ang Lee.

Turner Broadcasting plans to introduce a new advertising system designed to match commercial messages with the content of its programming.

Turner, which holds its upfront presentation to advertisers Wednesday morning in New York, calls the system “TVinContext” and says it has been in development for more than a year.

The system is designed to match the ability of digital media to place ads next to relevant content, according to Turner. If a movie features a scene about marriage, for example, Turner will be able to place an ad in the next commercial break for a related product, such as wedding rings. A movie scene in a cafe could be followed by an ad for coffee.

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Unilever will start using interactive advertisements to sell products such as Degree deodorant, the Wall Street Journal reports. The company, which has agreements with Comcast and DirecTV, will run ads in which customers may use the remote control to get more information or request for a brochure, the Journal says.

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By iTVX Staff

According to TV Guide and TV’s Extra, Donald Trump confirmed rumors that O.J. Simpson was once brought up as a possible contender for next season’s Celebrity Apprentice. According to Trump, the network shot down the casting almost immediately. All of a sudden, I have a newfound respect for studio heads.

By iTVX Staff

Bummer. Sesame Street signed a huge deal with New Balance sneakers to create a branded line of kicks for infants and kids. Why bummer? Well, it’s simple: they should’ve extended the deal to adult sneaks as well. Personally, I would love to wear a pair of sneaks with Cookie Monster or Snuffy on them. That may just be me, but tell me you wouldn’t wear them? Tell me college kids wouldn’t dig the whole throwback vibe? Comment below and share your feelings on that.

Winston Churchill once said, “The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.” I think, but I cannot be certain and have seen no confirmation of this point whatsoever, that Winston Churchill started out his career working in advertising. I think he may have been speaking to those people who feel brand advertisers are not spending online in conjunction with the time spent online by their consumers. There’s much ado about online advertising in the trades and the mainstream press these days, but I read very little that speaks to the difficulties with online advertising. I read about online advertising in Fortune, Forbes and sometimes Time magazine and it’s regularly covered in BusinessWeek as well as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. What they cover is the growth and the proliferation of new technology that’s being applied to the space, but they rarely break down the difference between dollars that are spent against direct response advertisers vs. brand advertisers and the difficulties that still surround brand advertising in this space. The majority of the dollars being spent online are being tracked, optimized and managed to direct response metrics, while many brand advertisers are still afraid to shift money to the Web. In a conversation I had this week with some well-respected industry experts, we identified our hypothesis as to why many brand advertisers are afraid to make the large-scale shift. These reasons were: ease of use and breadth of opportunity.

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