Archive for June, 2008

After watching its bigger rival McDonald’s Corp. try to woo mom, Burger King Corp. is launching a new marketing and promotional campaign Monday meant to grab her attention.” A large part of our customer base is parents with children,” said Russ Klein, president of global strategy, marketing and innovation. “As a parent, the challenge is always trying to get the kinds of things you want to but have some dimension of fun.”

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Your audience will continue to shrink. It’s that simple. You’ve already lost young men to digital media. New demographics disappear from traditional media every day. And the problem gets worse: Married women are spending more time playing online games and continuing to drift away from broadcast and print. Will blindly shifting your spend to the Internet solve the problem? Nope!

Consoles will continue to gain importance as an advertising channel to reach consumers leaving traditional media. According to Nielsen GamePlay Metrics, two-thirds of all men ages 18-34 in television households have access to a video game console in their homes. That “typical gamer” averaged nearly 3 hours of console game play per day, according to 2007 research from Nielsen. Valuable brand marketing opportunities could be lost forever as these behaviors become entrenched.

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Domino’s Pizza, beginning July 7, will begin delivering $10,000 directly to customers’ doors. The promotion is part of the pizza chain’s effort to leverage, what is expected to be, one of the biggest blockbusters of the summer—The Dark Knight.

In honor of the film, Domino’s, Ann Arbor, Mich., rolled out the new Gotham City Pizza. Through July 27, customers can order the $9.99 specialty pizza, which is “cloaked with 50% more pepperoni than a standard portion and delivered in a specially-designed box.” There are four versions of the box, each highlight a different element of the Batman costume, including the mask and utility belt.

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Sony’s “experiment,” in which it plans to stream Hancock, starring Will Smith, to Internet-connected Bravia TV-set owners immediately after its theatrical run (and before it is released on DVD), may set the stage for companies to bypass traditional content distributors like networks, cable TV, and satellite companies, the New York Times indicated today (Monday). The newspaper quoted Sony Cfo Robert Wiesenthal as saying, “The Internet is not only a great place to reach Web sites, but it’s also a great way to deliver conventional content. And at the end of the day, it’s about getting entertainment back into the living room.” But while Sony may be using its film studio and consumer electronics units to experiment with new ways of delivering home entertainment, it is unlikely that it can corner the market in that area, the Times article suggested. It noted that following Sony’s announcement, Pali research analyst Richard Greenfield wrote, “While the content offered is only from Sony today, we expect other studios to follow if consumer interest becomes apparent.”

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As the amount of money advertisers spend on product placements has increased in recent years, the FCC has begun a formal inquiry into whether product placements and other forms of embedded advertising should be more clearly labeled as such.

According to PQ Media, the FCC points out (via Consumer Affairs), the amount of money spent on television product placement increased an average of 21.5 percent per year between 1999 and 2004. Product placement grew 33.7 percent last year, for a total of $2.9 billion in television and movies. It is expected to grow 23 percent this year, to $3.6 billion.

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CBS Interactive has announced several organizational moves, including the formation of five distinct vertical audience-centric groups, as part of an overall integration effort following the company’s just completed acquisition of CNET.

Going forward, both CBS and CNET’s individual Web properties have been melded into a single business organization, an expanded version of CBS Interactive which now includes divisions built around Technology, Sports, News, Business and Entertainment. For example, the Entertainment division houses the CBS properties CBS.com, The CBS Audience Network, theInsider.com and Last.fm—as well as the CNET brands GameSpot.com, TV.com and Chow.com. Similarly, the News group now includes both CBSNews.com and CNET’s News.com.

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While 2008 will not go on the books as the year upstart cable took in more upfront dollars than the establishment, this year’s bazaar will mark a turning point for a segment that has long been regarded as strictly B-list.

In the last four weeks, an unforeseen tide of incremental revenue flooded the cable marketplace, as high-profile quick-serve restaurants, packaged goods and automotive dollars were redirected away from the broadcast networks.

According to sources on both sides of the sales continuum, Yum Brands—the QSR consortium that houses megabrands KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell—diverted as much as $25 million from broadcast to cable, with MTV Networks getting a supersized portion of those dollars. Packaged goods-heavy SC Johnson is also believed to have moved a tidy sum into cable—$20 million, per some estimates.

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SXM and Ikea will co-produce “Easy to Assemble,” a scripted Web series written and directed by and starring Illeana Douglas. The show follows Douglas and her celebrity friends, who will be named next week, as they try to assimilate into “civilian life” at the Burbank Ikea store.
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At midnight tonight, the current contracts under which the Screen Actors Guild and AFTRA have been working expire, and thus far only the latter union has approved (at least on its merits) a new deal. Is SAG set to walk? Guild president Alan Rosenberg maintains, “We have taken no steps to initiate a strike authorization vote by [our] members. Any talk about a strike or a management lockout is simply a distraction.”

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There’s a lot riding on the broad shoulders of Don Draper, Madison Avenue adman extraordinaire.

“This is an event for us, and we’ve elevated our game,” said Linda Schupack, AMC’s svp-marketing. “We’re looking for a bigger audience, and we’re treating this like a movie opening.”

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