Archive for June 2nd, 2008

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — TV networks have spent two years trying to come up with the perfect video player that will goose their online audiences and lead to engagement and discussion around the shows people are watching.And as both broadcast and cable networks ramp up their efforts, they’re finding it’s important to own that technology in order to give advertisers what they want: better reporting and targeting data.

“We always push the networks to help us understand how much younger the audience is online,” said Chris Allen, VP-video innovation at Starcom. “Not all the networks have been as transparent as we’d like in talking about numbers.”

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Coors Light, PapaJohn’s, Warner Bros. and Coca-Cola are new sponsors of TNT’s second annual Wide Open Coverage Nascar telecast, which this year will be televised from the Daytona International Speedway in prime time (the Coke Zero 400) on Saturday, July 5.

Those advertisers join returning sponsors Toyota, Sprint and Subway, with two others
expected to be announced shortly, said Turner officials.

The Wide Open Coverage concept allows viewers to see a wider screen of the race and creates “dead space” across the bottom of the screen, giving the network room to televise commercials or vignette video from advertisers during the race. The network will televise messages only from the sponsors; there will be no national breaks for traditional commercials.

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Last week I wrote a post about The Sims 2 getting Ikea via product placement within the game. This was a similar deal that Electronic Arts signed with H&M last year and McDonald’s in 2002. The New York Times has a post (Entering Virtual Worlds for Real-Life Pitches) about what the future might hold for The Sims 2 & 3.

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When NBC debuts the Rosario Dawson science fiction Web series “Gemini Division” online next month, it will mark a return to a programming genre that broadcasters haven’t had much success with—the online original series.

Broadcast and cable networks are building hearty businesses streaming their TV shows on the Internet, but their track record in producing original scripted content for the Web is poor. Most of their efforts to replicate the success of smaller, scrappier Web series, such as “Ask a Ninja” or “Zaproot,” have fallen short.

Most recently, Turner Animation, Young Adults & Kids folded its comedy Web site Superdeluxe.com into Adult Swim.com, a fellow Turner company. In the past year HBO shut down This JustIn.com and NBC migrated Dotcomedy.com into NBC.com after Dotcomedy failed to reach 500,000 monthly unique visitors. Also, NBC’s online-only soap opera “Coastal Dreams” peaked last fall with a few hundred thousand unique visitors.

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It’s tough to break into the energy drink market, even with a beverage containing nine herbs designed to enhance libido.

Delmond Newton, chief executive of Fever Beverage USA, could shill his drink on the radio and plaster ads all around town. But he recently discovered that sales of his energy “stimulation drink” skyrocketed with a mere mention in a music video featuring rapper Ludacris.

Now, rather than spend money on TV commercials and other traditional advertising vehicles, he’s relying solely on product placement: having the Fever drink appear in movies, television shows and music videos.

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As a vehicle for addressable advertising, video-on-demand has fallen short of its potential, but a new IAG Research study suggests that marketers could be overlooking a truly transformative sales platform in VOD.

Over the course of eight months, IAG analyzed a number of Lexus spots that had been baked inside select E! and PBS KIDS Sprout VOD programming, with an eye toward measuring the relative effectiveness of advertising in an on-demand environment. For example, viewers who opted in for E!’s “Excellence on the Red Carpet” clips were quizzed on how well they remembered the ad and the Lexus brand itself.

According to IAG’s preliminary findings (the study wrapped in March), viewers were 68 percent more likely to recall a spot seen in an on-demand context than they would an ad on linear TV. The Lexus brand also stood out in sharp relief on VOD, as consumers were 83
percent more likely to identify the marque after being exposed to it in that environment.

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Branded entertainment, known to industry pros as Advertainment (or to those familiar only with print, think advertorial), is becoming an increasing popular method for brands to get their messages across in a digital world. With the way people consume their media these days, advertisers continue to struggle with how to communicate with them. And communication is key, because young minds don’t want to be told what’s “cool” anymore; they instead are telling advertisers. And advertisers had better listen.

The video site Heavy.com is one of few sites that has mastered the art of advertainment. Aiming at men ages 18-34, they are ambitious with their video and series creation, including a partnership with Fremantle Media to launch an online dating reality series using partially user-generated content. They also partnered with Footlocker to host a King of Bounce competition on April 18, which was featured on their online Burly Sports Show. The weekly show is just shy of a year old and is streamed 900,000 times each month. It also won a Webby Award for the sports category in Online Film & Video. “Branded entertainment is thrown around as just this term but brand managers need to be asking themselves how they are going to get people to trust and care about their brands,” offers John Lumpkin, senior vice president, sales and partnerships at Heavy.com. “Our audience is young guys – you’re never going to find a demographic more loyal as long as you give them what they are asking for.”

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NEW YORK Turner is pasting together its vast collection of Web properties to form a sizable, brand-friendly ad network, just as the company officially swears off selling its remnant inventory via third-party ad nets.

The cable-centric firm said it plans to begin packaging both display and video ad inventory for advertisers from 19 different Web sites. That encompasses owned-and-operated properties like CNN.com and CartoonNetwork.com as well as partner sites such as NBA.com and PGA.com as part of an overall digital sales restructuring. (Previously, news and entertainment properties were sold by different groups).

In total, the new network — which also includes TNT.com, TBS.com, PGATour.com, AdultSwim.com and GameTap.com — will deliver an audience of 48 million monthly unique users (per Nielsen Online), on par with some of the Web’s larger media conglomerates.

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This month, casual games took a drubbing from industry skeptics, and now it seems next on the firing line is in-game ads. Speaking at a recent conference, Wild Tangent founder Alex St. John said that in-game ads, although they’re generating a lot of excitement in the market, are not especially effective ways of communicating with gamers. “And in-game advertising — Wild Tangent has patents on it, we did it very early on… is not a very effective way because you’ve got to plumb the game, you’ve got an unproven method of measuring the value of that ad, that unit is not trackable,” he said. “I came to the opinion that a lot of the in-game and some of these variations you’ve heard of out there — they’re a lot of work, they take too much explanation, they actually don’t make sense.” Nolan Bushnell, the founder of venerable game developer Atari, made similar comments to MTV’s gaming blog, Multiplayer, in April. “In-game advertising is much, much more [in your face] advertising and is more like a billboard,” said Bushnell. “I don’t believe those kinds of ads are very effective. In a game, if you’re not riveted on the objectives, you’re going to lose.”

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Converse sneaks and all…

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