Archive for June 3rd, 2008

Even though it’s been in development forever, this movie is likely to be called a Sex in the City-ish flick. Oh well, look how much business that movie took in this weekend.

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By ITVX Staff

Mr. Bill, the renowned character from Saturday Night Live decades ago, will make a triumphant return to television starring in his very own MasterCard commercial. Specifically, Mr. Bill will appear in a 30-second commercial airing on June 9 - showcasing the new MasterCard debit card.  Mr. Bill back on TV? Priceless.

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NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — The upfront market is in full swing, and buyers suggest the market is anywhere from 20% to 50% complete, with marketers focusing the bulk of dollars at top-performing networks. News Corp.’s Fox and Walt Disney’s ABC have been setting the market, with Fox in some cases securing price increases in the low double-digit percentage range in the cost of reaching 1,000 viewers, according to a person familiar with the matter. (A Fox spokesman said executives were not available for comment.) ABC has already been able to secure price increases of around 9% in the cost of reaching 1,000 viewers, or CPM.

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NEW YORK Renault-Nissan is reviewing its $1 billion Pan-European media account, seeking to consolidate duties for the two car brands at a single shop, according to sources.

The process will include the two European incumbents, Omnicom Group’s OMD, which handles Nissan’s estimated $200 million account, and Aegis Group’s Carat, which works on Renault’s estimated $800 million business, per sources.

Two years ago, Aegis Media won the $750 million European General Motors account, which sources said is managed separately from the Renault business to avoid any conflicts. An Aegis representative would not confirm the Renault-Nissan review and referred calls about it to the client. OMD also directed calls to the client.
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With 88 M&A transactions in the advertising infrastructure market last year, totalling over $12 billion, online advertising has clearly created a lot of value over the past decade. So much value in fact that market leader Google is now the most valuable brand in the world, and was at one point the fifth most valuable company in the United States.

But so far much of the focus has been on direct response advertising, where direct marketers have leveraged the internet’s ability to track consumer behavior and infer purchase intent to deliver relevant one-to-one marketing — through paid ads next to search results, for example. But what about brand advertising? Social networks and blogs have begun unlocking the interactive potential of the Internet, but taking full advantage of this interactivity and online communication remains a huge untapped opportunity for advertisers.

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This year’s upfront selling season seems to have come with its own wrinkles that haven’t exactly continued the pattern of the past few. Instead of the continual devolvement and advertiser mutiny that we’ve seen in the past couple of years, what seems to have occurred is exactly the opposite — advertisers returning to spend upfront dollars, despite continued network ratings declines and further ad skippage. This seems to be happening for several reasons. First, those same advertisers that held out in years past wound up paying even more in a scatter market that produced windfalls for select broadcasting and cable networks last year. Strike or no strike, they had to advertise somewhere — and the scatter market strategy wasn’t exactly value-priced. Not so sound a strategy for this year, it seems.

Second, we’ve got a ratings mess — complete with everything from program ratings to C3 ratings to average live commercial ratings — even to exact minute ratings. From the creative sidelines, it seems like there’s a free-for-all of buying criteria out there that makes locking in a TV CPM upfront… well, a lot less free for all.

Third, and perhaps most significant, is the acknowledgment that we’re headed towards a deeper recession — leading most traditional advertisers to forgo the whole “shift to digital” trend and simply fall back on the ol’ tried and true TV schedule that they figure will at least keep retail sales going and maintain their brand health measures in this uncertain economic/election year into next.

If you’re an advertiser, put all three factors together and you’re left with fear and control as your buying motivations. Which is not exactly a great place to be if you’re reliant on an industry in as much chaos and entrenched thinking as the agency business is. Combine the two dynamics and it’s not exactly a setup for guerilla-like innovative planning and gutsy creative execution either.

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A reality show without a showdown, where no players get booted off? Indeed, Macy’s appears to have abandoned these reality TV essentials in a forthcoming online video promotion for its five-year-old American Rag brand.

Instead, a series of documentary Webisodes will follow the lives of five young people who want to break into the music business.

The series, “Ragged Road,” launches in the fall. WPP Group-owned MEC Entertainment developed the show, which will play on YouTube.

Nancy Slavin, svp of marketing at Macy’s merchandising group, said this marks a first for the brand in “doing something wholly dedicated to a communications strategy on the Web.”

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T-Mobile was not featured in SITC.

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Turner Sports today will unveil RaceBuddy, an interactive element that will enhance viewing and assist fans during its six-week “Nascar on TNT” coverage.

RaceBuddy, which can be activated at www.Nascar.com/promos/tnt, is a free service that will enable visitors to choose from among five live camera angles, interact with other visitors and send questions to TNT’s on-air personnel during races. RaceBuddy is part of Turner Sports’ national TV and print effort, “Nascar on TNT,” handled in-house, which touts the cable network’s Nascar package. “Nascar on TNT” begins this Sunday (June at the Pocono 500 and runs six-consecutive weeks (through July 12) at the LifeLock.com 400 at Chicagoland Speedway.

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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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