Archive for June 17th, 2008

CANNES (AdAge.com) — One of the year’s biggest integrated campaigns, BBDO, New York’s “Voyeur” project for HBO, picked up its second Grand Prix at the Cannes International Advertising Festival today in the outdoor category. “Voyeur” has now won two Grand Prix in as many days after scooping promotions honors yesterday.

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The TV syndication upfront sales marketplace overall is north of 50 percent complete, with one syndicator, Warner Bros. Domestic Television Distribution, more than 70 percent sold out of its 2008-09 ad inventory, Mediaweek has learned from buyers and sellers.

The studio sales teams are continuing to get 7-9 percent cost-per-thousand increases for top tier new and returning shows, and between 5-7 percent for other programming, with daytime being the hot daypart.

The Bonnie Hunt Show from Warner Bros. has drawn a lot of buyer interest among the new daytime fair, as has NBC Universal Television Distribution’s new half hour version of the NBC prime-time hit game show Deal or No Deal.

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NEW YORK Holamun2.com debuted today with a new look and vibe designed to extend the Mun2 TV experience to Latino youth via enhanced interactivity, and an innovative integrated model for online messaging that seamlessly targets consumers.

Users to the entertainment Web portal will find an expanded offering of tools for building profiles, sending private messages, interacting with celebs and accessing mun2 TV content.

“The improvements are designed to help users interact with our content and to interact with each other,” said Jose Marquez, vp, mun2 digital media.

The Web portal has pumped up its interactivity capabilities, allowing users to shape their own experiences within the site, sharing images, text and videos with fellow Latinos, Marquez said.

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Web 2.0 company Demand Media launched Livestrong.com today in tandem with the Lance Armstrong Foundation. The site is a health, lifestyle and fitness destination.

The rollout is noteworthy as it’s the first time Demand Media has built a site from the ground up rather than via acquisition, the company’s usual modus operandi.

The site should let users create a profile, upload an avatar, creation an action plan for fitness and lifestyle goals, comment on articles and videos, add articles and video favorites to their profiles, and answer questions using the Demand Media-owned Answerbag.com question-and-answer engine.

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LOS ANGELES The presidential candidates aren’t the only ones looking for a debate.

On Monday, Screen Actors Guild president Alan Rosenberg, citing the spread of misinformation, proposed that SAG and American Federation of Television and Radio Artists hold an official debate on the issues involving AFTRA’s newly brokered prime-time TV contract with the Alliance of Motion Picture & Television Producers.

AFTRA declined the invite, calling it “disingenuous” and urging SAG to concentrate on its own negotiations.

AFTRA and SAG have been locking horns over the latter’s tentative agreement with the AMPTP, which was reached May 28.

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UK media agency TV chiefs have hit out at culture secretary Andy Burnham’s speech last week, which suggested the government would not be relaxing its ban on product placement in TV programmes.Azon Howie, head of broadcast at Carat, told Media Week: “For the past two or three years, we’ve all been saying we felt the rules would be relaxed in line with the EU directive.

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For all their experimentation with social networks, user-generated content and online video, marketers seem content to view games as little more than another advertising platform. Yet with 72% of U.S. consumers playing games of one type or another, according to NPD Group’s Online Gaming 2008 report, they’ve become far too pervasive for marketers and advertisers to ignore. The untapped potential of games lies in their ability to tell stories, thereby more closely linking brand mythology with game play and blurring the lines between brand and entertainment.

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A week after one industry ad tracker estimated online display advertising climbed 8.5% during the first quarter of 2008, another estimates it actually grew at nearly twice that rate.

“Internet advertising impressions grew by 14.7% in the first quarter of 2008 over the same period in 2007,” Nielsen Monitor-Plus said Monday, as part of a broader quarterly tracking report for the major media it measures. On June 11, TNS Media Intelligence estimated that online display advertising rose only 8.5%.

Nielsen also implied that the TNS MI data reflects the most tepid part of online advertising growth, noting: “Sponsored search link advertising drove overall growth, and rich media led growth in the display category.”

While Nielsen did not break out those online advertising platforms, it did disclose which types of advertisers are driving demand for online search.

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The vast majority of gamers are fine with seeing ads placed within video games, and those ads pack more wallop for brands than ads appearing in traditional media, according to comprehensive new study released by top vendor IGA Worldwide.

IGA, which works with game publishers such as EA and Activision to insert both permanent and rotation ads within video games played via an Internet connection, last year tapped Nielsen BASES and Nielsen Games to conduct a in-depth six month examination of the impact of in-game advertising using traditional brand effectiveness measures such as awareness and recall.

The report, Consumers’ Experience with In-Game Content & Brand Impact of In-Game Advertising Study, includes responses from nearly 1,300 gamers surveyed using IGA’s proprietary software while playing games in their homes, with participation from the advertisers Taco Bell, Jeep and Wrigley.

The report found that 82 percent of respondents found games to be just as enjoyable if ads were present. Of the respondents that claimed to most opinionated on the subject, 70 percent said that ads made them feel better about the brands involved.

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Paralysis is fast setting in.Just as the scripted TV biz was starting to get out from under the upheaval caused by the writers strike, the threat of a work stoppage by actors has studios and nets making contingency plans for the upcoming season.

The majors are putting the brakes on production starts for features and TV pilots for fear that the Screen Actors Guild will call a strike following the June 30 expiration date of its feature-primetime deal. A few pics now shooting, such as “Angels and Demons” and “Transformers 2,” have a built-in hiatus next month; the next batch of tentpole features, including “2012,” “Prince of Persia” and “Nottingham,” won’t start until late summer as a hedge against the labor strife likely to play out in July.

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