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“We felt like we were under-delivering on a year-round basis,” said Dave Finger, director of action sports for ESPN Digital Media. “We felt like we were missing out on covering action sports with the same voice and authenticity that we bring to stick and ball.”
Surfing, skateboarding, motocross and snowboarding are among the action sports in question. Estimates peg the size of this audience at anywhere from 27 million to 115 million-although most enthusiasts are only interested in their particular sport.
Everybody knows about Carrie Bradshaw and her cougar friends on “Sex in the City,” but a similarly-themed show called “Sprays in the City” tickles our fancy a bit more. It centers on two walking and talking Unilever products.
The webisodes focus on the adventures of Spraychel and Spritzy, BFFs who are respectively an I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter spray bottle and Wish-Bone spray vinaigrette. The two share a fridge in the city and we hear all about via interactive webisodes from the point of view of Spraychel, who flogs (fridge and blog put together – get it?) all about it.
These Interactive-TV ads are a pretty cool way to get consumers engaged in the products by becoming involved in the storylines of the show (users can vote which direction Spraychel takes in the following episode.) It’ll be interesting to see where this creative way of getting consumers involved will go. Unilever, at the very least, has put a lot of stock into the notion by securing deals with Comcast and DirecTV Group to center ad campaigns for ITV on roughly 20 brands including Degree deodorant. Thanks to Spraychel, perhaps other products could be ready for her close-up as the old “Sunset Boulevard” film used to say. Might I suggest a Sopranos-talking Degree character not sweating under pressure?
A little more than a year after Coca-Cola Co. disclosed the development of a natural sweetener that it said might start a new generation of calorie-free drinks, PepsiCo Inc. claims it has beaten Coke to the punch.
NBC is making an unprecedented digital push with its coverage of the Olympics this summer, making more than 2,000 hours of live content and 3,000 hours of on-demand content accessible via the NBCOlympics.com Web site. Cnet writes that while this is certainly a great opportunity for Olympics fans, it’s a huge test for NBC, Microsoft — which is powering the video service through its Silverlight video player — and Limelight, whose network is being used to route the video streams to Internet service providers across the country.
Bringing metrics to mobile medial and advertising, Nielsen Mobile and Mediamark Research & Intelligence announced Thursday (July 31) a partnership to launch Mobile-MRI. The new research service will provide behavioral, psychographic, demographic and product usage information on mobile users. Full Story
Digital marketing will play a pivotal role in driving growth during the UK’s economic slowdown, according to a new study.
The report, from information services firm Experian, outlines how marketers can turn the prospect of a downturn into a competitive advantage.
According to the report, entitled ‘Marketing success in a slowdown’ , brands can create new opportunities to fuel business growth where spending growth in the UK is expected to slow to 2.1% in 2008 and 1.1% in 2009.
TiVo released the first batch of data (covering May 2008) from its new second-by-second commercial audience measurement service, PowerWatch, which company officials said supported the idea that viewers skip fewer ads that they see as relevant to their circumstances.
The data from the service is drawn from a panel of 20,000 volunteer TiVo users and it revealed that all demographic segments time shift and fast-forward through commercials at a high rate. In prime time on the broadcast networks, about 57 percent of all viewing is time shifted and 66 percent of the ads are skipped. For all TV networks (cable and broadcast) across all time periods, about 36 percent of viewing is time shifted and about half the ads are skipped, said Todd Juenger, vp, gm, audience research and measurement, TiVo.
According to online sources, Mike Myers is currently writing a third sequel to his wildly popular Austin Powers series. The Love Guru is arguably the biggest bomb of the year, having opened in June, and closed within weeks of its release.
The Federal Trade Commission, in its report on the marketing of food to kids, handed the food industry a massive victory this week in its fight to avoid regulation over the childhood obesity issue.
The report found no area of kids-oriented food marketing that would require regulation. Instead, the FTC called for more companies to join the industry’s voluntary self-regulation group, the Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative, established by the Council of Better Business Bureaus in November 2006.
At a time of growing concern that the rise of ad networks is commoditizing branded content, the Online Publishers Association has released a report showing that ads perform better when they’re placed on branded content sites.
The OPA report, titled “Improving Ad Performance Online: The Impact of Advertising on Branded Content Sites,” uses Dynamic Logic’s MarketNorms, a database of scores that measures ad performance across a wide range of sites and is meant to represent the Internet as a whole.
The report compares ad effectiveness of branded content sites as represented by the OPA’s membership to MarketNorms, portals and ad networks.
