Archive for August 4th, 2008

Has the phrase “jump the shark” jumped the shark? Or, more to the point, should we be saying that it has “nuked the fridge”?  There is ample evidence that “jump the shark” — which emerged from a 1980s dorm-room discussion of a particularly ridiculous episode of the TV show “Happy Days” — has gone mainstream, and then some. New York Times columnists casually invoke the phrase to describe things that they perceive as being past their prime. Last week, the Motley Fool Web site used it to speculate that the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting might have lost its mojo, much the way that Fonzie, the leather-jacketed lothario on “Happy Days,” did when he water-skied over a shark.
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Media are inescapable. They’re present in every aspect of life, at all times and in all locations. A realistic approach to media research today has to take into account that we expect to be stimulated constantly without concern for channels.

With this in mind, the U.K.’s Institute of Practitioners in Advertising devised TouchPoints, a consumer-centric survey that looks intimately at daily behavior and media consumption across all platforms in the region.

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Will Smith is to revive his role in the futuristic action movie I Am Legend for a prequel.

Director Francis Lawrence has confirmed he is working on a follow-up to the hit 2007 film and Smith’s character Dr. Robert Neville will return to complete the beginning of the story.

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A rather sizable number of senior American marketers - 19 percent - say their organizations have bought advertising in return for a news story, despite growing criticism of these “pay-for-play” practices, according to a recent survey conducted on behalf of PRWeek and Manning Selvage & Lee (MS&L) by Millward Brown. The sixth annual Marketing Management Survey polled 252 U.S. chief marketing officers, VPs of marketing and marketing directors and managers about digital media and marketing ethics.

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A new agency is banking on hip-hop tie-ins and concert-tour promotions to help international advertisers leverage the Bollywood movie industry to gain a foothold in India’s huge consumer marketplace.

Cashmere Agency, a Los Angeles-based events and online marketing company, has set up shop in the country to facilitate a cross-cultural exchange for the entertainment community. Cashmere Asia is based in Mumbai. Karan Wadhera serves as managing director.

Its first project is with the new Bollywood film, Singh Is Kinng, that will hit movie theaters on Aug. 8 and stars Indian actor Akshay Kumar. The hip-hop tie-in involves Snoop Dogg starring in a music video alongside Kumar.

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Taking the phrase “You gotta have faith” to heart, NBC Sports said today that Faith Hill will star in a campaign for Sunday Night Football and, for the second season, will perform the opening theme during the 2008 season.

Spots featuring Hill, a five-time Grammy Award-winner and multiplatinum recording artist, broke Aug. 3 during NBC’s coverage of the Pro Football Hall of Fame Game between the Indianapolis Colts and Washington Redskins. The spot sees a group of NFL stars preparing and then serving pregame snacks for Hill and her and her girlfriends. The players include Dwight Freeney, Bob Sanders, Tony Gonzalez, Torry Holt and Ray Lewis.

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Wall-E, the newest Pixar release is a box office hit that has even surpassed Ratatouille’s figures!

The fact that the film stirs debate has been something of a help. People have been talking about Wall-E’s girlfriend, Eve, a pretty female robot with an immaculate and pure design. All that’s missing is a little apple affixed to her perfect silhouette and an “i” prefixed to her name to bring to mind a very well-know brand: Apple.

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It’s hard to imagine Elle magazine without thinking of Bravo’s “Project Runway.” But when Carol Smith first came to the Hachette Filipacchi title in 2002 to build the magazine’s brand as senior VP-group publishing director, the concept of adding brands to reality TV was still largely foreign.

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Young-male-centric original content hub maniaTV has signed four deals to develop new series which will potentially populate the Web site’s growing Comedy On Demand channel.

The Los Angeles, Calif.-based Web video upstart, which currently boasts of a sketch comedy series produced by National Lampoon as well as the upcoming Knight Rider spoof Midnight Rida, inked a slew of pacts at the recently concluded Just for Laughs Comedy festival in Montreal, Quebec.

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The Wii and DS may be losing momentum in Japan, but brisk sales growth around the world and a booming market for its games helped Nintendo profits surge last quarter. Japanese vidgame giant reported a 34% rise in net income to ¥107.27 billion ($993 million) on revenue of $3.92 billion, up 24% from the same quarter a year ago.

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