Archive for August 5th, 2008

The movie Bruno is still in production and fans have yet to see even a piece of rough footage, but there’s already publicity building for Sacha Baron Cohen’s next foray into over-the-top comedy.

Several recent stunts—like cage fights that turned into homoerotic episodes, staged in Arkansas, no less, and a former Mossad officer “punk’d” in public—are heating up the blogosphere about Bruno. The movie is Cohen’s follow-up to the mega-hit Borat, set for release next summer.

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Discovery Communications is throwing its weight behind a new initiative designed to encourage students to work toward developing green solutions for their schools, homes and communities.

In conjunction with the Siemens Foundation and the National Science Teachers Association, Discovery’s education unit will help launch the “Siemens We Can Change the World Challenge,” the nation’s first sustainability-education program for students from kindergarten through the twelfth grade.

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Over the past few years, we’ve gotten accustomed to hearing how the internet was going to reduce TV viewing and how it’s going to supplant TV as the primary advertising medium. Much to the surprise of the pundits, these expected outcomes have yet to take place. TV usage is actually up compared to the year 2000 and continues to increase despite the fact that people are spending more and more time online. And the TV market remains very healthy. Not even the impact of a crippling strike and a recessionary economy could keep the upfront broadcast TV market from registering year-to-year gains.

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There are distinct mutterings from the TV industry in the US about regulating branded television by forcing channels to identify product placement. It seems the process of bringing some sort of regulation to branded television was started by screen writers who clearly are becoming more and more irritated at their producers insisting on them including products or lines of dialogue paid for by advertisers.

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Say it isn’t so! According to an Internet rumor (are they any other kind these days?), funnymen Steve Carell and Seth Rogen may join a new version of the comedy classic Ghostbusters.

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ONCE again, George Foreman is out to sell his name.As familiar as his name is, more people probably know Mr. Foreman as the affable grill pitchman of the 1990s rather than the ornery heavyweight boxing champion of the 1970s. They may also know him as the face of Meineke mufflers, a street kid who became a born-again preacher, and the guy who named all five of his sons George.

He is colorful, yes. But is there still life left in the George Foreman brand?

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The Nielsen Co. has bundled psychographic data from Mindset Media into its Homescan Consumer Panel, allowing CPG brand managers to view the “mindsets” of their target consumers, and then make appropriate buys across Mindset’s ad network, as well as WPP’s 24/7 Real Media.

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The Seattle-based subsidiary of Comcast, thePlatform, has reached deals to deliver video to Web sites aimed at subscribers to the high-speed Internet services of Time Warner Cable Inc., Cablevision Systems Corp. and Cox Communications Inc.

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Already facing Congressional scrutiny in the U.S., behavioral targeting company NebuAd could also soon find itself under the lens in Canada. An advocacy group connected with the University of Ottawa Law School has requested that the Canadian privacy commissioner investigate whether it’s legal for Internet service providers to sell information about subscribers’ Web habits to companies like NebuAd.

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Dauman

Sales at Viacom’s U.S. cable networks division stalled in the second quarter of 2008, as advertising revenue grew just 1 percent, falling short of the company’s already watered-down outlook of 3 percent to 4 percent growth.

Speaking at the media conglomerate’s earnings call late Tuesday afternoon, Viacom president and CEO Philippe Dauman said the scatter market died down midway through the second quarter, undermining an already conservative outlook. (On May 28, Viacom issued a revised projection for the quarter, as Dauman told investors that ad revenue would grow between 3 percent and 4 percent versus the year-ago period; four weeks prior to that announcement, the company had forecast a 7 percent gain.)

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