Archive for May, 2009

Before I talk about “Maneater,” premiering this Saturday at 9 p.m. on Lifetime (it concludes Sunday at 9 p.m.), we need to discuss that the full title is “Maneater, a Lifetime summer event presented by Vaseline aloe fresh.”Kids, I believe this is the future of TV. On a scale of 1 to Annie and Dixon talking lovingly about Dr. Pepper on “90210,” the Vaseline product placement in “Maneater” is about a five.

The problem is when LA socialite Clarissa (Sarah Chalke) starts waxing about the glories of the new Vaseline aloe fresh the action in the movie comes to a stop. It is awkward and clunky. “It’s gel. Gel is the new lotion isn’t it,” Clarissa gushes. That kind of dialogue glaringly sticks out and this kind of product placement doesn’t sway me.

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With companies allocating more of their marketing budgets to online media, it’s important to know what to look for and ask about when working with new-media companies.

Alignment with your goals, audience, reach: these criteria apply across all media buys. However, other issues are specific to the online world: online metrics, conversion accountability, reputation of Web sites and more.

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Activision is looking to stress the variety of bands and music represented in the fifth iteration of its successful Guitar Hero franchise with an online scavenger hunt for consumers to identify all of the 85 bands represented on the game. “We have a very active fan base,” Amy Longhi, director of global brand management for Guitar Hero, tells Marketing Daily. “We wanted to do something that engaged them and got them to participate as we prepare to launch ‘Guitar Hero 5.’”

All this week, the company has been announcing band participation via news, gaming and entertainment programming (both Web and television). Through the game’s official site, GH5.GuitarHero.com, consumers are encouraged to find these news items. Properties involved in the announcements include Rollingstone.com, IGN.com, Yahoo News, G4 (and G4TV), as well as the sites of the bands themselves.

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The American Legacy Foundation’s (ALF) nine-year-old “truth” campaign wants to help Big Tobacco hire new “Big C” Suite executives. The youth smoking prevention campaign, known for guerrilla theatre and dark parodies of the tobacco industry, is launching a new effort, “Do You Have What It Takes,” that mimics job-recruitment interviews.The campaign — comprising television, print, cinema and online advertisements, social networking and a new Web site — plays on the idea that even in the recession, there’s always employment at the cigarette factory.

The campaign — timed with the “truth” campaign’s annual summer grassroots tour, which hits over 30 states and starts late June — will run from June through early 2010, with a hiatus from November to January.

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 A top McDonald’s executive said Thursday the company is capitalizing on lower pricing to increase its advertising reach without much change to its budget. It is no surprise that much of that added exposure is coming in local markets, where TV and radio stations are struggling in light of the recession.  President-COO Ralph Alvarez said “a drop in media rates” is allowing the restaurant chain to garner more gross rating points or added media weight this year for core offerings, such as Big Macs and its dollar menu.

“We have not cut our advertising dollars, so we can use those extra weights in a significant way to drive the business,” Alvarez said at an investor event.

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The average cost per of a prime-time network TV commercial fell 3.7% to $126,204 during the first quarter of 2009, according to an analysis released this morning by TargetCast TCM. The analysis, which is based on data from SQAD’s NetCosts service, indicates that the rate of network prime-time price erosion has begun to moderate from other recent quarters. The analysis also found that Fox currently has the highest average unit cost at $253,000, while NBC has the lowest ($85,000).

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Yahoo, the Big 3 online player that has been looked on as a wounded beast ever since Microsoft’s failed takeover attempt last year, and the subsequent exodus of senior executives, is showing strong signs of market leadership, according an analysis released this morning by the equity research team at J.P. Morgan. In fact, the analysts, led by Imran Khan, have been maintaining an “overweight” rating for Yahoo’s shares based on an assumption of a new deal with Microsoft, now say that ratings is based on the “improving fundamental strength” of Yahoo’s own operations, especially its growing dominance of the online display advertising marketplace, its increasing online audience share, and the improvement of its search advertising business.

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Having gone from zero to mass market globally in three short years, online video is the fastest-growing media platform in history, according to a new report from social media research consultancy Trendstream and research firm Lightspeed. In one week in January, 97 million Americans viewed a streaming clip online — as many as are tuning into any major broadcast network — according to a recent survey of 1,000 U.S. active Web users ages 16-65.

What’s more, with 72% of U.S. Web users watching clips online, Web video outstrips both blogging and social networking, and is now the leading “social-media platform.”

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I recall only the broad brush strokes of the movie Cast Away.Guy with a beard. Diminishing girth. Sand.

I did not remember, until I reviewed the movie outline, that Tom Hanks plays a FedEx employee, which says a lot, I think, about what a poor subject I would make for proving the efficacy of product placements in movies – or television programs, for that matter.

What did stick was Mr. Hanks’s whiningly irritating voice uttering one word: “Wilson.”

Wilson was a volleyball and Mr. Hanks’s stoic pal through the tribulation of being stranded on that desert island. What I did not know, until I read a story on the subject in the Journal of Popular Culture, was that the Wilson brand was a genuine inspiration in the writing of the script. (“Unpaid Advertising: The Case of Wilson the Volleyball in Cast Away ,” is the delightfully named paper.) Could it be that I accepted – and crucially recalled – the brand name because the presence of the volleyball was authentic?

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Sunkist is using everything from break dancing grannies to basketball phenom “Baby Jordan” to show that it is “12 ounces of awesome.”

The new brand repositioning, which targets trend savvy teens and young adults, broke this week. The Dr Pepper Snapple Group learned seen how powerful YouTube, Facebook and MySpace can be when it leveraged Tay Zonday for “Chocolate Rain” to promote its Cherry Chocolate Diet Dr Pepper and Judson Laipply for Orange Crush.

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