Archive for June, 2009

“Benjamins” are $100 bills, but what’s a “Roosevelt”? A dime, of course. While the expression may not be accepted as street slang, Taco Bell is doing its best to popularize the new coinage with a tongue-in-cheek music video appearing in National CineMedia’s First Look pre-show feature in movie theaters across the country. The one-minute spot debuted last week in theaters in 171 markets nationwide, before “Transformer: Revenge of the Fallen” and “Public Enemies.” The TV version of the ad is set to debut this week.

The music video stars Bobby Edner as a hip-hop wannabe — complete with a blinged-out convertible, sidekick and gaggle of adoring females — who raps in praise of Taco Bell’s low-price menu, with nine items priced at $0.79, $0.89, and $0.99.

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Still looking for a lucrative model to monetize online video, NBC has a deal where Visa is sponsoring ad-free streaming on NBC.com. The credit-card marketer has signed to offer more than 200 episodes from “Friday Night Lights” and “The Office” without commercials. The NBC.com promotion carries a “Go Commercial Free” tag, in line with a 3-month-old Visa campaign with the “More People Go With Visa” catchphrase.

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CANNES, France — Advertising agencies and Internet companies once viewed each other as foes, but are now coming together to harness the potential for online advertising. Like many other segments, online ad spending has slowed from its previous breakneck pace during the deep recession, forcing companies to devise new ways to chase fewer dollars.

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PARIS (Reuters) - Advertising on mobile phones should really take off within two to three years, driven by new applications on smartphones and the growing popularity of social networks such as Facebook.

Executives, who attended last week’s Cannes Lions 2009 ad festival, told Reuters that emerging economies were also promising though the lack of a global mobile phone standard could be a brake to speedy development.

As more consumers embrace new technologies and devices such as smartphones, personified by Apple’s iPhone, mobile advertising is seen growing at an annual average of 45 percent to reach $28.8 billion within 5 years from a current $3.1 billion, according to Ineum Consulting.

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While TV broadcasters have the clear edge in online video, they had better establish some sturdy ad formats “while there are still revenues from the traditional business to support the transition to multiplatform,” according to new research from media analyst firm Screen Digest. “The next few years will be critical,” said Screen Digest analyst Arash Amel.

According to the report, the combined dominance of the leading broadcaster-supported platforms will drive the total ad-supported model for the distribution of online entertainment programming, news, sports and events in the U.S. to more than $1.45 billion in revenues by 2013.

“With better targeting and increased ad inventory, online TV services could be generating per-viewer revenues comparable to an average TV broadcast viewing in as little as three years,” said Amel

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Until now solely an audience measurement service, Quantcast on Monday launched a product for advertisers to better define and buy audiences online. By incorporating impressions from any site on Quantcast’s radar, the Quantcast Media Program is offering advertisers a scalable way to define target audiences via their own “data insights,” and apply this custom segmentation throughout the buying process. The product, according to Quantcast CEO Konrad Feldman, “brings the essential qualities of search marketing to display.”

“This new solution enables scale and end-to-end consistency in media planning, buying and delivery,” he said.

Taking customer interaction data from marketers’ media campaigns, search activity and brand site visitation, the new product endeavors to help marketers discover the distinctive characteristics of their most valuable consumer segments.

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Betting on consumer demand for increasingly complex video viewing, white-label video technology company Digitalsmiths on Monday debuted a new product for premium video content libraries. The new product provides premium video publishers with new functionality like a free-form single box video search capable of identifying videos by dialogue, objects within a scene, locations and other complex criteria. Based in Raleigh-Durham, N.C., Digitalsmiths provides publishers with video indexing and ad-targeting technology bundled with a white-label video service. Digitalsmiths’ suite of visual interpretation tools processes each frame of video using proprietary algorithms such as facial recognition, scene classification and object identification to build a unique time-based, metadata framework — or “metaframe” — of informed video tags.

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Advertisers and creative designers will soon have more artistic freedom to turn campaigns on Xbox Live into interactive and interconnected experiences reaching far beyond technology for television, Sean Alexander, director at Microsoft’s Advertising Business Group, said Monday. Microsoft plans to bring IAB specifications for rich media technologies, including Silverlight, to Xbox Live within the year. It will enable companies to build advertising campaigns that span four screens: desktop, television, mobile phone, and Surface. Microsoft’s Surface debuted last year when AT&T and Sheraton released promotions based on the technology.

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The Online Publishers Association announced Tuesday that 37 of its members, whose sites reach 68% of the total U.S. Internet audience, have begun offering the three new larger new ad units the group unveiled in March. Several — including The New York Times, CNN and MSNBC.com — are already running, or will soon launch, campaigns for brands such as Bank of America and Mercedes-Benz.

The rollout follows the OPA’s announcement of the new ad formats three months ago as part of an effort to encourage better ad creative and highlight the Internet’s potential as a brand advertising medium. The three jumbo-sized ad units are:

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Betting on consumer demand for increasingly complex video viewing, white-label video technology company Digitalsmiths on Monday debuted a new product for premium video content libraries. The new product provides premium video publishers with new functionality like a free-form single box video search capable of identifying videos by dialogue, objects within a scene, locations and other complex criteria. Based in Raleigh-Durham, N.C., Digitalsmiths provides publishers with video indexing and ad-targeting technology bundled with a white-label video service. Digitalsmiths’ suite of visual interpretation tools processes each frame of video using proprietary algorithms such as facial recognition, scene classification and object identification to build a unique time-based, metadata framework — or “metaframe” — of informed video tags.

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