Madison and 42nd » Advertising

Coke Download The Concert

MadisonAnd42nd — Mon, 21 May 2012 06:41:54 +0000

This idea by Coca-Cola Colombia is kind of crazy. And this is probably the reason why I like it, even if I feel the engagement model with consumers was pretty complicated. But let’s get to the point… Coke organized a live concert where the band was playing on a stage at an altitude of 50m. In order to bring the band down to earth, the audience had to literally and manually “download” them. The public was prompted to discover Coke FM, an online radio station, with the trigger that by downloading the songs of the band, the performers would have also been lowered closer to the public.

The agency is Ogilvy & Mather Colombia. Thanks Mauricio for sending this through.

Handicapping the Cable Upfront

MadisonAnd42nd — Mon, 21 May 2012 04:15:57 +0000

Cable networks have griped for years that it’s past time they achieved parity in ad rates with broadcasters—and at some conglomerates (namely, NBCU), cable outshines broadcast. But despite cable’s sturm und drang about showing the big boys who’s boss, it all hinges on CBS’ CPM gains, says Pivotal analyst Brian Wieser, formerly lead forecaster for Interpublic. “The negotiation for the cable players is relative to that number,” he explains. “If you believe you deserve a premium, it’s a premium to that number.” Following are upfront week highlights among cable’s key players.

NBCU

Nets Prime the Pump

MadisonAnd42nd — Mon, 21 May 2012 04:04:41 +0000

Trying to gauge the quality of a 22-episode television series by watching three minutes of foot-age culled from the pilot is akin to declaring your major when you’re in kindergarten. And yet, this is what media buyers and clients do every year in May, when the five English-language broadcast networks host their respective up-front presentations in New York.

Sure, even an untrained eye can spot a stinker from the cheap seats in Avery Fisher Hall. Last year, an audible groan rose up after ABC teased the cross-dressing comedy series Work It, an outburst that was followed in short order by a good deal of nervous giggling. But a hit? That’s another story altogether.

Only a handful of new series really seemed to distinguish themselves this year, a limited roster that includes NBC’s apocalyptic drama Revolution, CBS’ cops, mobsters and casinos period piece Vegas and the Fox midseason thriller The Following.

On the comedy front, clients are abuzz about Matthew Perry’s latest NBC effort Go On and Fox’s The Mindy Project, a tour de force created by Mindy Kaling.

This could all change once the pilots begin circulating in a week or so, a deluge that coincides with the period in which clients will begin registering their TV budgets. And even if the National Football League is the only must-buy on the tube, most clients still tend to invest in individual series.

“The programming mix is still a priority,” said Chris Geraci, president of national broadcast, OMD. “Some clients are more concerned with atmospherics and the particular programming environment, and of course we often have our own reasons for aligning brands with certain shows.”

Analysts believe the 2012-13 marketplace should be healthy, though it’s unlikely it will top last year. For one thing, scatter is nowhere near as strong as it was in the ﬁrst and second quarters of 2011. And in the absence of registered budgets, trying to estimate demand is a matter of guesswork.

“Across all the agencies at SMG, we’re having a more difficult time getting conﬁrmed, approved budgets from clients,” said John Muszynski, chief investment ofﬁcer, Starcom MediaVest Group Exchange. “We probably won’t get a gauge on where the budgets will be until after Memorial Day weekend, and until that happens, we won’t have a handle on where pricing will be.”

Muszynski added that while it’s possible a few early deals could close before the end of the month, they would likely be “protection deals,” holds placed without establishing any actual pricing.

While it’s too early to predict exactly how the upfront will play out, the smart money says Fox will kick-start the market. “They’ll go out early to the auto and studio categories,” Muszynski said.

For his part, Geraci believes that there’s one sureﬁ re way to get the ball rolling: “The network that goes for share and not price could move very quickly.”

NBC
The most beleaguered broadcast net hangs its hopes on Christina Aguilera and a monkey.

Leading off the Peacock’s exhaustive—and exhausting—upfront pitch, NBC broadcasting chairman Ted Harbert on Monday threw cold water on the proceedings, delaying the start of the morning’s entertainment in order to lecture the Radio City crowd on the industry’s outdated currency.

“The conversion of the sales metric to C3 a few years ago was an important ﬁ rst step” in getting a handle on time-shifted viewing, Harbert told the assembled, before adding that live commercial ratings plus three days of DVR playback don’t provide a full picture of American viewing habits. “When you consider the fact that over one-third of all prime-time programs have at least 40 percent of their weekly viewing time- shifted, it’s time to consider moving to a C7 metric,” he said.

If Harbert’s words seem a challenge to parse now, they weren’t much clearer in real time. Beyond the thicket of knotty math (what exactly is 40 percent of one-third?), the Ted Talk struck a discordant note with media buyers on hand.

“He picked a really odd time to bring that up,” said Sam Armando, svp, director of strategic intelligence at Starcom MediaVest Group Exchange. “NBC had a lot to convey about their programming and it’s a shame that nine out of 10 people who walked out of there were talking about C3 versus C7 rather than, say, Revolution.” While Harbert is correct to point out that the ratings system is far from ideal, C7 is a nonstarter. Ninety-eight percent of prime-time viewing takes place within the ﬁrst three days of playback, a majority that effectively renders the additional four days of little consequence.

First Mover: Chris Hughes

MadisonAnd42nd — Mon, 21 May 2012 04:04:03 +0000

Specs
Age 28
New gig Publisher, editor in chief, The New Republic
Old gig Facebook co-founder, Obama campaign strategist, founder of Jumo

After Facebook and Washington, what’s it like to be part of the old-media establishment?
It’s completely different from the startup world. TNR is one of those big institutions, but in some ways, we’re a bit of a startup. We’re trying to build a sustainable business model for the next 10 to 20 years, which is going to be a challenge. But you look at The Atlantic, The Economist—there are traditional print models that are flourishing. I feel like there’s a hunger out there for big-idea journalism. Book sales are at an all-time high. The magazines I’m talking about, all their print numbers are up. Not to overstate it—it’s a small order of people—but I think the conventional wisdom that young people don’t want to read is a little misplaced.

How are you going to make this magazine viable? Do you plan to go broader or keep it as a niche audience magazine, for example?
I think we can do both. The magazine has historically been for an intellectual milieu. I do think we have to expand the coverage. To be a big-idea publication. We took down the paywall because some of the best content we have was hard to get to, and it didn’t make sense as a way to reach subscribers. My goal for the publication is to be the magazine New York and D.C. and L.A. people read on the weekends. It’s sort of for the cr

Facebook Still Courting Media Business

MadisonAnd42nd — Mon, 21 May 2012 04:03:36 +0000

Mark Zuckerberg has long encouraged other industries to follow the lead of the gaming business, which he believes has been transformed by social media. The Facebook CEO often points to companies like Zynga, which have built massive businesses entirely on Facebook’s platform, as a model for industries like music, books and of course, media.

Over the past year or so, Facebook began intensifying its courtship of the media industry. So far, media definitely finds Facebook attractive but seems afraid of getting hurt. In fact, while it seems clear that while Facebook and the media business are becoming further intertwined, media has so far rebuffed Facebook’s larger ambition—to be the place where media is consumed, talked about and shared for the majority of Web users.

Take Hulu for example. The Web video hub was one of the first companies to build an app on Facebook leveraging its Open Graph—the company’s set of automated content-sharing tools. The thinking was, users could download the app, watch their favorite shows on Facebook, and their friends would be alerted instantly that Gregg loves Grey’s Anatomy.

But last month, Hulu ditched what Facebook calls a "canvas app" and instead redirects users to Hulu.com. Hulu executives wouldn’t comment, but its likely that Hulu didn’t see any reason to cede some its traffic to Facebook, not to mention all that data on its users’ habits.

Among Hulu’s brethren, while most TV networks have dedicated (and quite popular) show pages, NBC doesn’t have a viewing app, nor does The CW. Fox never even built one. Even when Hulu was streaming shows on Facebook, ABC never permitted its shows to be delivered on the site. Curiously, the non-Hulu network CBS does allow fans to stream full episodes of shows like The Big Bang Theory on Facebook—but that’s using CBS’ player, not within an app.

The movie business is being equally cautious. Take Warner Bros. The company made headlines last year when it announced that Facebook users would be able to pay $3 to stream The Dark Knight. Warner Bros. still offers 14 titles, but the offering hardly seems to have taken off and other studios have steered clear.

Magazine companies aren’t exactly rushing to build Facebook editions either. Time.com has enabled frictionless sharing, and Sports Illustrated is looking to follow suit. But as far as delivering full-fledged magazines on the site? Not right now. “We’re exploring ways to implement Facebook sharing in ways that make sense for us. Ideally we want it to benefit our properties,” said SI.com editor in chief Paul Fichtenbaum.

What about the Web publishing world, which seemed to embrace the frictionless sharing made possible by the Open Graph in a big way? Early partners like Yahoo News and The Washington Post saw traffic referrals soar and their brand profiles blow up as their headlines flooded Facebook News Feeds.

Where Some See Controversy, Others See Ideas

MadisonAnd42nd — Mon, 21 May 2012 04:03:11 +0000

Times may be tough for news–weeklies on the advertising and circulation fronts, but they’re having a bit of fun lately. While Time and Bloomberg Businessweek collected top honors from their journalistic peers, Time and Newsweek reveled in the attention they got for their controversial covers.

While some were quick to point to these and other sensational covers as a sign of a desperation for magazines, others see a resurgence of conceptual and other experimental cover treatments, and with it, reason for optimism about the medium. Notably, in the Society for Publication Designers’ just-named 2012 awards, all 15 of the cover award finalists were idea covers.

The concept cover—whose current enthusiasm is driven by a handful of weeklies, like the Richard Turley-designed Businessweek and Tina Brown’s Newsweek—was made famous by George Lois, who artfully blended images, words and ideas to produce covers for Esquire like the one of Muhammad Ali as St. Sebastian. It gave way to the celebrity cover, though, designer Roger Black lamented, and “it pretty much became accepted wisdom that idea covers don’t sell because it takes too long to figure out what the idea is in that half-second it takes to grab [the newsstand buyer].”

Now, with the newsstand shrinking relative to overall circulation, why not embrace the idea cover? “For many magazines, the newsstand has become less important,” said Adam Moss, editor of New York. “It’s always been true for us, but now it’s true for others as well. When you don’t have to reach the widest possible audience, you’re allowed to use the audience for different purposes, and one of those is to make a statement, do something people will talk about, create excitement.”

Clearly, Businessweek, which has raised the bar for design overall under Turley, has been a big influence here. His graphic-heavy and often risqu

This Man Gets in People's Heads

MadisonAnd42nd — Mon, 21 May 2012 04:02:47 +0000

Kevin Allen began his advertising career in account service but made his mark as a pitchman for McCann Erickson, helping win accounts such as Marriott, Lufthansa and, most famously, MasterCard. He also worked for Lowe before launching consultancy Kevin Allen Partners in 2010. In a new book, The Hidden Agenda, Allen, 58, asserts that emotional connections are the key to success—whether pitching accounts or restocking airplane bathrooms, which he did in college as the “TP man” (as flight crews called him) for Marriott In-Flight Services.

Adweek: What do you mean in the book when you urge people to “think like a shrink”?
When we get into a business environment, we think, right, OK, now, it’s market share and brand this and blah blah that. And somehow the human element of the agency selection decision all kind of goes away. I’ve come to realize that the emotions that are tied up in the selection decision are even greater than what one person goes through as an individual. You don’t suspend human desire just because you’re in a business setting.

Are you surprised that MasterCard’s “Priceless” campaign, which McCann created in a pitch battle, has lasted 15 years?
Yes. Very few of these things become part of popular culture. I don’t think anybody could have predicted that. But I think perhaps we as an industry lose interest and patience with our own ideas a heck of a lot faster than the consumer does.

You called the old McCann gang an “eclectic group of loonies.” What did you mean by that?
I meant that in the warmest, most affectionate way because I did and do love that team. What was remarkable about what [former CEO] Jim Heekin achieved was not this sort of cookie-cutter “McCann guy” but, rather, this extraordinary diversity. He always understood how to field a team: Nina [DiSesa] who was a larger-than-life yet warm person who brought humanity to the group; Jonathan [Cranin] and his crispness; Nat [Puccio] and his passion; and Margie [Altschuler] and her persistence. Everybody brought something very special, and yet everybody was so wildly different.

What do you think about McCann today?
In a hundred-year history, there are ups and downs. McCann has had its moments of blazing glory and moments of disaster, even going back to [ex-president/CEO Marion] Harper, when he was tossed out of the company. …What the company always needs to do in those [down] times is examine what the strength of that brand is among the sea of agencies. Grit, competitiveness and being a winner is what the DNA of that place has always been about, and I believe still is. You can never, ever be something you’re not. You get found out really fast.

What did you learn from your college job as the “TP man” for Marriott?
I had this perception that the joy of work and the pride in what we do is obtained from having meaningful jobs. You know, “I’m an ad guy, I make ads,” and all this other stuff. The people that I worked alongside of were all the same from the point of view of coming home and having what I call the 6 o’clock conversation, saying, “Guess what I did today?”

Prime-Time Matchup

MadisonAnd42nd — Mon, 21 May 2012 04:01:28 +0000

MONDAY 9-10
ABC Dancing With the Stars vs. CBS 2 Broke Girls/ Mike & Molly vs. FOX The Mob Doctor vs. NBC The Voice

As much as you never want to drag a knife through the innards of the golden goose, you also don’t want to let the plucky little revenue source sit around and get too fat to lay eggs. Little surprise, then, that NBC chose to return The Voice for a fall cycle. Not only is it the network’s top-performing entertainment property, it’s literally the only viable lead-in for the new drama Revolution.

Barring an unforeseen catastrophe, The Voice should dominate this particular part of the night. Heading into its 15th cycle, Dancing With the Stars is on the downhill slide, dropping from a 4.5 rating in the 18-49 demo in 2010-11 to a 3.2 this season. And while 2 Broke Girls is the top-rated freshman comedy, it closed out its ﬁrst campaign at a series low of 3.3. Moreover, 2BG no longer will enjoy the beneﬁt of the How I Met Your Mother lead-in. Instead, the show will be required to build on the new comedy Partners.

Of course, nobody ever got rich by underestimating CBS Entertainment president Nina Tassler, so it’s possible that Partners will help maintain 2BG’s big deliveries. (Thematically, the two shows would seem to lock into one another like Lego.)

As it’s the only game in town, Fox could steal share among people looking for drama. Newcomer The Mob Doctor shares DNA with its lead-in, Bones, though that drama is beginning to exhibit signs of osteoporosis.

Video of the day: Honda Go Everywhere

MadisonAnd42nd — Sun, 20 May 2012 23:45:17 +0000

DDB South Africa has created a beautiful one minute animation to take consumers through the world of Honda. From lawn mowers to motorcycles, cars and motorboats, the power of dreams unveils everywhere. Not sure if the video will accomplish the mission of opening the Honda brand world to the public, but it is definitely worth watching.

via: Fubiz

Wash the dishes… or pay the bill?

MadisonAnd42nd — Sat, 19 May 2012 21:54:05 +0000

Another cool project for an uncool brand. In Brazil sponge brand Scotch-Brite created an amusing experience marketing initiative in partnership with several restaurants around the city of São Paulo. When people got their bills, they also received an invitation to wash their dishes. In exchange, they could leave the place without paying the check. What a fun idea to engage people with one of the less engaging products on earth!

The agency is Grey 141, São Paulo, Brazil.

via Comunicadores