Kahlua creates, produces and maintains full ownership of its own TV show.

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - With a new five-part travel series premiering Saturday on the Oxygen Network, Kahlua has accomplished what many advertisers are talking about but have yet to achieve in the branded entertainment space.

The coffee liqueur has created, produced and maintained full ownership of its own TV show, allowing it to control how its product and brand messages are portrayed.

Read the article: www.reuters.com

Vintage ad tactic shows new life: presenting sponsorships

The idea of a presenting sponsor taking ownership of a media channel is not new. As a tactic it enjoyed its broadcast heyday between 1930 and 1960, and has popped up periodically across all media ever since. Still, as I flicked through the August 22 issue of the New Yorker it dawned on me that it’s time is now.

As many will have read, that New Yorker issue had only one advertiser. Retail giant Target, abetted by Hayworth Marketing & Media and Peterson Milla Hooks, bought every ad site in the issue and then populated those spaces with exclusive images fashioned by world-renowned illustrators. The idea was that the works could have been in the magazine on artistic merit alone, but all incorporated the Target bulls-eye in one way or another, collectively giving the retailer ownership of the issue.
On a simple, immediate level, this campaign works because it is sufficiently unusual to have the disruptive, first-mover advantage that is central to many of today’s best campaigns. The smartest marketers have realized that if their advertising makes a unique statement, either in content or placement, it will spark a media and water-cooler conversation whose value will be tens or even hundreds of times the cost of the media buy.

Read the article: www.adage.com

Music file sharing to be offered legally

Online music fans will for the first time be able to legally share tracks by big names such as Oasis, Beyonce, David Bowie and Elvis Presley after the artists' record label signed a ground-breaking deal with a new internet service provider.
In what some see as signalling a dramatic shift in the way consumers buy music, the provider, Playlouder, has licensed acts from SonyBMG, the world's second largest record label, and is confident that the other two big record labels, Universal and EMI, will follow suit.

Illegal file sharing, which allows users of software such as Kazaa, Grokster and eDonkey to swap pirated tracks over the internet, has been blamed by the record industry for largely contributing to a 25% slump in global sales since 1999, worth around £1.3bn a year.

Playlouder is offering the first legal alternative with a comparable experience to the "peer to peer" file sharing sites often used to swap pirated tracks.

Subscribers will be charged £26 a month for a high speed broadband internet connection, similar to the price charged by BT, with the added attraction of being able to share as much music as they want with other subscribers at no extra cost.

Because there will be no restrictions on the format in which the traded music is encoded, users will be free to transfer songs to any type of digital music player, including the market leading Apple iPod, or burn them to CD.

However, not only will consumers have to pay for music which they currently acquire free, albeit illegally, but they will also have to change their internet provider.

Read the article: www.media.guardian.co.uk

How label-backed P2P was born

Andrew Lack wasn't like the other record label honchos, file-swapping maverick Wayne Rosso thought as he left Lack's swank office in a midtown Manhattan skyscraper.

That Lack, the chief executive of Sony BMG Music Entertainment, was even talking to Rosso showed he was more open-minded than most industry executives. That he was talking up the benefits of working together--even schmoozing with the man who used to run controversial peer-to-peer service Grokster--was downright amazing. "'I'm going to make you a millionaire,'" Rosso remembers Lack telling him. "So I told him, 'I'm all ears.'"

There was no more an unlikely pair in the music and technology business in early 2004. But behind the scenes, their growing camaraderie became one of the most important bridges between the warring recording industry and peer-to-peer companies.

Their relationship led to the creation of Mashboxx, a new kind of peer-to-peer company that's expected to go live in mid-September. Mashboxx is one of several avowedly law-abiding, peer-to-peer companies trying to thrive in the wake of June's landmark Supreme Court decision that found Grokster potentially liable for copyright infringement.

Read the article: www.news.com

Introducing video game brands to new audiences

Every May the entire video game industry congregates in one spot in Los Angeles to mingle, network and promote new and upcoming products. We all know that E3 is the event for publishers to showcase their newest titles to the media, analysts, and retailers, but how do these companies market their lucrative brands and IPs to companies outside the computer and video games industry? One solution would be to look to the RoadShow Hollywood, which is run by marketing entertainment company The L.A. Office.

Now in its eighth year RoadShow has consistently brought together film, television, and music executives with senior brand managers, retailers and agency executives from around the world. The major difference this year, however, is that RoadShow has finally decided to add gaming to its schedule. After all, how could a $10 billion (and growing) market be ignored? Most would say that this addition was overdue. In order to make room for gaming, RoadShow has extended its schedule to four days, September 26-29.

"We knew it was time to introduce gaming to this receptive audience of marketers and promotional partners as our attendees have been asking for it to be included during the last couple of years," said Mitch Litvak, President of The L.A. Office. "They are already using gaming in new ways to reach their audiences. It's looking like it will be the most popular day of the event."

Read the article: www.gamedaily.com

Auto giants push harder for magazine product placement

Marketing executives at GM’s Hummer division, a frequent advertiser in the glossy culture magazine Black Book, have often said they want exposure outside traditional ad pages.

In Black Book's spring/summer issue, they got it. The magazine’s editors conceived of, wrote and printed a brief article about Ratatat, a hot young band whose songs have received wide exposure in the carmaker’s commercials. The accompanying photo pictured band members with a Hummer superimposed near their heads.

“There was and is absolutely no quid pro quo,” said Eric Gertler, CEO at Black Book Media. “Great editors know that great ideas come from a multitude of sources and great editors need to know how to frame those ideas and know that they are free of any outside influence.” But there may not have been any story without the automaker’s influence, according to executives close to the situation.

That influence is being felt more than ever this year as automakers from Toyota’s Lexus to Detroit’s Big Three and their agencies all apply new energy to penetrating the once-hallowed ad/edit wall. While pressure from advertisers is nothing new, the rising number of requests from car companies to magazines of all stripes seems to signal a potentially more slippery twist in the road. And automakers are increasingly being abetted by page-hungry magazines.

Read the article: www.adage.com

"Martha" inks Branded Entertainment deals with GE, P&G, GM

"Martha", the new Martha Stewart-hosted syndication show, has signed on brands from General Electric, Procter & Gamble, and General Motors for season-long branded entertainment deals, according to media executives.

In addition to a sizable amount of media time bought on the show, executives say products will appear on set (or in segments), including kitchen appliances from GE and food products from P&G. The deals are priced in the millions, and also include extensions into other media areas in the Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia empire, particularly its magazine group.
Overall, the show has now sold about 75% of its inventory going into its fall premiere, and is looking for a few more deals before the show launches this fall.

During the upfront advertising market, some media buyers complained that "Martha" was priced on the same level--or higher--than other established syndicated shows. Media buyers say "Martha" inked deals between $18 and $22 for every thousand women 25-54 viewers (CPM). Some buyers say this a bit higher than the $17 to $20 Buena Vista Television gets for the longtime morning syndication show "Live with Regis & Kelly."

Read the article: www.mediapost.com

Pass the joystick, sonny, this is the future of driving

This game (Gran Turismo 4) would only be more real if a big spike shot out of the screen and skewered your head every time you crashed...you could definitely use GT4 as a device for trying out your next car,

Of course, like just about every car firm in the world, it took BMW about five seconds to realise that PlayStation reaches a part of the market that television advertising cannot.

Read the article: www.timesonline.co.uk

New branding reality: Off-TV platforms

For NBC's newest reality show "Meet Mister Mom," all four of the show's primary sponsors not only are integrated into the program and running numerous spots throughout the six-episode series, but they also all have launched marketing and promotional campaigns around their involvement in the show.

"Mister Mom" is the latest example of how for many blue-chip advertisers, the integration of products into program content no longer is enough. More and more brands are setting their sights on a loftier goal: building a marketing platform around a brand integration to take full advantage of the equity of the show.

Read the article: www.hollywoodreporter.com