Online advertorials worry watchdogs

Weather.com's decision earlier this month to start running advertorials for Scott's fertilizer--a first for that site--evidences the growing trend of online content paid for by sponsors, say online media experts.

And while the watchdogs say there's nothing inherently wrong with advertorials, they stress that publishers should clarify that the content is paid for. Without such disclaimers, they say, consumers will eventually lose confidence in the Web as a source of information.

"The public already perceives that advertisers have an influence on content," says Al Tompkins, who teaches broadcast and online journalism at The Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla. The prevalence of advertorials, at least those without disclaimers, "only adds to the public skepticism that coverage is for sale," he says.

Traditional publishing associations such as the American Society of Magazine Editors issue guidelines stating that advertorials should be clearly marked as such. But Web-only publishers have yet to agree on any standards.

One reason, says Tom Regan, executive director of the Online News Association, is that it's relatively easy for magazines and newspapers to place the word "advertorial" on the same page as paid articles, because they can do so unobtrusively. It's harder to be clear--yet still low-profile--on the Web, where articles are often posted via a series of links. So far, says Regan, publishers have made advertorial policies on "an institution by institution basis."

Read the article: www.mediapost.com

Product Placement: Agencies Debate Next Steps

Product placement has gone from a strategically placed box of Oreo cookies on an episode of "Friends" to a Mattel-themed "The Apprentice" and a Pontiac Oprah-mercial. What's next for product placement--and the marriage of Hollywood and Madison Avenue that brings it together?

That question was raised at Thursday's panel entitled "The Next Big Idea: The Future of Branded Entertainment," presented by the Hollywood Reporter at The Museum of Television and Radio as part of Advertising Week.

The panelists were Linda Goldstein, Partner, Marketing Advertising and Media, Manatt, Phelps & Phillips; Laura Caraccioli-Davis, SVP/Director, SMG Entertainment, Starcom MediaVest Group; Matthew Ringel, President, Games Media Properties; and David Collins, co-founder, Scout Productions.

For successful product integration to take place, there obviously needs to be a mutual respect for one another, and Caraccioli-Davis admits that "it takes a different skill set to work with Madison Avenue."

The secret to making a successful product integration is to have a brand become a part of the character's lifestyle. Collins used HBO's "Sex and the City" as example of how Carrie Bradshaw's Apple laptop and Manolo Blahniks were a part of her "lifestyle." And the Manolo Blahniks name became a household familiarity.

For advertisers looking to dabble in product placement, the panelists gave advice on how to measure ROI. It's impossible to measure with the existing traditional models.

"If you are looking for exposure or to make your product hip, don't put measurement tools in place," advised Goldstein.

Video games are another arena chock full of product placement, and the medium is a difficult one to multitask to.

"Videogamers are very passionate about gaming. When you're playing, you're focused on the game," [as opposed to reading a newspaper and watching TV at the same time--you can tune out the TV] said Caraccioli-Davis. "It's hard to multitask while gaming," she continued.

Read the article: www.mediapost.com

Furnishing an entire reality show

Miramax's Project Runway, a reality show about the search for a new cutting-edge fashion designer, has signed a product integration and marketing deal with Drexel

Drexel Heritage will furnish the sets and production facilities for the new reality show, 'Project Runway.' Yet, the two aren't odd bedfellows, said executives from Drexel, a 100-year-old furniture company that's always been more Connecticut country club but wants to let out its inner downtown bohemian.

The one-hour show, hosted by supermodel Heidi Klum, will put a group of Tommy Hilfiger wannabes in a downtown New York loft to live and work together.

Drexel will furnish the loft where the show's contestants will live and their workspace at the Parsons School of Design. The series, on NBC Universal-owned Bravo, launches Dec. 1.

"Anything they're sitting on, lounging around, sleeping in, it's ours," said Stephen Carlson, a marketing and public relations executive at Drexel. "We're integrated throughout their space."

Bought about 2 1/2 years ago by Furniture Brands International, home of Broyhill and Thomasville, Drexel is trying to get younger and hipper. Its previous target was the affluent 45-plus demographic. Executives said they are trying to shift that down to a mid-to-late 20s and 30s consumer.


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Broadcast ad biz poised to enter new frontier

NEW YORK - As Madison Avenue mounts a tribute to itself this week with the inaugural Advertising Week events in Manhattan, industry veterans say the ad business is on the cusp of the kind of sweeping changes not seen since the dawn of network television more than 50 years ago. Local and national broadcast TV outlets have taken the lion's share of domestic advertising expenditures since the late 1950s. But today, a growing number of marketers are finding that TV is no longer the only -- or even the best -- route to consumers. Advertising dollars that routinely would have gone to broadcast TV in years past is now going to cable and interactive television, the Internet and even nontraditional approaches like event marketing and public relations.

Read the article: www.hollywoodreporter.com

Call to legalise file-sharing with taxes

Pop piracy should be decriminalised and the music industry should realise that efforts to stop illegal downloading are doomed, a conference has been told.

Instead the music industry should embrace file-sharers, said technology journalist and author Andrew Orlowski in a keynote speech at the Interactive In The City conference being held in Manchester.

Mr Orlowski said the record labels should look to novel ways to generate cash to support new artists.

One way could be the addition of a small surcharge to net subscription fees which could be shared among artists whose music is being downloaded.

Read the article: www.bbc.co.uk

Break out

LONDON - Hailed by some as the future of television, and by others as the end of programme quality, advertiser-funded TV production is experiencing a boost from an unlikely source: central government.

COI Communications, the executive agency that advises government departments and related agencies on how best to spend their marketing money, has developed In Good Company, a four-part series that will air on ITV1 in peaktime from next Thursday. It is the fourth COI-backed TV series on British television in recent months. The format may sound familiar - four struggling businesses are teamed with well-known business mentors who assess how they could do better - but the programme's evolution is a model that a growing number of advertisers now hope to emulate. In Good Company was conceived and paid for by Investors in People (IiP) to spread its message - that business success comes from investing in people.

Working with the COI, IiP approached the media specialist Drum and the production company Enteraction TV to create the programme format. This was then offered to and accepted by ITV. In return for funding and developing the series, IiP will be credited within the programme titles and use the programme as the centrepiece of a promotional campaign. "We considered broadcast sponsorship and conventional TV advertising but they were either too costly or unable to deliver the message we needed to convey," IiP's director of marketing Nicola Maine explains.

Another significant public sector funder of TV programmes is the National Blood Service. It paid for and conceived Blood Matters, a factual series about blood donation among different ethnic groups which has just aired on Channel 4. And it was also behind two daytime factual series, Lifeblood and Extra Time, both of which recently went out on Five.

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

Marketers look to video games to drive their messages home

Research and Markets (http://www.researchandmarkets.com) has announced the addition of Marketers Look to Video Games to Drive Their Messages Home to their offering.

Advertisers, advertising agencies, and media buyers are increasingly worried about the effectiveness of traditional advertising formats. Whether it is due to the adoption of digital video recorders (DVRs), TV programs on DVD, rising subscriptions to satellite radio, or consumers watching less television, traditional media's effectiveness as an advertising platform is declining.

Marketers are looking to new advertising vehicles to reach fickle consumers. One such platform - video games - represents significant potential. The video game industry is already a mass market comprising more than 108 million gamers 13 years and older in the United States who spent $7.4 billion on video games in 2003. By 2008, this market will grow to more than 126 million gamers 13 years or older, generating in excess of $8.3 billion in revenue.

Surprisingly, given the size of this market, video games have largely been ignored as a platform for advertising. In 2003, marketers spent a paltry $79 million placing ads on video games, compared to $42.4 billion on broadcast TV advertising. That is about to change as advertisers realize video games are effective platforms for reaching consumers with their marketing messages. In this report, video games are examined as a marketing vehicle and how advertisers can take advantage of this opportunity.

While traditional advertising media is losing its effectiveness, new opportunities such as video games are presenting themselves to advertisers. With more than 108 million U.S. gamers 13 years and older, video games represent a significant opportunity to reach consumers. Further, gamers tend to be receptive toward advertising.

Video game advertising comes in three basic formats - in-game advertising, Advergaming, and Internet advertising on gaming Web sites. This report focuses on ingame advertising and advergaming.

Read the article: www.businesswire.com

Mattel rolls back into branded entertainment

Mattel, an early pioneer of content integration, is now circumventing broadcast restrictions on children's fare with DVD and Web site-based branded entertainment.

Barbie's sales have been thinner than her waist lately, and Mattel's broader fashion doll business is just as puny. But what could do Barbie and pals more good than a supersized cheeseburger combo meal landed in my mailbox two weeks ago, addressed to my 8-year-old daughter, Leah, during her first week as a third grader.

23-minute animated feature A DVD mailing for My Scene "Masquerade Madness" features a 23-minute animated feature with a sophisticated and hiply drawn Barbie, her exquisitely attired friends with names like Nolee, Delancey and Kenzie, and "The Boys," who entirely warrant such names as Hudson, Sutton and River. The DVD comes with a coupon for the new My Scene perfume and a mail-in offer for a free My Scene bag with doll purchase. Pre-show ads pitch a CD-ROM game and Myscene.com.

These junior soap-opera characters and the kiddie lifestyle brand they inhabit is Mattel's answer to MGA Entertainment's Bratz, the chunky upstarts who have been muscling Barbie off the playground. In a conference call with analysts last month, Mattel Chairman-CEO Robert Eckert acknowledged reinvigorating the fashion doll business is his biggest problem. Branded entertainment of the sort Mattel could only dream about in recent years appears to be the solution.

Mattel, pioneer content integrator You see, once upon a time, more than a decade before Madison + Vine had a name, there lived a content integrator named Mattel that was so successful Congress passed a law to curb it.

In the 1980s, Mattel's workshops spawned He-Man and She-Ra, action figures that hit the market just ahead of the Saturday-morning cartoons that made them famous. G.I. Joe, a "Real American Hero" who'd seen more action during Vietnam than all swift-boat and Texas Air National Guard veterans combined, got his own TV gig, too.

Enraged consumer advocates responded by getting the Children's Television Act of 1990 passed, followed by more specific 1996 regulations by the Federal Communications Commission. The FCC required broadcasters to air three hours of "educational," or at least action-figure-free, children's programming. It didn't ban He-Man, but said such shows, if accompanied by ads for the starring action figures, constitute infomercials, not qualified children's programming. Broadcasters, not wishing to turn any more time over to low-rent kids' shows, gave content integration the boot.

The My Scene DVD is an artfully executed dodge of such barriers that hits its target, much like G.I. Joe, with overwhelming force.

Read the article: www.adage.com

Behind the scenes of the Oprah giveaway deal Behind the Scenes of the Oprah giveaway deal

The stunning on-air Oprah Winfrey-Pontiac giveaway stunt that has generated an explosion of media coverage since Monday isn't over yet, Madison + Vine has learned.

In a move that raises the bar for product placement concepts, Oprah Winfrey and Pontiac gave away 276 new cars. But there's more to come.

The long-range plan that has integrated General Motor's Pontiac brand into a high-impact Oprah drama calls for the TV diva to revisit at least two members of the studio audience in the future to explore how their Pontiacs changed their lives. Those future video features will heavily reinforce the extraordinary branding impact already achieved with the car giveaway, which has a total retail value of nearly $8 million.

On Monday, when Oprah opened its 19th season with a "Wildest Dreams" theme, Ms. Winfrey electrified the studio audience by giving every one of the 276 people in attendance a new, fully loaded Pontiac G6 sedan worth $28,400.

The program also included footage of Ms. Winfrey helping on the G6's production line and her praise of a variety of product features, including GM's OnStar communications system.

Aaron Walton, president of Radiate Entertainment Group, part of Omnicom Group, characterized the stunt as one that set an example of how a marketer can get a product on the air in a way that makes a deep and lasting impact on viewers.

"I TiVoed it," Mr. Walton said. "It was so emotionally uplifting. It is an A-plus in marketing and brand entertainment. It's got talk value, PR spin, there's an emotional connection. It is something you couldn't have paid for."


Read the article: www.adage.com

Guerrilla marketing raises questions about deception

When Wieden+Kennedy made a one-hour logo-laden movie for Brand Jordan about boxer Roy Jones Jr., the ESPN2 network reportedly aired it at no cost to Nike.

Everyone won -- especially viewers, who got a close-up look at Jones that only Nike could deliver -- say Wieden+Kennedy managers.

Not so, says Gary Ruskin, director of Commercial Alert, a Portland-based nonprofit that works nationally to contain commercialization.

"When Wieden+Kennedy engages in this trickery and networks do as well, they're brazenly violating the public's right to know who is seeking to persuade them," Ruskin says. "It's deeply sleazy and part of the creep of advertising into every nook and cranny of our lives and culture."

As the Portland-based ad agency helps lead the industry into branded content and guerrilla-marketing campaigns, the firm blurs long-established lines between programming and advertising. The crossovers and ploys, which include Internet hoaxes that create a buzz for products, delight creative ad executives and outrage critics.

Ruskin founded his organization in 1998 with Ralph Nader. Commercial Alert claims more than 2,000 members, as well as success persuading the Federal Trade Commission to require that Internet search engines clearly identify link sponsorship. Now the organization is trying to persuade the Federal Communications Commission to require disclosure of embedded advertising.

"Television is turning into an infomercial medium," Ruskin says.

Wieden+Kennedy made the Roy Jones Jr. movie for $650,000, according to Advertising Age newspaper -- a bargain compared with the cost of TV commercials. The movie "Sweet Science: A Jordan Love Story" chronicles the boxer's preparation for a major bout.

An ESPN spokeswoman declined to discuss the network's deal with Nike on the movie, referring inquiries to the Beaverton-based company. Adam Roth, Nike content and partnership director, turned down interview requests and wouldn't discuss financing of the Jones movie and other projects.

Read the article: www.oregonlive.com

Catalogues in vogue

LONDON - Nicholas Coleridge, the managing director of Condé Nast, is an unlikely fan of home shopping magazines. "I think what they sell is fantastic," the old Etonian enthuses about the traditionally downmarket retail sector."I didn't realise how quickly you could get these things delivered. They are terribly good value."

But Coleridge isn't buying stuff. He's selling it. In one of the least likely partnerships in publishing, Condé Nast, the distinctly upmarket home of Vogue, Vanity Fair and GQ, has teamed up with retail giant Littlewoods to produce its home shopping titles. A "magalogue", a mixture of traditional catalogue and glossy consumer magazine, is born.

"Traditional catalogues are expensively produced, unfeasibly heavy and with so much stock they are quite confusing for the customer," says Sue Douglas, who heads Condé Nast's contract publishing division. "People haven't got time to look through all that stuff. They want something that's a bit more discerning and someone to tell them what's cool and what's best. Littlewoods have hired us to translate their marketing objectives into reader speak. We are 'magazining' their relationship with their customers."

Magalogues? Magazining? Thankfully, the first issue of Littlewoods new-look LX, distributed to nearly a million customers this week, is rather more straightforward. Targeted at Littlewoods' younger, more brand-conscious buyers, LX wears its Condé Nast branding on its sleeve. Or rather, on its cover, with references to Glamour magazine, Condé Nast's market-leading women's glossy, along with numerous "top 10 best Glamour buys".

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

The streak of shame

I say, what a to-do at the Daily Telegraph. Last Monday's sports section was something of an eye-opener, to say the least. Six pairs of naked breasts were on display in a picture spread which must have had some male readers checking their pacemakers.

That was a relatively minor shock though. For a closer professional look revealed that the two pages, showing pictures of 10 streakers at sports events, were not what they seemed: they were a none-too-subtle merging of advertising and editorial.

The entire two-page display was, in fact, part of a five-week, six-figure deal between the advertiser, Clinique, and a wing of the Telegraph's advertising department, the commercial development division. Media Week has described it as an "advertorial". Yet the average reader would hardly have realised.

The strapline at the top tagged the pages as "sportextra", using the same typeface as appeared in the rest of the section, but did not make clear that they had been produced at the behest of the advertiser, whose advert ran across the foot of the two pages. The "cod" editorial copy, which was not bylined, did not state that the feature was part of a commercial enterprise.

It is true that the sans headline typeface and text were not typical of the paper's usual editorial format, but that was the only possible clue - apart from the un-Telegraph-like content - that the spread was not editorially driven.

An internal inquest was instituted at Canary Wharf last week because several journalists, including those at the highest level, were upset by the blurring of the lines between editorial and advertising. As one senior executive explained: "We are concerned about whether this kind of 'advertorial' could destroy the integrity of our paper. We certainly need to define where the boundaries between editorial and advertising lie".

The Telegraph incident should not be seen in isolation. It represents the growing problems all newspapers are facing as they strive to win advertising revenue against a background of falling circulation and falling profits.

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

Forrester research study reveals strong consumer affinity for DVRs

As if the tentative alliance announced this week between TiVo and DVD renter Netflix won't lead to more Americans staying home to watch TV, a new report by Forrester Research says viewers already spend more than half their time with their DVRs.

According to a new report, consumers who own digital video recorders (DVRs), like TiVo, spend nearly 60 percent of their total TV watching time viewing recorded or delayed programs, in which they skip 92 percent of ads.

Though DVR users currently constitute a fairly small population, 5 percent of households, this group will grow to 41 percent within five years, Forrester predicts. For its study, the Cambridge, Mass.-based research group surveyed 588 DVR users. The survey results have been published in the two-part report series, "Inside the Mind of the DVR User."

"Consumers told us that they love the control DVRs give them," said Josh Bernoff, a vice president for research at Forrester. "The ability to record programs easily, pause live TV, and skip ads creates a powerful change in the way they view television. As these devices shift the way that mainstream consumers experience programming and advertising, they create both opportunities and challenges for the TV industry."

So far, DVR owners rated their improved enjoyment of TV at an average 4.4 on a five-point scale. Nearly one in five respondents used the word "love" in response to an open-ended question about how they feel about their DVRs.

And the love affair seems likely to last. DVR owners are hooked on the device - less than 2 percent of people who owned DVRs have stopped using them, the Forrester study said.

Read the article: www.mediapost.com

Women gamers making small inroads

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) -- Jennifer Canada knew she was entering a boy's club when she enrolled in Southern Methodist University's Guildhall school of video game making.

There was one woman besides Canada; the other 98 students were all guys. She jokes the ratio may be great for dating, but she sometimes got lonely.

"It's really different," the 23-year-old Indianapolis native said. "I miss having a lot of women friends."

The $10 billion industry may have entered the mainstream, but with a few exceptions, the target audience for big-budget video games is the same as it ever was: teenage boys gripped with visions of dragons, space ships and voluptuous virtual babes.

It doesn't help that the number of women developing games is also low -- less than 10 percent of all game developers, Guildhall executive director Peter Raad said. Men design games that appeal more to men.

"I believe it behooves the gaming industry to attract more women developers," Raad said. "Playing games is a primal human activity that knows no boundaries of geography, language or gender."

Organizers said the first Women's Game Conference, in Austin on Thursday and Friday, is a step toward changing some long-held assumptions about the sex of those who make and play games.

"Games are no longer just for geeks," said Laura Fryer, director of Microsoft Corp.'s Advanced Technology Group, which includes the company's Xbox console. "Half of our population probably has an opinion about what should be in video games, but it goes unnoticed because we don't have a lot of women in the industry."

Read the article: www.cnn.com

Products slide into more TV shows

Leslie Moonves loves to talk about the Steven Spielberg movie "Minority Report." Mr. Moonves, the co-president and co-chief operating officer of Viacom, which owns CBS, Paramount Television and Showtime, still sings the praises of the movie two years after he saw it. But it was not the cinematography or Tom Cruise's star turn that moved him. It was all the brand names - Lexus, Gap, Reebok, Guinness and American Express - that found their way into the film.

"That movie was packed with brands," he said. "I sat in the movie theater and thought A, the movie's working, and B, if Spielberg can do it without compromising the artistry, we can, too."

Television networks have worked hard in the last two years to strike their own product placement deals, closing the gap with the movies. CBS plans to broadcast product-themed nights, with a single brand featured on consecutive shows, although Mr. Moonves declined to offer details. Entire episodes of NBC's "The Apprentice" will revolve around one brand: instead of selling lemonade or giving rickshaw rides, the aspiring business tycoons will sell Mars's newest candy bar, hawk Crest toothpaste and construct a new toy for Mattel. Campbell's Soup has been written into "American Dreams," with NBC and the soup maker sponsoring a real-life essay contest mirroring one in the show's plot.

Read the article: www.nytimes.com

P&G Makes NASCAR Scene

For decades, Mr. Clean was a ladies' man, playing on homemakers' subconscious fantasies of a muscular man who would come around and lend a hand when hubby was gone. But in his new incarnation hawking car-wash products, Mr. Clean has taken on double duty as one of Procter & Gamble Co.'s few male-oriented brands, so he's getting into the action of EA Sports' Nascar 2005 video game to beef up his guy credentials.

Mr. Clean this year joins P&G's other male-oriented brand, Old Spice, which has been a past and current integration partner with EA Sports' Nascar and College Football games, sponsoring "Old Spice Red Zone" reports on the latter.

Old Spice's experience with EA was positive enough that Bob Gilbreath, Mr. Clean brand manager, decided to give his brand a spin around the track with "Nascar 2005: Race for the Cup," which officially goes on sale Sept. 2. The P&G brands join Levi's, AutoZone and Chrysler Corp.'s Dodge in a total of $1 million in in-game placements this year, according to EA Sports.

P&G hasn't been a huge player in video games, with Pringles being the only other brand to try game integration so far. But Gilbreath said the Nascar game integration was a natural for Mr. Clean AutoDry, a towel-free car-wash kit that launched last year with a heavy dose of Nascar marketing.

"Everyone marketing to men now is saying the same thing: they're going away from TV," Gilbreath said. "They're into DVDs and video games. Everyone is trying to crack the code. So we're trying to climb up the learning curve [with this EA Sports integration]."

Read the article: www.adage.com