Writing an opinion piece in Ad Age, Rance Crain says product placement may create a Bob Garfield-like chaos theory of its own. He claims that movie viewership and DVD sales may be down because people are sick of watching the increasing number of product placements within movies and games. He opines people are returning to traditional television viewership and that the infrastructure put in place to handle product placement and new media ad delivery may collapse upon itself as well as hurt advertiser's sales because the sell in a product placement is too soft.
TiVio, today, announced an upgrade for one million of its Series 2 users that will allow viewers to respond directly to long form ads which have been specially encoded to provide more information to the viewer upon request. To do so, TiVo will, with user permission, forward the users contact information to the advertiser. Oddly, the service appears to be put to use for the mailing of physical marketing materials where some form of on screen or online delivery would seem to be more logical and appropriate.
Madison, Wisconsin, a city that has long shunned outdoor and in-school advertising may, in the face of spending caps and citizen's unwillingness to pay more taxes, give in to the easy money made possible through advertising. School officials, while loathe to do so, are revisiting the possibility of gleaning revenue through school-based advertising. Madison residents have always snubbed their noses at advertising with Alderman Mike Veneer calling bus shelter advertising "gross" and ruinous the the city's ambiance.
Displaying complete insensitivity to the cities mindset or freedom to decide whether or not advertising is an integral part of the community, Adams Outdoor Advertising General Manager Chris Eigenberger says it's "humorous" that Madison residents hold their city to higher standards than other cities that allow more advertising and said, "That to me is just arrogance and not thinking properly." Hey, Chris, there's this thing called democracy. Heard of it? It has to do with people having a bit of choice in how they live their lives and how the communities in which they live operate.
Adrants reader Chris points out Israel may become the first country to require modeling agencies to monitor the health and body mass index of models. This has been in reaction to reports from Israeli photographer Adi Barkan who interviewed 12,000 models aged 13 to 24 and found 35 to 40 percent of these models to be anorexic.
UK-based Ryanair, last Friday, ran an ad that referenced the recent London bombings to promote low fares. The ad appeared in UK newspapers last week with the headline, "London Fights Back," an image of Winston Churchill and a speech bubble that contained an alteration of a famous June 1940 speech and read, " "We shall fly them to the beaches, we shall fly them to the hills, we shall fly them to London!" The Advertising Standards Authority received more than 100 complaints regarding the ad but Ryanair has refused to pull the ad.
Ryanair Head of Communication Peter Sherrard explained the move telling the Guardian, "We are trying to ensure that the terrorists don't succeed in paralyzing people with fear, which is their primary objective, and that people continue to lead their lives as normal and continue to fly."
Adrants reader Susannah points to an LA Times story that describes the growth in perks car dealers offer to their customers. Specifically, Galpin Motors, which sells Aston Martins, in Van Nuys has upped the anti by creating Club Aston, a private club, launched last Spring, that bathes buyers and owners in such amenities as key card entry to the club, suede and mirror-clad stairways, James Bond theme music, a fireplace, big screen TV, white leather sofas, a bar, 101-gigabyte music collection, terry cloth towels in the bathrooms and Starbucks coffee. Naturally, this sort of thing is reserved for the rich and famous but, as with all things, there's the trickle down theory that will bring many of these amenities to normal people who frequent the likes of Toyota, BMW and GM car dealerships.
Pauly Shore, who, other than a recent appearance on HBO's Entourage, appeared to be dead, is launching a new show on TBS called Minding the Store and is promoting it by offering a dollar to the first 250,000 viewers who don't find the show funny. Of course, to get the dollar, the viewer has to send a self addressed, stamped envelope making two way postage $.74 rendering a net return of $.26 which only an idiot would bother doing. One the upside, this might be the best joke Shore has ever told and the Post Office certainly isn't complaining.
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