Reality TV to Face Dot Com Like Bust

Here's a great article that lays out the current reality TV landscape. It will account for 40% of all programming on the broadcast networks this Summer and in doing so, it is drying up the scripted programming pipeline. That will be death when this reality fad ends. Networks will be in very deep trouble as they scramble to reprogram for what will surely be a mass viewership exodus of reality TV.
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Crunch Crunch Choke Choke

In this week's Ad Age TV Commercials of Note, we have a man forced to watch a 7UP commercial while taking the proverbial dump. And, we also have mindless restaurant patrons imitating a guy who is choking, thinking it is the new Macarena. Weird. What will we think of next?
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Martin Sheen War Stance Bothers NBC Execs

Martin Sheen is very forthright in his opposition to the potential war with Iraq. And that is bothering the executives at NBC who think it may hurt his show, "The West Wing".

Sheen even recorded an TV spot for anti-war group, moveon.org.

Once again, I don't think TV brass realize that the American public is intelligent enough to differentiate between fact and fiction. Sheen, and everyone else in this country, is entitled to their opinion. That should have no effect on his job of portraying ficticious characters in movies and on TV.
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Infrequent Updates to Adrants

This week, I started a new full time job at an agency called RDW Group. I'll be busy ramping up for that so posts here will be light for this week but should pick up again shortly.
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Marketing to Tweens

Chris Reidy of the Boston Globe writes a nice summary article about marketing to the burgeoning segment of tweens, or those aged between 7 and 12. It's estimated that there are 20 million of them out there who have graduated from PBS and are now working their way towards the belly-baring teens years.

Marketers, of course, have jumped all over this segment marketing so called older products to this younger market and using celebrities like Shakira to do it. And parents are going along for the ride.
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Ad Business Optimism Abounds But Reality Gets in the Way

Here we have Lauren Rice Fine, an advertising and marketing analyst for Merrill Lynch, trying to be optimistic about the outlook of advertising for the coming year. But with the looming war and accounting controversies at Interpublic and Omnicom, optimism is hard to come by.

There's just not going to be anything significant, in terms of an ad recovery, until mid to late 2004.
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Red Herring Editor in Chief Sees Future

Tony Perkins, editor in chief of the now defunct Red Herring, comments on the fall of the publication and on how he sees the possibility of re-birth in a different form.
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