Call it what you will these days; advertainment, product placement, advergaming. Marketers are returning to the days of old when marketers "owned" television shows. They had a much firmer grasp on the content and a much bigger slice of the sponsorship pie.
Well, what goes around, comes around. We are just calling it something different this time. Pepsi has just announced plans for a game show called 'Play for a Billion' in which the game show is tied directly to Pepsi's bottle cap sweepstakes.
"You're going to see a lot more of this," says Dave Burwick, chief marketing officer, Pepsi-Cola, North America. "It's so much more difficult for a 30-second ad to stand out these days. . . . When you control the content, you develop the exact message you want."
This USA Today article discusses this trend and explains what other major marketers are doing in this area.
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Fox has named its new teen male targeted network, Fuel. The network will cover extreme sport including skateboarding, snowboarding, surfing, and motocross. There will also be original programming featuring athlete profiles, music artists, and a concert series.
More...
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This little titdbit just in from a reader of the ever watchful Gawker:
"The Dixie Chicks recently wrapped on a commercial for Pepsi/Lipton Brisk. Unbenknownst to the Chicks and the client, the ad agency, Leo Burnett, rented out the former Manson Ranch in California for the shoot. Pepsi is currently debating if the commercial will ever air, and has hired a high-profile public relations firm to handle this if it leaks to the media."
Ouch. Well, I guess it's officially leaked.
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We have forehead advertising, urinal advertising, dogvertising. You name it. Now we have "headspace" advertising". James Nelson started this new "strategy" by auctioning off the back of his head to the highest bidder. The prize? The company gets to put their logo, as a tattoo, on the back of his head for 5 years. Nelson ran an eBay auction and pulled in $7,000 for the "headspace". [via KMBC-TV]
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Just when all the Adrants Posts were getting boring...
Oh, how sex and near nudity finds its way into advertising...
Found these here. Which led to here. Probobly slightly altered versions of the real thing. [via reverse cowgirl]
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NEW YORK Mitch Mosallem, who headed the print production department at Grey Worldwide, has pleaded guilty to 11 counts of anti-trust, conspiracy, mail fraud, bid rigging and tax evasion in U.S. District Court in Manhattan. The charges stem from an ongoing investigation of the print and advertising industries by the Justice Department's Antitrust Division.
More from Adweek.
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Cosmopolitan Television, a Lifetime-like cable channel in Spain, may be coming to a cable channel near you. The channel is the top rated women's network in Spain and it had been credited with increasing the circulation of the magazine in Spain as well. Read more here.
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'We were going to be characterized as a failure in the lads category. That meant that with the ad community we were spending more of our time debating about what we weren't than we were spending time proselytizing and expanding on what we did well.'
That's one of the reasons why 'Gear' has ceased publishing. This article examines that and explores Guccione's vision of the next 'Gear' iteration.
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Citing the ad industry as being mostly unaffected by the war and unemployment, Zenith Optimedia has raised its December 2002 ad spend estimate for Q1 2003 up to $146 billion or 2.2% over last year. Originally the projected increase was 1.9%. [via AdWeek]
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"The cable industry is missing at its post and absent without leave," said Eddie Fritts, NAB CEO, at the annual NAB meeting. "Cable operators are carrying less than 13 percent of local DTV broadcast stations on the air today. At last count, only 107 of the 809 broadcast DTV stations were receiving cable carriage."
Did he think the cable industry would actually be proactive about anything? [via MediaWeek]
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