Today, Dasani launches a new $20 million campaign designed to set the bottled water maker apart from the crowd. The campaign is decidedly more adventurous than your usual water bottle marketing. As described in the New York Times today:
...in one Dasani commercial, a man and woman frolic in an elevator as a security camera captures the action, but they turn out to be husband and wife. In another spot, a woman spends a night out on the town with an extremely attractive man, then heads home where she gets undressed and jumps into bed � with her teddy bear.
Bummer, I was hoping for another round of bikini babes fighting in a pool of...oh...bottled water.
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BX Media Group has contracted with the New York Port Authority to manage the content on the Authority' PATHVision transit information system. PATHVision delivers ads and informational spots to travelers and commuters on 227 screens
throughout 13 PATH stations using video formats rather than typical transit posters. Ads can be created using traditional video or Flash and Acrobat type formats.
Rather than having a fixed transit poster up all day long, advertisers can time their messages to particular segments of the day based on the nature of the message (a dinner idea) or the type of person they want to reach (an early morning commuter versus a weekend leisure traveler).
"Due to the large number of commuters traveling into New York City from New Jersey on a daily basis and the revitalization of the World Financial Center area in New York and Penn Station/Newark in New Jersey, PATHVision offers advertisers a truly unique and creative avenue to place their messages in front of a captive audience," said Chief Strategy Officer, Melvin Wilson. "We will make possible the full use of the media formats available on PATHVision. The advanced technology creates an opportunity for advertisers to grab the attention of travelers that can now look at entertaining moving media to pass the time and make their commutes more enjoyable."
BX Media Group's chief strategy officer, Melvin Wilson, was interview a couple of weeks ago and covered here.
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In his weekly article, Scott notes this year's Cannes winners being independents versus large conglomerates (a good thing) and how awards shows can stifle effective marketing (a bad thing).
It can be argued that the most effective client solutions often don't include cutting-edge TV ads, and that awards shows such as Cannes harm the industry more than consolidation by perpetuating its dependence on the 30-second spot. There are, too, greater challenges to the relevance of agencies.
Yet, he contends, rightly so, their necessity.
Ads are the only tangible product agencies produce, and they want that product to be of the highest quality. When it comes to peer-group benchmarking, employee morale, client confidence and new-business opportunities, awards aren't as meaningless as critics of them would have you believe.
And anyway, who doesn't like the pomp and ego boost that comes from an awards show?
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Oh, don't get all excited. That babe in this still from a new commercial for Toyota isn't what she seems. She looks pretty good though up until the end. So there's that and a kid who builds a wooden Hummer, a bitchy diva, Danny Devito schilling for DerecTV, a bear who wants his Smirnoff, a Land Rover that gets the right of way, and a toked out dude in the basement. See them all here.
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Most popular Google searches in France. Particularly amusing. Found on Google Zeitgeist.
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David Lazarus, in his At Large column in Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle, gets to the heart of the new Botox ads. The ads themselves portray Botox as a harmless way to keep your youth. But, until you read the 3,500 word legal disclaimer that David calls to our attention.
It's not until you delve into the fine print that you learn Botox, otherwise known as botulinum toxin type A, a purified form of a deadly poison, 'contains albumin, a derivative of human blood.'
The small-print text adds that because of 'effective donor screening and product manufacturing processes,' there's only 'an extremely remote' chance that Botox users will be the recipients of blood-borne viral diseases.
Hmm, that's the kind of thing potential customers might have wanted to know a bit more clearly.
Don't you just love the honesty of those drug ads?
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Suggestions for the new TNN:
- John Singleton TV.
- The New New TNN.
- The Only Basic Cable Network Guaranteed To Draw More Women Than Men, Just Because They Appreciate The Irony Of Watching A Network That Is Supposedly Only For Men Network.
- The We Promise You'll Never Have To Sit Through Another Agonizing Made-For-Lifetime Movie Here Network.
- The I Can't Believe We Have Pamela Anderson In THREE Series Network.
- The Last Chance For Kelsey Grammer To Break Out Of A Quarter-Century Of Typecasting Network.
- The All Star Trek, All The Time Network.
- The Burp & Fart Jokes Network.
- The Don't Let Your Kids Watch This Cartoon Network.
- The Testosterone Network.
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Back on June 2, TiVo announced a new service that can measure ad-skippage. Since television advertising began, the primary metric for determining where to advertise and how much to charge has been viewership: Based on surveys, how many people watch the show. Or at least claim they do.
Now TiVo can measure What really matters to advertisers. Advertisers really don't care who watches the show but who watches their ad. Unfortunately, to date, advertisers have had to extrapolate from data showing who watches they show and assume that their ad is also being watched as well.
Some of the latest findings out a big whole in that line of thinking and it's going to be a big scare for those in the ad business.
For one, a program's rating -- the number of people saying they watched a TV show at a given time -- appears to have an inverse relationship with the proportion of ads viewed. On April 11, 2002, ABC's popular TV drama The Practice drew a TiVo rating of 8.9, meaning 8.9% of TiVo owners watched the show live or recorded it and watched it later. But those viewers watched just 30% of the ads shown. Meanwhile, quiz show The Weakest Link, drew a rating of 0.9, but viewers watched 78% of the commercials. TV news magazine 60 Minutes got only a 2.2 rating, but its viewers sat through 73% of the ads.
So why pay a premium price for a television show where it can be proven that only 30% will watch your ad?
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On June 25, it was announced there will an additional Superbowl come this football season. 'Lingerie Bowl 2004' will be a pay per view event aired during halftime of the 2004 Super Bowl broadcast on February 1, 2004. Good thing. Most Superbowl halftime shows suck. This should be much more interesting.
The event will feature two teams of models in custom lingerie taking part in a 7 on 7 tackle football game. Nikki Ziering will be the quarterback of Team Dream and Angie Everheart will be quarterback of Team Euphoria.
This outta be good. Thanks to Apechild for finding this one.
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In the Publishing world, there are titans and then....there is Hilary Clinton. See how Hilary dukes it out with Harry Potter here for the publishing limelight.
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