Miller Brewing Co., along with its agency, Wieden & Kennedy and agency's production house, Radical Media, are considering the adaption of it High Life ad campaign to use as a TV show, possibly called, "The High Life." Wieden will create and write the show and it may go into production in February.
The currently running ad campaign, which has resonated successfully with the target group, has helped stem a downward curve in sales that has gone on for 20 years. Whether this success of the campaign can be translated into a successful television show is anyone's guess but Miller and Wieden are to be lauded for their efforts in experimenting with new forms of advertising.
SaveMartha.com will be out in force to support queen Martha outside her trial on January 20. The group had planned to buy a billboard in Times Square with the headline, "If the Stock Sale Was Legit, You Must Acquit, " but the price was too steep. The group will, instead, create a "human billboard" by holding signs, wearing aprons and waving kitchen utensils.
Diane Mermigas in her Mermigas in Media column gives a massive run down on the Citigroup Smith Barney annual media conference and notes that many media giants still are resistant to the changing media landscape.
However, too many media companies and executives are content with simply acknowledging or dismissing the threat and challenge of video-on-demand, personal video recorders, intellectual property piracy, commercial ad skipping and anything else that smacks of a new competitive landscape that further fragments and even alienates viewers and advertisers.
In his Ad Age column this week, Al Ries wonders why Tyson foods spent $40 million on an ad campaign with the tagline, "It's what your family deserves." He claims it, and most other ad taglines, simply do not speak the language that people speak. It's analogous to quotes you see in articles that are clearly lifted directly from press releases. Real humans are not the source for those quotes. A public relations press release writer is responsible for stuffing those in-human pontifications in said quoted human's mouth. Most ad slogans are meaningless and connote nothing about the brand. Of course, if you spend a lot of money like Coke and Nike, you can say whatever you want because those brands just buy their way into your brand psyche.
On her Whatsnextonline blog, B.L. Ochman points to Lucian James' Agenda American Brandstand, a service that tracks the number of brand mentions in the Billboard Hot 100. Top mentioned brands in 2003 include Mercedes, Cadillac, Prada, Nike, Cristal, Hennessy, K-Mart and Timberland.
Doc Searls writes of the scenario now being enabled by Apple which will turn consumers into producers and forever shift the method through which consumers consume and producers produce. At the recent Macworld show, Steve Jobs introduced a product called GarageBand, which is basically a production studio in a box, complete with electronic producer and sample music tracks, that,along with other applications, Doc Searls thinks will radically alter how entertainment in produced.
What Apple's doing with 'i' apps like GarageBand isn't about the computer industry; it's about the entertainment industry. That industry lately has become vigilant about threats from its customers, which it still thinks of as consumers. Instead it should be watching how Apple transforms those consumers into producers. Because the next challenge will be finding ways to turn those producers into partners. The old gig is up. They'll never be just 'consumers' again
Dan Gillmor has similar thoughts and touches on how MoveOn.org and others have capitalized on "democratized" the creation of marketing.
Sick of Britney Spears? Check out bandyou'veneverheardof.com. Hate reality TV? Go to juliemakestvshows.com. Given the right tools and the Internet as a publishing platform, scenarios such as those Searls and Gillmor allude to could certainly become reality.
The beautiful Jessica Simpson has signed a deal with Randi Shinder, founder of Clean perfume, to create a line of lickable fragrances called Dessert. I don't know who would actually want to lick perfume but the New York Post wonders if Dessert will come in "Buffalo wings" or "Chicken of the Sea" flavor. I hope the obvious advertising headline, "Lick me, baby," is left on the wall in the creative conference room.
The so called "smart reality series," "The Apprentice, in which 16 people who actually have a brain and compete to win a $250K per year job running a Trump company, drew healthy numbers for its premiere on Thursday. The show was watched by 18.5 million viewers according to Nielsen television ratings. It succeeded in crushing the "Prime Time Thursday" interview with Pete Rose but couldn't topple CSI which was watched by 27.5 million.
Radar Magazine was supposed to the next hot gossip (excuse me, literary) magazine. Founder Maer Roshan put out two issues and has since not published another. Gawker has the tale of a subscriber who woke up one day eight months after subscribing and realized he hadn't receive a single issue.
One the cover of the February issue of Home Theater Magazine is the headline, "85+ Sexy Speakers for Plasma (TVs)." Granted, every other magazine is throwing some hot guy or girl on their cover or writing some double-entendre but sexy speakers? Do they think readers will look at or listen to these speakers and get so sexually aroused that they work themselves up to the point of no return and afterwards go buy the speakers instead of having the proverbial post-coital cigarette? Anyways, what exactly is a sexy speaker?
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