John Brock points us to a story about a company, formed in 2004, called Brain Fingerprinting Laboratories which claims its brain imaging product can determine whether specific information has been stored in a person's brain. The company, which just teamed with Millward Brown to compare the technology to traditional surveys, plans to launch an advertising measurement division and predicts that division will employ 100 people within a year or two and generate $250 million in revenue. Perhaps we've finally reached the reality depicted in Tom Cruise's Monority Report.
To promote its Saturday, Monday and Thursday pullout, Super Goals, The Sun has launched Super Chants, a site where visitors can create custom chants, play them and them send them to a friend. Not bad, if your into the whole soccer...uh..football thing. The site was created by Tequila.
Sort of like the girl that got a snowball facial in a Vodaphone ad, this web ad for the upcoming move, The Fog, doesn't exactly steer clear of sexual innuendo. In fact, it appear to be quite blatant about it. But, then that's just us. Or is it? What do you see in this ad?
Ad Induced Hotness? Previously on Adrants: Writing in the Hendersonville News, Susan Hanley Lane shares her feelings regarding a racy Skechers billboard she saw when she was with her father in law as he was getting haircut. Noting the odd juxtaposition of the two figures on the billboard having simulated sex, advertising-style, with the presence of her father in law and two small girls playing outside near the board, Susan makes a convincingly cogent argument that, perhaps, we've taken this sex sells thing a bit too far.
She notes the walled garden that used to be called childhood has collapsed and has been replaced, at least for girls, by girlhood. In other words, kids aren't kids anymore but have, because of the continual presence of adult imagery, become young hotties in training. When you roll it up like that, it does certainly feel odd that young kids are routinely exposed to this sort of imagery. Many, including myself, have said, "Oh, just don't look. Turn the TV off. Monitor what your kids read and what they do online." Well, sure. That's all good but it's also like trying to juggle 12 tons of Jello while riding a unicycle. It's not possible. Kids are resourceful. If they want to see or do something, they'll find a way around parental blockage. Acknowledging that, one could argue if racy imagery that is now commonplace wasn't there in the first place, kids who circumvent so called blockage would find nothing more that a fully clothed Betty Crocker staring back at them.
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As if consumers haven't rebelled enough about increased commercial and promotional proliferation on television, broadcasters are inserting the knife deeper and twisting it more aggressively. While ABC says the total number of minutes per hour of advertising hasn't change in three years, the network, which began the practice last season, this year has required show producers to slice episodes into six acts versus the traditional four increasing the number of breaks per hour and angering viewers in the process.
Seemingly oblivious to people's abhorance of advertising, ABC Ad Sales Chief Mike Shaw said, "We've had the exact same commercial load for three years in a row. People must "feel that way because they love the show so much, that they really notice it when the breaks are there." That's precious.
Everwood producer Greg Berlanti doesn't like the practice saying, "It makes you long for the day when everything comes out in boxed sets of DVDs so you can enjoy it." Given the rise in outraged, DVR-enabled consumers, that day may not be far off. The current television advertising model is a losing proposition. As broadcasters struggle to maintain ad revenue by shoving more ads through consumer's eyeballs, people, increasingly armed with methods of avoiding ads, will rebel, lowering ad viewership thereby causing broadcasters to foist even more insanity-based methods of forced ad viewership upon consumers until the entire broadcast television model implodes on itself and finally experiences the death it so dearly deserves.
To garner attention for its new season of sex talk show Talk Sex, Oxygen has launched an online match game where players must match the name of a fetish with its definitions while show host Sex Grandma Sue Johnson looks on. We have no idea if these are actual fetishes but Eproctophilia, or sexual arousal from farting and Agalmatophilia or sexual arousal from looking at mannequins sound plausible. While we don't think any of these fetishes apply to us, we'll certainly admit to Octogenariophobia or the fear of playing a sexual fetish game while grandma looks on.
While we're not quite what the draw is about watching television on a 2.5 inch screen in a world of 50 inch televisions, we can't complain about Walt Disney's deal with Apple to provide next-day downloads for $1.99 via iTunes to the new video iPod of ABC's popular series Lost and Desperate Housewives, among others. With dwindling television viewership and, hence, dwindling ad revenue for networks, providing mobile, commercial-free, pay-per-view programming makes a tremendous amount of sense for the nets. If this takes off, networks will run with glee to the bank. Marketers, with an ad medium pulled out from under their feet, may not be so happy.
Facing the proliferation of on screen guides, TV Guide, back in July announced it would revamp the magazine in a, some would say, pointless, effort to stay afloat. This week, the magazine launched its first redesigned issue which focuses more on features, stories and gossip than listings. TV Guide also announce a dramatic reduction in rate base from 9 million to 3.2 million and a cover price drop from $2.49 to $1.99. With Entertainment Weekly, TVgasm, TV Sqaud and countless other television news sources, who really needs TV Guide anymore? They should have just slapped JLH on the cover and called it good. We think people would snap that up quite quickly.
Joining the growing cadre of media and advertising weblogs, Business Week has launched Fine on Media written by Business Week's Jon Fine who pens the magazine's Media Centric column. With four posts so far, the blog feels, well, bloggy. Not that that's a bad thing, after all, it is a blog. There's an intro post, a post about New York Times Editor Bill Keller taking pot shots at bloggers at a recent conference, a post about how bad the Saturday Wall Street Journal is and a post about the Allstate campaign. We're sure the blog will be just Fine as it finds its legs.
With Kid Rock, Dennis Hopper, Matthew Fox, Jerry O'Connell, Michael Imperiole, Wayne Gretzky, Rick Pitino, Alex Trebek, and Sir Richard Branson; trainers Bob Baffert, Bobby Frankel, D. Wayne Lukas, and Todd Pletcher; and jockeys Jerry Bailey, Jorge Chavez, and retired Racing Hall of Fame jockey Angel Cordero Jr., the National Thoroughbred Racing Association has introduced a new $5 million ad campaign with the tagline,"Who do you like today?" Gee, we don't know but campaign creator Conover Tuttle Pace's Chip Tuttle clarified who the campaign was aimed at, saying, "This is really targeted to the core fan, the light fan, and the potentials." Well, gee, again. That sounds really focused.
Recovering from his astute targeting comment, Tuttle went on to explain the campaign, which has the celebrities, trainers, jockeys, and fans asking or answering the question, "Who do you like today?", saying, "I think everyone in this room would agree that we've just about exhausted the variations of brown horses running in a circle. We're out of clever ways to do that as television advertisers." Well, we'd definitely agree with you on that, Chip. Tuttle also says the campaign is intentionally not focused on the horses but on the people who play the horses.
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