Writing in Clickz, Sean Carton gives marketers a swift kick in the ass and tells them DVRs are ready to wipe out television advertising as we know it. We've heard this warning over and over but marketers need to hear it again. Begin right now. Today, envision your media plan with no commercial pod television element. Foresee a media landscape in which the consumer has complete control over every piece of content fighting for their eyeballs. It's not science fiction. It's happening right now.
Plan for it.
There's a lot of pulling out going on these past few days. Following Lowe's and Tyson Chicken's pullout from ABC's Desperate Housewives, SC Johnson is pulling out of the TBS cross dressing reality show He's A Lady.
It seems marketers are having difficulty completing the task at the last minute. Perhaps Viagra can fill in for these less than virile marketers.
A group of New York and New Jersey Ford dealers are experimenting with addressable advertising - the practice of delivering customized advertising using database marketing. The dealer association is running nine versions of the same spot with each delivered based on geography, income and demographics as determined by zip code. Granted, this is hardly what addressable advertising will resemble in the future with true, individualized message targeting but marketers are at least getting their feet wet.
To put the campaign in place, the dealership group worked with its agency, J. Walter Thompson and Visible World's Intellispot software.
The first :15 seconds of each :30 are the same. The second :15 uses the same footage but superimposes different financing options over the second half of the spot.
Visible World EVP Claudio Marcus acknowledges the industry is in its infancy. "We are in the diaper stage right now," Mr. Marcus said, "and many marketers and media buyers are just beginning to understand what it could mean to execute cable TV campaigns in much the same way as direct marketers use household data to plan and execute mailings."
New York-based Massive Inc. has announced its introduction of the first online gaming ad-serving network. Similar to online ad banner networks, Massive Inc. will enable advertisers to embed their advertising messages within gamescapes. Unlike product placements in games, Massive Inc.'s system, like current ad banner networks, will allow for the placement of messaging based on dayparts and other targeting criteria.
Massive Inc. has signed deals with gaming companies such as Ubisoft, Universal Games, Atari and Konomi. The company has signed RealNetworks as its first client. Estimates claim 10 million PC gamers and 3 million internet connected consoles. Massive predicts internet connected console players to double every 12 months.
A study conducted by the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston into the preference for Coke versus Pepsi found Coke is preferred only because of its cultural brand iconography and that there is no perceived difference in taste between the two when tasted blind.
In the study, when asked to taste the two soft drinks blind, participants showed no preference. However, when the participants were shown company logos before they drank, the Coke label, the more famous of the two, had a dramatic impact: three-quarters of the tasters declared they preferred Coke. Perhaps branding does work. Afterall, it was Coke that got us all to believe Santa wears red.
