CHICAGO (Reuters) – The marketing buzz that a Super Bowl television commercial creates is invaluable to advertisers, whether it gets broadcast or not.

With a national audience that could reach an estimated one-third of 300 million Americans on February 7, the National Football League’s championship game is more important than ever for companies and advocacy groups.

With a price tag of almost $3 million for 30 seconds, it can be just as effective for those submitting ads to have a spot rejected as inappropriate and use the attention generated from that to drive visitors and business to their websites.

“A whole cottage industry has grown up out of trying to make use of network turndowns,” said Martin Franks, executive vice president of planning, policy and government affairs at CBS Corp, which is televising the NFL game this year. “It can happen in the middle of July, but obviously this is a wonderfully high-profile opportunity.”

The commercial approval process has come under heavy scrutiny this year since CBS approved an ad sponsored by a conservative Christian group called Focus on the Family. Some U.S. women’s groups have urged the network not to air the ad — which stars college football star Tim Tebow — saying it has a strident anti-abortion rights message.

Industry executives and analysts recognize Internet domain company GoDaddy.com, which annually airs several ads during the Super Bowl as the best at attracting attention for its ads. On Thursday, GoDaddy in a press release invited consumers to view its latest rejected ad at the company website.

“GoDaddy was one of the first advertisers who set out to capitalize on the fact that ads get rejected and that there’s a PR opportunity in that,” said Tim Calkins, marketing professor with Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. GoDaddy is one of the PR masters of the Super Bowl.”

Other companies that have had ads rejected as inappropriate this year include online jobs site CareerBuilder.com and gay male dating site Mancrunch.com. Last year, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) garnered the spotlight for an ad General Electric’s NBC rejected.

The companies that have been rejected unanimously say they do not submit ads simply to have them rejected, but CBS’s Franks said a rejection and the attention that it generates can be as valuable as paying for a network ad.

“They’ve found a loophole in an otherwise well intentioned process,” he said in an interview.

Dominic Friesen, a spokesman for Mancrunch — whose ad CBS on Friday deemed inappropriate — sees it differently.

“It’s blatant discrimination,” he said. “The reason why it’s controversial to CBS is because they’re anti-gay.”

CBS also raised questions about the company’s credit history, although Friesen said Mancrunch offered cash and has no credit history as a new company.

In the ad, two men watch a football game on TV and begin to passionately kiss after their hands brush when they reach into a bowl of potato chips.

Meanwhile, CBS rejected GoDaddy’s ad about an effeminate ex-football player who launches a fashion design company online as potentially offensive to the gay community.

“We’re pretty used to being the fish in the barrel on this one,” Franks said.

However, Calkins said networks must look in the mirror. Read Rest of Article

From AdAge (original article)

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — For some marketers, a new year means a new agency. If that’s your company’s annual resolution, you should know that line of thinking will lead to a bad reputation in adland.

Agency new-business executives and industry search consultants report a growing blacklist of sorts, composed of marketers that tend to put ad duties into play every year or two. Thanks to rapid turnover in the chief marketing officer seat (a CMO’s tenure averages 28 months, according to the most recent figures from executive search firm Spencer Stuart) and pressure to perform amid the troubled economy, long-lasting agency-marketer relationships are becoming more rare.

“I have a huge disagreement with people changing their agencies like they change their underwear,” said Jane Bedford, partner at the Bedford Group, a consultancy based in Atlanta. “Our clients tell us it takes them about three to six months for them to get fully engaged with their agencies. It’s very difficult for an agency to get up and running, and totally please the client, within the first year.”

And that’s coming from an exec who actually benefits when accounts go into review.

Take Chipotle: In January 2004, the burrito chain tapped Mother, New York, to be its first advertising agency. Six years later, that account has cycled through four different shops: After Mother came TDA Advertising & Design, Boulder, Colo.; Devito/Verdi, New York; Butler Shine Stern & Partners, San Francisco; and, its latest, hired this month, Compass Point Media, a division of Campbell Mithun in Minneapolis.

Thinking twice
The regularity with which Chipotle changes its agencies is more than most. But it’s hardly the only marketer with a penchant for flitting from shop to shop. Retailer Ikea and luxury automaker BMW are known for frequently reviewing their creative and media accounts, and Mitsubishi Motors North America moves its ad business around a fair amount as well.

Too many reviews could also mean that, over time, the very best shops will think twice before going after those accounts. “Agencies do a risk assessment when deciding whether to pitch an account, and there’s definitely a toxicity factor they look at. If [a client] does a lot of reviews, the client gets blacklisted,” Ms. Bedford said.

Even at a time when agencies are hungry for more revenue, such flip-flopping has consequences: Two different new-business executives said two accounts they wouldn’t touch with a 10-foot pole are 1-800-Flowers and Quiznos, as the businesses seem to be too volatile, regardless of their billings. The marketers did not respond to requests for comment.

Another consequence is cost: Constantly opening reviews can be incredibly costly and disruptive to both the marketer — for whom travel and other fees associated with agency reviews racks up — and the agencies, which shell out thousands of dollars in the hopes of crafting the perfect pitch that could win the business. If they do land it, there’s often an added cost of having to quickly ramp up freelance and full-time staff to work on the new account.

Michael Houston, chief marketing officer at Grey, New York, said the window for agencies to prove themselves has lowered dramatically.

“Results in our business are no longer evaluated on a semi-annual or quarterly basis, but on a monthly, weekly and sometimes daily basis,” Mr. Houston said. “Couple that with the level of dollars attached to the advertising line item on a client’s balance sheet, and we find clients forced to justify their marketing ROI in a way never seen before. In that process, agencies sometimes become the scapegoat, with the easy solution being to call an agency review.”

Consistency
What’s more, “serial reviewers” risk damaging their brand with inconsistent marketing messages.

“Clients shouldn’t be constantly jumping ship,” said Lisa Colantuono, managing partner at AAR Partners. As communication between consumer and client evolves, “they need to work together with their agencies. If that foundation is constantly changing, the marketer is hurting themselves in the long run in terms of building brand loyalty with the consumer.”

The Association of National Advertisers, the marketer’s trade group, doesn’t exactly see it this way. The ANA’s position is that conducting formal agency evaluations on a regular basis offers the best chance for fixing problems before frustration sets in. It believes that the companies that have two-way assessments at regular intervals have the most-productive relationships. “Having a formal agency evaluation process is always imperative but even more so at a time of heightened focus on marketing accountability,” Bob Liodice, president-CEO of the ANA, has said.

Said Grey’s Mr. Houston: “Desperation may be something new to many industries in the recession, but it’s something the agency business has known, embraced and perpetuated for decades. Agencies only have themselves to blame by playing right into the hands of these serial agency-review ‘players’ [and] making it too easy for the client to bully us.”

Endeavour Marketing and Media – A Murfreesboro, TN Advertising Agency

From Ann Handley (of MarketingProfs.com) for American Express Open Forum:

Dec 29, 2009 -

What do bacon, Bogota, yumberries and Foursquare have in common? They are all on the list of 100 Things to Watch in 2010 by the marketing communications company JWT.

Certain trends on the list suggest clear implications for businesses. JWT’s Ann Mack says that many items on it reflect broader shifts, like a growing action around health and wellness and environmental issues, to crazy-fast developments in the tech space.

There are also a number of trends tied to the so-called Great Recession (“trip bundling,” for example) and those that speak to various demographic, political and economic power shifts (“East Africa Wired,” and “TV for Tween Boys” among them). Interestingly for business, Mack says, the list “points to the way industries are redefining or reinventing themselves to survive or to fully leverage these power shifts.”

What trends might affect your small business in 2010? Here a subset you might find worth watching (as well as a few I found just plain interesting). The full list is in alphabetical order, below.

1. 3D at Home
3D is the new HD. Having successfully invaded the big screen, it’s on its way to the small screen: James Cameron, director of the new 3D film Avatar, will promote Panasonic’s 3D sets, out next year, which will compete with versions from Sony and Samsung.

See Rest of List

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — PepsiCo is taking a gamble, sidelining its entire beverage portfolio during the Super Bowl and ceding ground to rival Coca-Cola, in the midst of a tough environment for beverages.

Following a report in Ad Age that the marketer was considering pulling back from the Super Bowl this year, Pepsi confirmed to The Wall Street Journal that it would focus on its coming “Pepsi Refresh Project,” a marketing effort that aligns Pepsi with social responsibility and has a heavy emphasis on digital media. The beverage maker will bypass the big game for the first time in 23 years (though its Frito-Lay sibling, Doritos, will advertise during the event). That’s a marked turnabout from last year, when PepsiCo went so far as to block rival Coca-Cola and other non-alcoholic beverage marketers from the first half of the game.

“The fact that Pepsi is not going to be on the Super Bowl and Coke is could open up an opportunity for [Coke],” said Bill Pecoriello, CEO of Consumer Edge Research. “Pepsi is taking risks with the strategy, and it’s going to remain to be seen how 2010 plays out. Is their [Pepsi Refresh Project] going to be a winning strategy? Time is going to tell.”

Pepsi said the cost of advertising in the Super Bowl was not at the heart of its decision to keep its famous beverages from the game. (this year’s broadcaster, CBS, has been seeking between $2.5 million and $3 million for a 30-second spot.) Instead, the new marketing strategy required different tactics. “The Super Bowl broadcast can be an amazing stage for advertisers if it aligns with their brand strategy; however, brands should not blindly anchor themselves to history,” said Frank Cooper, senior VP-chief consumer engagement officer at PepsiCo Americas Beverages, in a statement. “In 2010, each of our beverage brands has a strategy and marketing platform that will be less about a singular event, less about a moment, more about a movement.?”

Read Rest of Article

By Andrew Hampp for AdAge

LOS ANGELES (AdAge.com) — When Delta Airlines wanted to reach business travelers just in the New York area last spring, it decided to test the idea of microtargeting with place-based media. So it teamed up with out-of-home vertical SeeSaw Networks to create multiple 15-second spots customized to a wide array of venues across five different digital out-of-home vendors.

Cafes from Reach Media Group’s Danoo, ferry terminals from Affiniti Group Media, Pump Top TV’s gas stations in the New Jersey and Connecticut areas and health clubs on the Netpulse and When networks were all included in the plan, complementing similarly targeted ads in New York-based print and digital media.

Although business travelers in a single market like New York may ultimately amount to a relatively small audience, the campaign represented one of the biggest digital out-of-home outlays to date from a client at Digitas, Publicis’ digital media agency that recently branched out into the emerging outdoor medium.

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by Garrick Schmitt for AdAge

ust a few short years ago, if you had asked most marketers about the future of mobile, their nirvana most likely would have been a consumer strolling down the aisle of her local grocery store receiving text messages offering 50 cents off a bottle of ketchup or jar of peanut butter.

But not so much today, as industry heavyweights and upstarts like Google, Facebook, Twitter and SimpleGeo are racing to map out a digital, geo-tagged future where our physical and virtual worlds will increasingly collide. Soon a simple coupon delivered via SMS or Bluetooth will seem like an idea from a different era, like Pong or the Hula Hoop.

Everyone, it seems, is looking to take advantage of the demand for location-based services created by GPS-enabled devices, such as Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android 2.0. Even desktop operating systems, such as Windows 7 and Mac OS X Snow Leopard will soon contain location-awareness features — so too will browsers, as we’ve seen with the latest Firefox releases.

Now come the services. Just this week, Google launched What’s Nearby, a location-based search that’s part of Google Maps on Android and will soon be more widely available. The service allows consumers to simply access a list of the ten closest places of interest near their physical location via their mobiles.

And that’s just to start: Google Latitude allows users to share their locations with friends and view their friends activities on a map; Facebook has rewritten its privacy policy, foreshadowing its entrance into location-based services; and Twitter has rolled out its Geotagging API, which will allow popular Twitter apps like Tweetie and Tweetdeck to display the location from where a tweet was posted.

But geo-location APIs and GPS-enabled mobile devices are just part of the “location equation.” Here’s a look at the most promising geo players who are making location-based marketing a reality for brands today.

FOURSQUARE AND GOWALLA: Foursquare and Gowalla are the two most buzzed-about leaders in location-based services. Both companies provide game-like experiences for their users that allow them to “check-in” at various locales (bars, restaurants, etc.). But it’s Foursquare that has recently made the first play for advertisers. The company recently debuted its Foursquare for Business program, which enables retailers to provide offers to their users and track the success of location-based campaigns. Industry analysts are understandably enthused.

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Endeavour Marketing and Media, A Murfreesboro Advertising Agency

From AdAge

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Consider that $3 million you just dropped on a 30-second Super Bowl spot a waste of money — unless you’ve got a smart, calculated search-and-social-media strategy behind it.

Last year, the ads from the big game racked up 99.5 million collective online views, according to Visible Measures, which tallies viral-video data; 98.7 million people watched the game on TV, per Nielsen. It’s further proof that while Super Bowl is still valuable because it’s one of the last high-profile, mass-media TV events, it’s maximized with an ongoing online effort.

“Social media provides a longer shelf life for people’s campaigns,” said Anthony Iaffaldano, senior director-strategy and innovation at Reprise Media. “It’s about who’s got a plan in place to take the equity they’re building through all this activity and activate it after the game. Social media becomes more valuable as you continue to engage.”

Read Rest of Article

From AdWeek

Ad industry executives have talked for years of a future where a marketer could buy a single national TV placement that serves up different ads to individual households depending on the viewing and purchase profiles of those homes. Does the planned Comcast-NBC Universal merger bring this vision any closer to reality?

Executives contacted last week say the likelihood of an addressable world arriving sometime soon has clearly improved.

“Now that you have a distributor and a content provider sitting on the same side of the table, that could accelerate movement into this area,” said Rino Scanzoni, chief investment officer at GroupM, a unit of WPP.

“A portion of the opportunity in addressability is dependent on partnerships between content owners and distributors,” agreed Tara Walpert Levy, president of Visible World, a tech company involved in the efforts to deploy interactive and targeted ad delivery systems. “Time will tell, but when you put together two critical pieces of the pie like this, it should make it easier to get [addressability] done on a mass scale.”

According to Heather Way, analyst at Dallas-based market research firm Parks Associates, the proposed merger reinforces her latest projections: While spending on interactive TV ads will amount to a mere $49 million in 2009, she says, she sees the sector expanding exponentially over the next few years, exceeding $4 billion by 2014-assuming the successful rollout of Canoe Ventures’ national advanced TV platforms. (Canoe is a consortium of six cable operators: Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cablevision, Cox Communications, Charter and Bright House Network.)

By comparison, broadcast TV ad spending will reach $46.5 billion this year, and cable and satellite TV spending combined will total $29.5 billion this year, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. By 2013, the furthest out the company forecasts, combined spending is expected to be $73 billion.

Cable operators and tech companies, including Visible World and Invidi, have led efforts to deploy interactive TV delivery systems for the last decade. National scale has been elusive because of the different and incompatible technologies used by competing cable firms, and the fact that content companies like NBCU and distributors like Comcast haven’t been able to work out terms for jointly deploying ad-targeting systems.

Read Rest of AdWeek Article

From Karlene Lukovitz for Marketing Daily/Media Post

Nearly a third (32%) of Americans say they would be open to having their Web-surfing and television viewing habits monitored in order to receive ads more relevant to their interests — as long as the data collected could not identify them as individuals, according to a global study of consumer media habits and advertising attitudes conducted by market research firm Synovate.

Another 8% said they would be open to such monitoring with “few, if any, concerns.”

However, 35% said they would reject such technology because they would be concerned about monitoring services collecting data about them, and 9% said that they are not interested in changing the ads to which they are exposed.

On a worldwide basis, 11% expressed acceptance with few or no concerns, 26% indicated openness if individual identities were protected, 27% indicated rejection on the basis of privacy concerns, and 16% said they are not interested in changing the ads to which they are exposed.

The survey was conducted in September among consumers in the U.S. and 10 other countries. The U.S. survey took place online, and the 500 respondents comprised a representative national sample, according to Synovate.

The results confirm that consumers are taking steps to avoid advertising, and that this behavior varies by medium. For instance, 41% report that they are avoiding Web sites with intrusive ads or pop-ups more frequently than they did a year ago (9% are doing this less frequently, and 37% have not changed the frequency of this behavior). Even more (44%) are more frequently skipping ads when watching TV or listening to radio (5% are doing this less frequently, and 46% have not changed this behavior).

Here’s a summary of U.S. consumer responses when asked about their frequency of engaging with brands/advertising via the Internet and social media during the past year:

• Following a brand on Twitter: 82% have never done this, 4% are doing it more often than a year ago, 1% less often, and 9% with the same frequency.

• Promoting a brand or ad on their social networking pages or becoming a brand fan: 63% have never done, 9% are doing more often, 6% less often, and 18% with the same frequency.

• Sharing links to ads that they like with friends: 55% have never done, 7% are doing more often, 9% less often, and 26% with the same frequency.

• Searching for an ad on the Internet (e.g. YouTube): 51% have never done, 8% are doing more often, 12% less often, and 27% with the same frequency.

Consumers were also asked to indicate how important various media are to them. Not surprisingly, Americans love their TV: 41% said they’d miss it a great deal if it wasn’t there, and 34% said they “can’t live without it.” Only 19% said they like it but don’t need it, and 5% that they could easily live without it.

But according to this survey — remembering that it was conducted online — Americans are even more attached to the Internet: 58% said they can’t live without it, and 31% said they’d miss it a great deal if it wasn’t there. Just 10% said they like it but don’t need it, and 1% that they could easily live without it.

More than one-third (35%) said they can’t live without their mobile phones, and another 28% would greatly miss them.

In comparison, 25% of Americans said they would greatly miss newspapers, and 10% that they can’t live without them, while 23% and 6%, respectively, expressed those opinions about magazines.

Looking at perceptions about the amount of advertising in various media, 71% of Americans said there are too many ads on TV — although 26% actually said that the number is about right, and 1% would be “happier to see or hear more ads.”

Print media came out more favorably. Just 30% and 54% said that there are too many ads in newspapers and magazines, respectively, while 61% and 40% said that the number of ads is just right in newspapers and magazines, respectively. Four percent would like to see more ads in newspapers, and 2% would like to see more in magazines.

As for the new advertising frontier of mobile phones, 39% feel that the current number of ads is about right, versus 28% who already view advertising as too intrusive. Nearly a third (31%) were undecided.

How many would be willing to be exposed to more ads if they were paid for it? For both TV and the Internet, more than half (52%) said they would agree to be exposed to more ads, while 40% would not be willing. Slightly more – 54% — would be willing to view more ads on their cell phones if they were paid to do so, although 31% said they would not be willing.

Looking at ad content, novelty appears to be more important than perkiness to U.S. consumers. Asked what characteristics their favorite ads tend to have in common, 21% chose “innovative/unique,” 17% chose “spontaneous/playful,” 15% chose “logical/straightforward,” and 12% “optimistic/happy.”

From AdAge:

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Much of the buzz you’re hearing now that “Where the Wild Things Are” has finally opened is about making sense of what the movie’s No. 1 position atop the box office means. By most standards, a haul of $32.5 million is the mark of a solid performer, but there’s a feeling that the PG-rated movie would have done even better had it lured more of a family crowd, which, one would think, would be a natural for a movie based on a beloved children’s book.

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