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From Garrick Schmitt for Advertising Age -

The teams playing in this year’s Super Bowl have already been decided, but the Super Bowl shuffle for advertisers began in earnest last month when marketing mainstays like FedEx, General Motors and Pepsi made news by announcing they were opting out of this year’s ad extravaganza.

But for those looking to gauge the health of the ad industry, Super Bowl advertising is a bit of red herring. CBS is charging about $2.5 million for 30 seconds of commercial time — and rightly so. Rarely do you get so many Americans watching one event and actually enjoying the advertising. It’s a tremendous opportunity for most brand marketers and we’d be foolish to look at this year’s Super Bowl as proof of either the rejuvenation of the 30-second spot or the rejection of it.

That doesn’t mean some won’t try. After all, last year Hulu saw a 50% increase in site traffic after running ads during the Super Bowl and Denny’s traffic to its website soared nearly 1,700% as consumers sought information about its free breakfast promotion.

There certainly will be advertising winners (and losers) on Super Bowl Sunday but let’s hope that the Monday morning quarterback chatter doesn’t obscure the larger shift at hand for marketers this year. 2010 will be the year of the “platform” for advertisers. Read Rest of Article

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

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.?”

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Endeavour Marketing and Media, A Murfreesboro Advertising Agency

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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Endeavour Marketing and Media, A Murfreesboro, TN Advertising Agency

By Dean Donaldson for AdAge

The recent surge of research around creative variables like ad shape, format and video puts online creative into the hot seat, and size, it seems, doesn’t necessarily matter. We’ve been groomed to judge online display ads based on aesthetics alone as opposed to trying to match the physical elements with performance to see patterns. This has shown certain assets can positively impact campaign results, but it often overlooks one critical factor — the online environment.

Historically, we create ads in an assortment of shapes and sizes and stick them everywhere, only to find ourselves surprised when the same creative generates a range of results across many environments. It’s relatively obvious, actually: Surely the impact of a piece of creative that works effectively in one in environment will differ — sometimes radically — when placed in another.

That’s largely due to the consumer experience and level of activity found in each location. It may seem obvious that a portal homepage would differ to a social media site, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. As consumers spend more and more time online, the environment in which they find themselves matters more and more to them — and not matching the right creative against the right environment can be toxic. As they say, looks will only get you so far; for advertising, it’s location, location, location.

Since the first display ad 15 years ago, a variety of environments have become amenable to online advertising. Take the mega sports homepage portal ESPN, or the opening to news sites like New York Times and Forbes where users skim headlines for few seconds before clicking on various links. Then, contrast destination pages found within these homepages, where the user explores athlete stats or reads specific news articles. Although homepages have mass reach, they also have short attention spans compared to destination pages, which are more likely to retain re users for extended periods of time as the absorb information and content.

Next, consider price-comparison pages versus web mail, let alone desktop messenger ads and entertainment content. Each of these online destinations creates different experiences for audiences, and if we seek to drive better results, today’s online creative should be carefully mapped out to fit the area surrounding it.

We’re wasting data from ineffective advertising if we’re not using it to determine how to improve creative concepts against the actual consumer data shown in the various environments. We see the same mistakes repeatedly, such as expecting users to click away when writing emails or hiding enticing content behind static images on fast-paced homepages. Here’s what we know:

For example, homepages typically call for high impact creative that can distract users very quickly before they move-on to another destination. Recent examples include the Chanel No5 ad or Fedex Paper Crumble.

However, destination pages require something more subtle and less intrusive that can be afforded by time, such as the Virgin Bets, often catching people who are rolling through to navigate, provided the pay-off is fun and rewarding like Ikea’s Set the Table.

In web mail, users continually refresh the page while checking emails and habitually return. Here, they’re unlikely to click away, but may be distracted to play with an ad while they chat with others online or prepare to type an email. An ad that rewards data capture like Snickers Mr. T is a great example for a web mail environment.

Also, in communication environments, marketers should use the ability to re-target users and sequence messages, which is much of what contributed to the success of Levi’s Moon bathing campaign. Sharing content with someone that users are chatting with, like in the case of the Universal Pictures’ Bruno ad is a great way of exploiting desktop messenger or facilitating social media.

If reading reviews or looking for information, affording the search within an ad itself drives people closer to the information they’re looking for and can enhance their brand experience as seen in Travelocity.

With budgets under threat, assuming all creative is equal and underestimating the environmental nuances will deliver catastrophic results and could start to destroy the digital atmosphere and threaten agencies just as global warming has melted the ice caps. Credibility comes from environmental awareness and developing a strategy for change. By learning how consumers respond across environments, marketers may consider spending less time looking at format innovation and more time looking at campaigns holistically.

Endeavour Marketing and Media, A Full-Service Murfreesboro, TN Advertising Agency

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.

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.

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Endeavour Marketing and Media, A Full-Service Advertising Agency in Murfreesboro, Tennessee

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.”

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Endeavour Marketing and Media, A Mufreesboro, TN Advertising Agency

By Christine Huang for AdAge:

The fourth Futures of Entertainment conference hosted by the Convergence Culture Consortium took place at MIT before the holidays, bringing together scholars and key thinkers from across TV, advertising, activism, new media and beyond. The hot topic of the weekend was transmedia.

A primer for those unfamiliar with the term: transmedia is that which moves across multiple channels of communication. Professor Henry Jenkins (formerly of MIT, now at USC), a transmedia scholar and founder of the Convergence Culture Consortium, distills the concept further: “Transmedia storytelling represents a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience.”

But transmedia approaches are applicable anywhere a narrative is formed. Here are four key takeaways from the conference for brands and advertisers to consider in this new transmedia age:

1. Make stories drillable. Jenkins, the event’s keynote speaker, highlighted “drillability” as his first key principle of transmedia storytelling, pointing out the importance of creating narratives that resonate widely as well as deeply. While many storytellers and brands focus on spreading their narratives horizontally—across platforms, networks, users, etc.—it’s in their vertical foundation, their drillability, that lasting engagements are formed.

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From Aaron Kahlow at ClickZ:

Unequivocally, the biggest questions of the year are: “Where does social media fit into my search and marketing plan?” and “Where’s the ROI (define) going to come from to CYA (define) for the spend?” Answers to these questions will be addressed during the panel session, “PR, Social Media, and Search” at SES Chicago next month. This topic has me so pumped, that I’m flying from California to Chicago in the heart of December.

Looking at major brands like Dell, Southwest Airlines, Cisco, and more, our panel explores the boomerang effect of social media on PR efforts, SEO, and all things in between. It’s been stated that social media is the single biggest differentiator in the SEO world today. Those that harness unique user-generated content, the links from the blogosphere and forums, as well as the buzz created from retweets, Facebook updates, and YouTube videos, will reap benefits — if done correctly. READ REST OF ARTICLE