Articles of Interest

Pheedo Bows Self-Service RSS Ad Product

2006-05-03T14:49:00.000-07:00

Pheedo Bows Self-Service RSS Ad Product
by Shankar Gupta, Wednesday, Apr 26, 2006 6:00 AM EST
RSS MARKETING FIRM PHEEDO IS expected to unveil a new product that allows Web site publishers to insert and track advertisements in their RSS feeds.

Pheedo founder Bill Flitter said the product, dubbed "Ads for Feeds," will simplify the process of inserting ads into syndicated feeds. "What we've created is a way to make RSS advertising and analytics available to everyone," said Pheedo Founder Bill Flitter. "Before, publishers were a little bit in the dark. What this product does is shed some light onto some of the problems with RSS. We created this product really to be easy, almost to the point of cutting and pasting code into their template."

With Ads for Feeds, publishers host a piece of Pheedo code on their own Web sites, and that code inserts ads and tracks the advertisements. The more extensive, expensive version, now called "Ads For Feeds+," redirects the feed through Pheedo's own servers, allowing for more data to be collected.

The product currently works with the major blog content management systems, including Wordpress, Moveable Type, and Typepad. According to Flitter, Pheedo can write custom code for proprietary content management systems, as well.

Flitter said the company hoped the new service would allow it to capture more of the widening marketplace. "A real motivation behind this particular product was to appeal to the market. The market is changing quite a bit over a year ago, and more and more people are becoming aware of RSS, and they're RSS enabling their sites," he said.

Engagement Panel: No Currency, No Clarity

2006-05-01T10:18:00.001-07:00

Engagement Panel: No Currency, No Clarity
by Erik Sass, Friday, Apr 28, 2006 8:19 AM EST

ENGAGEMENT IS REAL AND MEANINGFUL, but its usefulness is limited by the lack of a single measurement currency, speakers on the "Engagement" panel agreed during Media Magazine's "Outfront Conference" on Thursday. During the course of the panel, it became obvious that in large part that's due to the fact that the meaning of engagement itself is still up for debate.

According to Deborah Reichig, senior vice president of sales strategy for CourtTV, "We're talking to one agency who thinks that loyalty is an important factor, and they measure that by the number of people who have watched three out of four episodes. Another thinks it's persistence, and that's measured by numbers of minutes watched per show. And there's others who want to look at 'persuasiveness.' We actually did a literature review and there are 85 different words and phrases that people have used to get at this concept."

The reality and importance of engagement were established early on by Paul Iaffaldano, executive vice-president and general manager of the Weather Channel's media solutions group, who noted statistics on the disparity between viewer attention to programming and ads: "There can be a 25 percent drop-off between ratings in program and ratings in minutes where commercials run. That is a very significant drop-off, and that is worth measuring."

By the same token, minute-by-minute data is not always reliable, according to Sandy Eubank, director of U.S. research and communications insight for OMD: "We don't think that the minute-by-minute ratings are engagement, and we don't think that they are commercial ratings... sets tuned doesn't necessarily indicate engagement... we prefer a measure of engagement where we actually ask something of the consumer."

Eubank went on to explain that it would be a mistake to use simple statistics like the number of sets tuned to measure a more complicated phenomenon like engagement: "Engagement occurs on a continuum... and if you just look at that tuning data you're missing a richness in data that is very important to advertisers. Having minute-by-minute data is far from a commercial rating." Above all, Eubank suggested a metric "where someone has asked the consumer something that suggests that they're involved with the program."

Although the means and object of measurement remained ambiguous, the other panelists seemed to agree with David Marans, executive vice president of IAG, when he summed it up: "Ratings are currency for transactions, and Nielsen does them well... but if you're building a house, they're the foundation, not the whole house."

And where might media execs find other sources of data? Deborah Reichig, senior vice president of sales strategy for CourtTV, noted: "There is a wealth of data hidden in those syndicated services we all use every day. There are ways to get at loyalty, and length of tune, and audience retention... you can use a combination of syndicated data and proprietary data to get a much better feel for what's going on."

Of course, proprietary methods for measuring engagement also allow competing research and media firms to distinguish themselves--a fact that seems to suggest a single measurement currency may still be a long way off. But it's worth noting that the basic ratings currency provided by Nielsen was at one time a proprietary service too. If "engagement" is to become a meaningful metric, it too must be standardized.

"They're probably all different," Eubank said of media deals that focus on engagement. "What's hard is to get other people around the table to accept your measure of engagement... What we would like to see is that everyone accepts one measure--and there's a currency, and a level playing field. But it may be ten years before that actually happens."

Wired News: Movie Mashups Take on Trailers

2006-05-01T04:47:00.000-07:00

Wired News: Movie Mashups Take on Trailers
Movie Mashups Take on Trailers

By Niall McKay| Also by this reporter
02:00 AM May, 01, 2006

Hollywood has drafted a British VJ outfit to produce the first official movie mashup.

New Line Cinema commissioned Addictive TV, a British VJ duo, to mashup the new Antonio Banderas blockbuster Take The Lead to market to the iPod generation.

Watch the mashup here:

The Brit duo, known for bootleg movie remixes of titles like the Italian Job and James Bond were commissioned by New Line in a VJ faceoff with DJ 2nd Nature and Electric Method.

"It's the first time that a Hollywood studio has included a mix as part of its (marketing) package," said Graham Daniels, who runs Addictive TV with DJ Trolly.

The pair are no newcomers to mixing and mashing video. As a live act, they've been on the road VJing since 1992. Performing live, they blend film footage, video and audio clips using video and audio mixers, DVD turntables, laptop computers and video projectors. But the recent upswing in mashup culture is giving them a new lease of life.

The pair have also been hired by EMI to create a Doors versus Blondie mix that will feature live Doors concerts mixed with snippets of Blondie's '80s videos.

"EMI liked our Queen vs. Tarantino bootleg mashup so they asked to create one for Blondie," Daniels said.

The pair will be performing a VJ "symphony" on Monday night at the San Francisco International Film Festival called "The Eye of the Pilot."

The audiovisual symphony will feature a collection of color 8-mm film from the '50s shot by French commercial airline pilot Raymond Lamy, mixed live with guitar playing, ambient music and images drawn from Addictive TVs archive.

"We like to perform special mixes for our concerts," said Daniels. "We did a Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon mix for our Shanghai concert and the crowd went mad on the dance floor."

Is Poker Losing Its First Flush? - New York Times

2006-04-16T08:09:00.000-07:00

Is Poker Losing Its First Flush? - New York Times
April 16, 2006
Is Poker Losing Its First Flush?

By TIMOTHY L. O'BRIEN
LAS VEGAS

NEXT month, Fox Broadcasting plans to introduce "Poker Dome Challenge," a live television show that will be broadcast from inside the Neonopolis, a shopping mall just down the block from Binion's, the gleefully bawdy casino where high-stakes poker started here more than 50 years ago.

While "Poker Dome" may be Binion's neighbor, the show will be as far removed from poker's leisurely Mississippi Delta roots as weekend paintball matches are from big-game hunting. "Poker Dome" will encase a group of players in a soundproof, glass-walled stage, while viewers and a studio audience watch everything they do.

Microphones will capture game chatter, and pulse monitors strapped to the gamblers will track their heart rates. Robotic cameras will scrutinize every nervous tic on the gamblers' faces, projecting the angst of brinkmanship onto oversized video screens. New to the mix will be an N.B.A.-like shot clock that gives gamblers only 15 seconds to bet, check or fold, an innovation that Fox says will increase the rate of play to 80 to 100 hands an hour from the usual 15 to 20. "It's poker on triple espresso," Fox boasts in a "Poker Dome" news release.

Three years into the poker boom, the game's purveyors are out to prove that it is not a mere fad, but a form of entertainment with real legs — even as there are signs that the country's poker appetite may be becoming less ravenous. Some industry analysts expect the growth of online poker to slow sharply, and televised poker is already drawing fewer viewers.

The Travel Channel says ratings for its "World Poker Tour" have fallen 36 percent in the last two years. Poker even has its own miniature stock scandal, with the Securities and Exchange Commission investigating whether the poker legend, Doyle Brunson, and his Las Vegas lawyers manipulated the stock price of WPT Enterprises, the company that runs the "World Poker Tour."

Even so, the commercialization and transformation of the old game zips along at light speed. Fox, as well as other companies and networks that produce and broadcast poker, dismiss naysaying and continue to inject more adrenaline into promotion.

"I do think that poker is one of the most durable and cost-effective forms of programming in television," said George Greenberg, a Fox executive overseeing the network's poker forays. "Quality poker, dramatic poker and poker that is in your face is the poker that will be left standing."

Big-money poker, of course, is in everyone's face now, thanks to Fox, its television brethren, and the Internet. The "World Poker Tour" is modeling a major new tournament after invitation-only events found in professional golf, much to the chagrin of some players who worry they will be cut out of lucrative licensing deals. ESPN showcases the "World Series of Poker," in June, and this year's entry list is expected to briskly outpace last year's roster of about 5,600. And the Bravo network continues to play the glamour card on " Celebrity Poker Showdown" (Ben Affleck! Martin Sheen! Ray Romano!).

The Web is a distinctive sugar daddy in all of this. PartyPoker.com, a leading Web site, is host for about 32 hands of poker play per second, according to a British securities filing by its parent company, PartyGaming. In 2005, that amounted to about $1,454 wagered per second, or $45 billion for the year — and PartyPoker is just one among some 2,400 online poker sites.

The growth of the poker industry, meanwhile, has led some television executives to bet that darts, dominoes or blackjack will be next. A group of Las Vegas and Los Angeles entrepreneurs has filmed a new blackjack tournament that it is pitching to networks as the next big thing. For his part, Mr. Greenberg at Fox still sees poker as the biggest game in town — and "Poker Dome" as its most robust incarnation.

" 'Poker Dome' will be the Nascar of poker," he said, "because of its style, design, graphics, information and the speed with which the game is played."

But are speed, the currency of slot machines and other quick-fix gambling gimmicks a virtue in poker? And are all the people joining the dizzying electronic and tabletop smorgasbord of tournaments really playing poker anymore?

Well, no, some purists say. They contend that real poker is about a sober assessment of risk and long-term gains at the table, and not about speed or frequent high-stakes collisions over big pots.

"The minute you make it a tournament meant to bankrupt someone else then it isn't poker anymore," said Aaron Brown, an executive director at Morgan Stanley and the author of a new poker book, "The Poker Face of Wall Street." "It's the same difference between being a career singer and being on 'American Idol.' Tournament play may be great entertainment, but it's not poker."

Poker industry honchos dismiss such critiques. They say that their efforts have snared a mass audience of new poker enthusiasts and that those who are not enamored of high-octane tournament play simply have not adapted to modern times.

"Poker has gone from something that has been hardly an afterthought to a big, big business," says Steven Lipscomb, the chief executive of WPT and co-founder of the "World Poker Tour."

"Inevitably, no matter what you do, anybody who drops out of a tournament will gripe about structure," he said.

ON a recent evening at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas, Phil Gordon, a former commentator on "Celebrity Poker Showdown," regaled a Wall Street group with tales from the poker trenches. J. P. Morgan had hired him to entertain a group of professional money managers who would set off after a sumptuous dinner to play poker with one another in a small, private tournament.

"I am not a professional gambler — I have never gambled a day in my life," said Mr. Gordon, who became a full-time poker player several years ago after he made about $2 million exercising stock options earned as a high-tech entrepreneur. "What I am is very similar to what you do. I'm a strategic investor."

"All I'm trying to do is get my money in and invest as often as I possibly can," he told his audience. "Every time I put $100 into the pot I expect to take $100 or more out."

The gambler reinvented as investor, shrewdly calculating expected values and other statistical realities, is one face of contemporary poker, and Mr. Gordon is an advocate of the game's new business-minded mantra. Lanky, genial and savvy, he is a talented poker player who is quick to point out that he does not consider himself a great player. But he is clearly an avid promoter. He comes to speaking engagements loaded with slick poker-training DVD's, copies of his popular poker books, a snappy résumé and talking points.

Mr. Gordon says he can now make more money, more consistently, from his speeches, books and DVD's than he ever made playing poker. As he stands in the middle of Caesar's poker room, a few poker groupies spot him and rush over to get his autograph, making him something quite other than the back-alley poker tough Steve McQueen played in "The Cincinnati Kid," the 1965 film.

Mr. Gordon has had a ringside seat at the poker boom. He finished in fourth place at the 2001 World Series and then won the "World Poker Tour" the next year, all just before the introduction of a hole-card camera helped ignite poker ratings on television by allowing viewers to peek at cards that were once hidden in players' hands. A chance encounter with the actor Hank Azaria, in late 2002, led Mr. Azaria to suggest that Mr. Gordon get in touch with Joshua Malina, another actor producing a charitable poker event, which evolved into "Celebrity Poker Showdown."

Mr. Molina asked Mr. Gordon to be a commentator on "Showdown," which made its debut in 2003 and found itself a sudden and unexpected catalyst in poker mania.

From his years in the game, Mr. Gordon has mapped out qualities that he believes make a great poker player — qualities like aggressiveness, courage, patience, observational brilliance and open-mindedness. He also asserts that an ability to assess opponents' psychological makeup is far more important than mathematical dexterity. In fact, he says in his poker primers, all that any player needs to succeed are fourth-grade math skills and emotional discipline.

"It's the only game that normal, everyday people can visualize themselves doing at the highest level," he said. "They know they will never be able to hit a Randy Johnson fastball or catch a Joe Montana pass, but they can imagine themselves sitting across from Phil Ivey and going all-in. A plumber with marital difficulties can find himself suddenly rich and famous."

Those particular fantasies took flight among poker fans when Chris Moneymaker, an otherwise nondescript 27-year-old novice with a poker-perfect surname, unexpectedly won the 2003 World Series, taking home $2.5 million.

In 2001, poker players around the world spent a combined $72 million buying their way into live games. Last year, the global buy-in was $376.6 million, according to PokerPages.com, a firm that tracks the industry. About 304,500 people entered those tournaments in 2005, according to the firm, compared with about 147,500 in 2001. For now, the popularity of poker playing remains. The number of people entering tournaments and the amount they spent doing so were both higher in the first quarter this year than they were in the same period in 2005.

The emerging powerhouse in tournament play is the "World Poker Tour," shown on the Travel Channel. Mr. Lipscomb, a former documentary filmmaker who said he was inspired to create a slickly packaged professional poker league after he filmed the 1999 World Series, joined a casino industry veteran, Lyle Berman, to found WPT Enterprises. Mr. Berman minces few words in describing the partners' original aspirations: "Our whole goal was to create a brand around poker and monetize it."

That attitude has upset players like Mr. Gordon, who say the tour is trying to monopolize all of the financial action floating around tournament play, like licensing deals. But other players say they are grateful for the tour's national platform and for television exposure as they play in top poker rooms like those at the Bellagio in Las Vegas, the Borgata in Atlantic City and Foxwoods in Ledyard, Conn.

THE Travel Channel and WPT televised the first "World Poker Tour" from March to June 2003, featuring about 1,400 entrants competing for a total prize pool of $11.6 million. When the tour's fourth season ends this June, WPT says it will have had about 10,000 entrants competing for a pool worth $90 million to $100 million.

While new poker players are clearly continuing to flock to tournaments and online forums, it is less clear that television fans will share that enthusiasm. The Travel Channel said that about 850,000 households, on average, tuned in to the "World Poker Tour" in its first season, in 2003. That figure jumped to 1.2 million in the second season, broadcast from December 2003 to September 2004. But during the tour's fourth season, which began in March and ends in June, an average of only 760,000 households have been tuning in.

ESPN has experienced a dip in its "World Series" viewership, and viewers have also been abandoning "Celebrity Poker Showdown." Bravo said "Showdown" had an average of 957,000 households watching in its first season, from November 2003 to January 2004. In the seventh season, which was broadcast from last October to last December, the average household viewership plunged to 387,000. Bravo said that part of the dropoff in average ratings, though not all, was attributable to added "Showdown" episodes.

Although Mr. Gordon says he thinks that poker play has about two years of growth left before it plateaus — a view he bases on anecdotal evidence like book sales and e-mail traffic — his former bosses at Bravo say they are in for the long haul. Lauren Zalaznick, Bravo's president, describes "Showdown" as one of her most bankable franchises, along with "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" and "Project Runway."

On the financial side of the ledger, WPT also has doubters. While the stock market is never a perfect predictor, investors do not appear convinced that the World Poker Tour's owner is telling a growth story. Even though WPT's revenue grew to $18 million last year from about $4.3 million in 2003, the company is unprofitable and its stock price closed at $6.86 yesterday, exactly where it was shortly after the company went public in the summer of 2004.

For a brief time after its initial offering, the stock rose smartly — including a surprising spike to about $29.50 last July, after Mr. Brunson announced on his Web site that he planned to start a takeover bid. Less than a week later, Mr. Brunson allowed his WPT bid to lapse, causing the stock price to begin falling back to earth, where it has since remained. The S.E.C. said in December that it was investigating Mr. Brunson and two of his Las Vegas lawyers, Chaka Henry and David Chesnoff, regarding the circumstances surrounding the takeover offer. All of the parties involved in the investigation declined to comment.

Mr. Lipscomb also declined to comment on the investigation, but said that he was confident about WPT's future, primarily because he was ramping up his company's online presence.

The legality of online poker betting in the United States is murky, with the Justice Department and some states flatly considering it illegal, even though some courts have interpreted the situation differently. Regardless, setting up shop on a computer server abroad and establishing an online poker presence identity is easy, and WPT has already started sites in 150 countries to do so. (Mr. Lipscomb says that American players are blocked from accessing WPT's overseas pay-for-play gambling sites.)

The earnings of the online poker titan PartyGaming, especially in comparison with WPT's anemic numbers, illustrate why Mr. Lipscomb is in such a hurry. PartyGaming's revenue leapt to $977 million in 2005, from $30.1 million in 2002, while its profits in those same years soared to $293.2 million from $4.4 million.

Feverish online poker play accounts for the difference. According to PokerPages.com, digital gamblers open their wallets at a far lustier rate than poker players entering live tournaments. The company estimates that 40 million poker players entered online tournaments last year and forked over buy-ins totaling about $1.1 billion.

PartyGaming says its PartyPoker Web site had about 41 percent of global online poker play last year, with most players based in the United States. But PartyGaming's securities filings also cite a study indicating that the growth of online poker revenue will slow sharply. While revenue grew at an annual rate of 158 percent from 2000 to 2005, the study projects annual increases of only about 18 percent from 2005 to 2010.

The Internet fosters speedy poker play as much as television tournaments like "Poker Dome" do, and analysts are curious about whether such haste may also give rise to compulsive gambling problems. Dr. Howard J. Shaffer, director of Harvard Medical School's division on addictions and an authority on problem gambling, is completing a study of online gambling and poker play. He says that online poker is in its infancy and that his data need to be interpreted carefully.

I THINK online poker play has changed the gambling landscape," he said. "I think younger people see it as much more average and acceptable, and without the same apprehensions and restraints, as earlier generations. That could make current online players more vulnerable or even less vulnerable. We just don't know yet."

Another age-old threat that is given a new twist in the online poker world is cheating. Cardsharps have always prowled poker rooms, colluding with one another to set up naïve or unwitting players. But some poker veterans say that the Internet makes collusion much harder to discern and avoid. Richard Marcus, a gambler who has written an autobiography about his exploits as a professional cheater, recently published a book, "Dirty Poker: The Poker Underworld Exposed," that purports to detail the poker world's underbelly.

For example, Mr. Marcus contends that it is simple for a skilled cheater to adopt several digital guises and "sit" anonymously at several seats at one online poker table and control a match's outcome. "I've been cheating at everything, including poker, since I was old enough to walk, to put it bluntly," he said. "There is no policing of the online sites. None."

John Shepherd, a PartyGaming spokesman, disputes this view, saying that his company carefully monitors its poker sites for cheaters. "We have absolutely zero tolerance for cheating," he said.

PartyGaming also has zero tolerance for sitting still. The company continues to start a variety of new online casino games, including blackjack, which has generated about $800,000 a day in revenue since its debut in October.

OTHERS also say that blackjack may be ready for prime time. Russ Hamilton, a professional poker player in Las Vegas, received the backing of Los Angeles investors to produce a new show called the "Ultimate Blackjack Tour." Mr. Hamilton says he has introduced some innovative tweaks, like a secret-betting button, that are designed to speed up wagering and make blackjack just as telegenic as poker. Mr. Hamilton and a Las Vegas consultant, Anthony Curtis, say they have shot 10 episodes of the show and are negotiating with networks to broadcast them.

"There are more blackjack players than poker players, and blackjack is far easier than poker," Mr. Curtis said. "I believe it's the next big thing. Poker is big, but it's got to hit a wall."

If tournament poker has yet to hit a wall in terms of popularity, some people say it may already have reached a breaking point in terms of its quality. Televised tournaments are demanding bigger "blinds" — designated antes that players are required to throw into the pot before a new hand begins — that cause players to burn through their bankrolls more quickly. That forces faster play and speedier eliminations. And that, in turn, makes luck a much bigger factor in those games than it is in normal poker matches.

"It's as if you played golf where every hole was just one or two shots — that's what they've done to TV poker," Mr. Gordon said. "They're more interested in production values than in letting a player's true skill play out on the green felt."

Still, the game goes on. In addition to the thrills of its new "Poker Dome," Fox says its series will also offer pricey, stand-alone "mega events." The first such "Poker Dome" event is planned for July and is scheduled to star the poker wizard Phil Ivey. Mr. Ivey, along with five other gamblers, will each have to pay $10 million buy-ins for the right to participate in a $60 million, winner-take-all face-off. The money promises to trade hands very, very fast.

Why Can't I Have Just the Cable Channels I Want? - New York Times

2006-04-16T08:07:00.000-07:00

Why Can't I Have Just the Cable Channels I Want? - New York Times
April 16, 2006
Media Frenzy
Why Can't I Have Just the Cable Channels I Want?

By RICHARD SIKLOS
AT the National Cable and Telecommunications Association convention in Atlanta last week, the cable guys were at it again. They were kvetching that the Federal Communications Commission had gotten it terribly wrong in pushing to loosen the way that cable television channels were packaged and sold. Essentially, the cable contingent says that its current practice of selling a package of 75 or so broadcast and cable channels is better for consumers and the public good than letting people pick and choose the 10 or 20 stations they actually watch.

The average price of extended basic cable — the type of channel package to which most of the nation's 73 million cable-watching households subscribe — is $41 a month, according to Kagan Research. Plenty of other premium channels and services are available, but the only cheaper option is truly basic: a package of mostly local stations with none of the popular cable channels (ESPN, MTV and CNN, to name but a few). At my house in Connecticut, for instance, basic cable runs me $13 a month.

The cable operators say that forcing them to give people more latitude over the channels they buy would constitute rank government interference, the equivalent of forcing restaurants to sell burgers and buns separately. The à la carte model favored by some regulators would lead to much higher rates for individual channels, executives argue. Whereas that same $41 might get you only 10 hand-picked channels, the bundle model both pays for the infrastructure — all those pipes and set-top boxes and servers and repair trucks — and preserves the smorgasbord of big and small channels to suit all demographics and tastes.

Without bundling, programmers like Disney and Viacom might no longer be able to afford shows with smaller but loyal followings. Under the current system, they can produce niche channels like ESPN Classic because they are bundled with ESPN and other channels, the programmers say.

For the most part, the F.C.C. rolls its watchdog eyes and notes that the price of expanded basic has increased well beyond other goods and services over the past few years. It and the cable association have drawers full of studies disputing the other's studies about their studies. Kevin J. Martin, the F.C.C. chairman, showed up briefly in Atlanta to reiterate that he was not giving up the fight, even after recently cajoling cable companies to agree to put together a new, smaller tier of family-oriented channels that was a few dollars less than extended basic. "Putting more control in the hands of consumers is always good," he said.

Alas, the legislative year is rapidly winding to a close in Washington, making it unlikely that Congress will pass any à la carte legislation this time around. Still, even a few renegade television providers are finding it difficult not to side with Mr. Martin. Cablevision Systems in New York and the satellite service EchoStar have done so, though they remain a clear minority. Comcast, Time Warner, the News Corporation, Walt Disney and others are lined up to harrumph at Mr. Martin.

The great paradox of this debate is that it comes as the number of media options is exploding and the way they are being priced is all over the map. The much-maligned bundle will most probably prevail as the most popular business model for media, although it, too, is likely going to need an extreme makeover.

Just look at the big picture: At one end of the spectrum is the push to sell more and more programming on a per-show or per-viewing basis, via video-on-demand or some kind of download service. Whether it is iTunes from Apple Computer, the new video services from Google and Yahoo, or the newest iterations of nascent mobile telephone services through Verizon, Sprint and others, it's clear that we are approaching a future where there will be no chance that a favorite show can be missed.

Last week, Disney pushed the ball forward by announcing a trial to show four of its popular television shows free on www.abc.com, with commercial sponsors. And Fox said it had worked out a deal with affiliate stations that would let it join the other big networks in making popular shows available in new digital and online formats.

All this is happening not so much because content makers sense gigantic riches in these new ventures, but out of fear that if they don't make their programming more freely available, younger audiences will grow up accustomed to getting their favorite shows free via illegal file-sharing services and DVD's burned by their pals.

At the other end of the spectrum from selling individual shows is the equally au courant concept of überbundling — selling digital cable services combined with high-speed Internet and telephone service, and maybe throwing some wireless into the mix.

Ask cable industry executives, and most will argue that a majority of people still prefer buying the existing pre-ordained packages of cable. And the addition of new services like high-speed access gives viewers conveniences like a single bill and shared customer service. Yet a recent USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll found that 54 percent of television viewers said they would prefer to buy channels individually, while only 43 percent said they'd rather pay a flat fee for a fixed number of channels.

Strangely, these colliding views make sense. When asked whether they want total choice, especially from historically monopolistic quasi-utilities, it's no shock that most people say: heck, yes. Yet, as the author and psychology professor Barry Schwartz and two of his colleagues pointed out a few weeks ago in The New York Times Magazine, Americans have this funny habit of confusing freedom, which they cherish, with choice, which can give them headaches.

"We're definitely at an overwhelming number of options," Maribel D. Lopez, a media analyst at Forrester Research, told me. "It's frequently difficult to understand what you're buying. There's also different content that goes on different devices. We run the risk of consumers moving to indecision because they have a lot of choice."

Stephen B. Burke, the chief operating officer of Comcast, also contends that people are most comfortable paying for subscription services they can rely on at a set price, even if they don't consume every minute or inch of it — whether the subscription is to cable service or Time magazine.

Mr. Burke pointed out to me that well under 10 percent of subscribers bought pay-per-view or video-on-demand movies from Comcast. But as many as 70 percent of Comcast's customers avail themselves each month of the free video-on-demand programming that is part of its digital package.

Mr. Burke says part of the problem with buying individual shows is that, amazingly, more than 90 percent of Comcast's 22 million customers still pay monthly cable bills by cash or check. That kind of customer isn't ideal for impulse digital purchases.

And Ms. Lopez says that one reason new mobile services may be slow to take off is that even tech-savvy consumers in the United States are not as culturally attuned to prepaying for communications services as those in Europe and elsewhere.

There are examples to the contrary that suggest that consumers are more than keen to buy products by the bite — but they are fewer than you'd expect. Ring tones, music downloads and pornography come immediately to mind, but, needless to say, these models don't translate across all media.

Rather than unfettered choice, maybe what most people yearn for is more, better choice. Video providers in Britain, Hong Kong and Canada have figured out how to offer a much wider variety of ways for their audiences to pay for TV without invoking video Armageddon.

The cable operators are indisputably right about one thing: they shouldn't need Mr. Martin to tell them to do the right thing.

Ken Belson contributed reporting for this article.

MySpace Exec: Teen Users Promote Brands

2006-04-14T11:28:00.000-07:00

MySpace Exec: Teen Users Promote Brands
by Tobi Elkin, Wednesday, Mar 29, 2006 6:00 AM EST
LOS ANGELES--MARKETERS NEED TO BECOME cultural anthropologists if they want to connect with people on MySpace.com. "We take a sociological approach to building MySpace, and advertisers need to be cultural anthropologists when they're thinking about their communications strategy on social networks," said Shawn Gold, senior vice president of marketing and content for MySpace.com, during a keynote on Tuesday at the OMMA Hollywood Conference & Expo in Los Angeles.

Social networks, including MySpace.com, are "about individuality and identification and connecting with others," Gold said, adding that kids on MySpace.com are looking to belong, and for discovery, access, self-expression, recognition, confidence-building, appreciation, and building knowledge. "We think that every feature on the site needs to tie in with these core needs."

In presenting a highlight video from MySpace.com, Gold showed examples of how teens are incorporating brand networking into their MySpace pages. One page showed images of the LA Lakers, an Aston Martin, and other auto brands. "Teens are brand networking on their pages--they are trend-setters and they want to be the first to know or to spread something," Gold said, adding: "that's the cultural currency of life on MySpace."

Gold mentioned MySpace programs with Aquafina and the Beastie Boys, as well as Wendy's, which has managed to rack up 94,000 friends on MySpace and boasts a variety of features on its page including downloads, wallpapers, screensavers, AIM icons, slides, audio, and video. Verizon Wireless, the Honda Element, and Toyota are among the marketers that are evolving profiles on MySpace.

Gold offered a few predictions when it comes to marketing to the "everywhere, always there consumer." He said consumer empowerment marketing is a "now and forever trend," that social networks/blogs are a publishing platform for early adopters, and that word-of-mouth has turned into citizen journalism as a trusted form of media. In addition, marketers will step up their focus on brand programming designed to "catch consumers in their stride as they communicate and connect," but he said, "people don't come to social networks to click on the advertising." Marketers that have turned to brand programming on MySpace include Boost Mobile, Best Buy, and TV properties like "The Family Guy." The marketing opportunity is to create mini social networks within a social network.

Marketers can slice and dice the database. "There are thousands of brand programming opportunities that have yet to be exploited," Gold said, citing niche communities on MySpace of DJs, comedians, filmmakers, and musicians. "A marketer could create a celebrity brand of the month because there is so much content that can be sliced and diced." Exclusive and original content, including previews of TV shows like "The Office," and albums ranging from artists like Audioslave and Madonna to Neil Diamond can premiere successfully on MySpace.com.

Gold told OMMA attendees that communications will become more important than marketing, and that choice will lead to an even greater fragmenting of the media landscape. "If an average person is getting 30 visits per day on MySpace, how do you maximize the opportunity? Smart marketers are trying to get onto people's home pages," he said. For example, for the film "She's the Man," MySpace enabled a member to take their Top 8 "friends" and categorize them as best-looking, most secrets, biggest crush, and so forth, and created a special HTML graphic for the feature. MySpace found that 82,000 people accessed the generator application and used it on their home page to maximize their personal reach.

Cause-related marketing on MySpace is growing, Gold explained after showing the video "Life Rolls On," about a young surfer who was injured and paralyzed doing the sport he loves. "Marketers will create cause-related programs that enhance their brand's position in society. Marketers can get behind some of these people."

Gold predicted that event marketers will lead social networking advertising by increasing their contact opportunities to get people more invested in an event. He cited Aquafina's tying in to a Beastie Boys concert for MySpace devotees, in which there was a contest to create a music video and a trip to the Sundance Film Festival for the winners.

As for advertiser skepticism and scrutiny of MySpace.com, Gold said: "Results are the only way to build advertiser confidence. We have enough major advertisers using MySpace right now--it's not who's going to go first, it's about not being left behind." In addition, "to really capitalize on the future and efficiencies of media, marketers need to credibly insert their message." Gold explained that walled gardens exist on MySpace where an advertiser doesn't have to be on a person's page, but can appear on the site's home, TV, and music pages where there's "exceptional reach."

MySpace stands for "empowerment of the individual" and "now you have this exceptional efficiency and intimacy to reach people. Advertisers somewhat have to unlearn tactics of traditional media in order to take advantage of it," Gold said, adding: "We know the audience really well, and we won't let advertisers do something it won't accept."

During a panel discussion after Gold's keynote, Doug Neil, senior vice president, new media at Universal Pictures, said his team is leveraging consumer-generated media to create buzz around the upcoming film "Slither." "It's all about personalization and customization. We allowed fans the chance to create their own 30-second spot for the film, and the winning spot will run in one of our TV ads," Neil said, adding, "We're empowering consumers to be part of the marketing message and to spread it virally." He hopes the effort will build awareness for the film by getting people involved early in buzz-building. Neil added that Universal put nearly 30 percent of its marketing budget into online media.

Gold said advertisers can deploy MySpace users and fan clubs to do their marketing for them, and added that MySpace is actively looking at how users can control which advertisers appear on their profile pages.

Some MySpace fast facts: As of Tuesday, there were 66 million people on MySpace, with 230,000 people joining each day on average. By year-end, that number is projected to reach 98 million. About 90 percent of MySpace users are from the United States.

MySpace is the No. 2 site on the Web behind Yahoo in content consumption. About 15 million log on to the site, 30 million songs are streamed, 11.5 million friends are added, and 15.5 million comments are left each day.

To the MySpace generation, "MySpace is not technology. A user's profile can be thought of as a metaphor for their life or apartment. The profile is a characterization of who users are, and they want to express themselves creatively," Gold said.

Tiny screens pitch one last ad

2006-04-14T09:43:00.000-07:00

Tiny screens pitch one last ad

By Kelly P. Kissel
Associated Press
Published April 3, 2006

Shelf space: For retailers worried that their advertisements are reaching smaller audiences, it's the final frontier.

Retailers are losing their traditional television audiences to cable, their radio listeners to satellite services and newspaper readers to the Internet.

So Vestcom, a company that makes price labels that adorn shelves nationwide is developing a different way to reach shoppers: video monitors attached to store shelves.

"You're in the store. You're making a decision and they have the last chance to try to influence you to buy their product," said Tim McKenzie, executive vice president and director of sales and marketing at Vestcom, which produces shelf tags for thousands of stores including Kroger Co., Target Corp. and Walgreen Co.

"It is where the industry is going in terms of trying to redirect advertising dollars to what they call the last three feet of the marketing plan," he said.

Vestcom's video monitor, about 4 inches wide, will show 10-, 20- or 30-second commercials as well as an item's price. It's the next logical step after ceiling-mounted video displays and end-of-the-aisle kiosks promoting weekly or daily specials that have become commonplace in grocery and drugstore chains.

Vestcom is developing a prototype for a large national retailer that it won't identify publicly, but it says shoppers could catch commercials on the small screen this time next year.

Retailing experts say the concept is likely to work.

"Consumers are spontaneous and if you can catch their attention, that's going to increase the chance that they will look at your product," said Jack Taylor, a professor of retailing at Birmingham-Southern College in Alabama.

Retailers will be walking a fine line between informing shoppers and irritating them, but because the target audience is already in the store, a shelf-level commercial is an effective way to spend advertising dollars, Taylor said.

"It's not going out to people who aren't going to go shopping. You've already got the people who are shopping," he said.

Still, he said, with advertising already on shopping carts, ceiling monitors and checkout stands, placing monitors at eye level might be a bit too much. If consumers feel overwhelmed, there might not be a sale at all.

Change from price tags

The video monitors are a big change for a company founded to print inch-high black-and-white price tags.

Vestcom began 21 years ago as Electronic Imaging Systems. On a machine that appears fashioned from the sides of an old dishwasher, some gears and wide rolls of Scotch tape, the company produced labels that carried a product's bar code and the price, and not much else.

EIS merged in 1997 with six other companies to form Vestcom, which was traded publicly until 2002. It is now privately held.

"We wouldn't have predicted that 50 million people would view our products every day or that we would be processing 100 million price changes each week," said Vestcom President Steve Bardwell, whose bread-and-butter operation remains price tags for grocery store and drugstore chains.

Inside Vestcom's football-field-size building in Little Rock, Ark., clerks compile price tag information from stores. Printers push out reams of paper to be sliced into strips or perforated for later detachment. Vestcom has a dozen similar plants nationwide to provide a quick turnaround for retailers as they change prices weekly.

"The lead time can be 12 hours to 48 hours," McKenzie said.

Vestcom's new video monitor can accomplish price changes virtually on the fly.

Customized messages

For companies not wanting or needing videotaped commercials, Vestcom in the last year has expanded development of "ad tags," which combine shelf price tags and static advertisements that can tell consumers which cough syrup is best for a dry cough, or advise them which wine is best with chicken.

"You can customize the message to consumers depending on what you want to tell them," said Mark Feinberg, marketing director for Centerra Wine Co., a division of Constellation Wines U.S., which has used the tags for a year.

In a tag attached to a Turner Road Shiraz, Feinberg recently highlighted the "fragrant aromas of ripe plum, blueberry and blackberry...." Vendange wines recently promoted a cancer-related charity, and the Three Blind Moose label said simply: "New. Try me."

"It's getting people to notice the product," Feinberg said. But, he pointed out, the product still has to be worth the investment. "If the wine in the bottle isn't good, they'll only buy it once."

Coming soon to the US: gaming kiosks?

2006-04-13T14:20:00.000-07:00

This is from IG's TrendCentral newsletter, April 10, 2006. The bit about kiosks at airports w/ downloadable content sounds brilliant.
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Coming soon to the US: gaming kiosks? Already found in Japan, these download stations are tearing gamers away from the screen and out of the house. Located in high traffic public spaces such as train stations, these systems-specific kiosks offer demos, trailers and other gaming-related files to the Nintendo DS and the PlayStation Portable. According to an announcement Nintendo made at the recent DICE Summit, the DS download stations will be here in the U.S. any day now. Gamers are a little dismayed that the stations will be limited to mass retail locations such as Target, but stores are excited about the extra traffic they may bring and the new revenue they could ultimately inspire.

We can envision this growing into a much bigger trend, with kiosks at travel hubs offering downloadable TV shows and movies for portable media players. While entertainment ATMs exist on the trade show circuit, they haven’t really gone mass. Their marketing potential has yet to be fully harnessed, but we imagine that as the number of people owning portable media players increases, we’ll see more of these kiosks loaded with coupons and promotional materials.

Networks Tout Podcasting

2006-04-13T10:27:00.000-07:00

From AdWeek IQ Interactive, April 10, 2006

Networks Tout Podcasting
NEW YORK Sometime this summer, Battlestar Galactica executive producer Ron Moore will sit his writing team down at an undisclosed location to begin mapping out the upcoming season of the Sci Fi Channel hit. And before the team gets started, someone will hit the record button to tape the session for a future podcast.

Moore typically records a weekly podcast and fans eat it up (2.4 million Battlestar podcasts have been downloaded to date). Witness this comment, recently posted on iTunes: "For diehard sci-fi fans, it's as if Gene Roddenberry called you after each original of [Star] Trek and told you what he was thinking that week."

Podcasts -- once solely the domain of small-time content producers -- are increasingly being embraced by traditional media players. In fact, the top 20 list of podcasts on Apple's iTunes Music Store is regularly littered with big names from cable: As of April 7, Cartoon Network's three-week old AdultSwim.com video podcast was ranked No. 2 overall. In the last few months, podcasts from VH1, Nickelodeon and ESPN have made regular appearances in the top 10.

"The demand has been phenomenal," said Marc Horine, general manager of new media for ESPN Radio, which hits in the million-plus download range. To answer that demand, today ESPN is launching PodCenter, a new podcast-centric hub located on ESPN.com, along with 11 new podcasts, ranging from an audio version of Pardon the Interruption to originally produced podcasts built around specific pro sports as well as poker.

While ESPN's content is a close cousin to sports talk-radio, most TV content producers are experimenting with producing DVD-like content in podcast form. "We know our audience has a voracious appetite," said Dave Howe executive vice president and general manager of the Sci Fi Channel. "Podcasting is an opportunity to dive deep and get more into a show."

For Adult Swim's new podcasts, fans are able to watch the creators of Robot Chicken banter, while also getting a look at how the show's twisted puppets are actually built. According to Paul Condolora, vice president and general manager of new media at the Cartoon Network, this sort of fare plays a dual role. "It's definitely marketing in the sense that it is tied to on-air shows and is used to build awareness," said Condolora. "At the same time, this content is definitely sought out."

Steve Youngwood, executive vice president of digital media at Nickelodeon, added that Nick has deliberately released podcasts for big events like the Kids Choice Awards or the recent release of the Zoey 101 movie. "We usually don't do these things in isolation," he said.

In terms of a business, Sci Fi's Howe said an ad-supported model will likely evolve, though it's early. Advertisers are watching closely, particularly video podcasts, according to Greg Smith, executive vice president of director of insights, planning and data analysis at Aegis Group's Carat Fusion. "We're actually teaching our network people to buy video in all forms," he said.

For ESPN, an ad model has already taken hold, as most podcasts carry both a 15-second pre-spot and a 30-second post-content spot, from "blue-chip advertisers," according to Horine, who acknowledged that his company's built-in radio infrastructure provides a major sales advantage. "We've already spent the big money," he said, adding that podcasting has been "very profitable." It's likely that most programmers will need to bake in advertising to offset production costs, despite their low-budget reputation. "There are resource and production issues absolutely," said Condolora. "It's not just flipping a switch."

Still, most agree quality podcasting can only tighten TV's hold on viewers. "The more immersive the experience, the more people will bond with your content," said Howe.

Wired News: The MySpace Economy

2006-04-11T04:38:00.000-07:00

Wired News: The MySpace Economy
The MySpace Economy

By Rachel Rosmarin, Forbes.com 02:00 AM Apr, 11, 2006

Tens of millions of people show up regularly at MySpace, News Corp.'s suddenly popular virtual hangout. That's good news for News Corp. boss Rupert Murdoch, who raised eyebrows by shelling out $580 million for the website last summer. But it's also an opportunity for ambitious entrepreneurs who have figured out how to make money by catering to the site's hordes of visitors.
Like mega-sites eBay and Google before it, MySpace is creating its own economic ecosystem, populated by small businesses that do everything from helping users decorate their profiles to creating tools that let advertisers target MySpace users.

It's unlikely, though, that the MySpace spinoffs approach a fraction of the revenue News Corp. is generating from the site itself. Even though some mainstream advertisers have expressed reservations about participating in MySpace's wild, just-about-anything-goes atmosphere, plenty are willing to get in front of the site's users, who have made it the second-most trafficked site on the internet, according to ComScore Networks. Analyst Richard Greenfield of Pali Research estimates that News Corp. sells $13 million in ad revenue each month.

Also at Forbes.com:
Check out these slide shows from Forbes:

Google Spawn
The World's Billionaires
The Global 2000
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Media Moguls

Meanwhile, Louis Ramos, a freshman at Southern Illinois University, says he has made more than $200,000 since last June by running Pimpmyspace.com and Myspaceeditor.org, two sites that offer MySpace users free tools to upgrade and spruce up their profiles with colors and images. MySpace doesn't build many customization options into users' profiles.

Ramos, who makes money by hosting ads from Google's AdSense and ValueClick's FastClick networks, says he's received six-figure offers from internet companies interested in buying his sites. "Hundreds of people are doing this," he says. Other programmers offer to overhaul MySpace profiles for a fee, charging several hundred dollars for the service.

Another subset of sites has cashed in on MySpace's popularity by creating and selling software designed to automate tasks within the network, such as inviting and confirming friends, posting messages and sending bulletins.

Some versions of this software allow MySpace users with thousands of friends—such as companies that have created profiles—to contact groups of friends by age, ZIP code and other demographic information. Without the tools, users would need to complete transactions one click at a time, but the software effectively allows them to conduct a highly targeted direct-mail campaign.

Programmer Justin Lavoie, whose Silent Productions firm sells bundles of software like "Friend Request Broadcast" and "Comment Broadcast," says he has more than 4,000 customers. Lavoie sells the packages, which start at $50, through affiliates, which take a cut of each sale.

Lavoie says he and some of his affiliates have received cease-and-desist letters from MySpace commanding them to stop selling the software; he also says some of his competitors have received similar warnings. MySpace officials declined to comment on Lavoie's business or any other MySpace spinoffs.

"MySpace doesn't want any marketing on its site other than what they are getting paid for in the form of banners and other ads," says Brandon Hoffman, director of internet marketing at Kea Advertising, an agency in Valley Cottage, N.Y.

Hoffman uses Lavoie's software in the MySpace accounts he created for several of his clients, primarily car dealerships. "The beauty of it is that it is 100 percent permission-based," he says. "The dealerships' friends can cancel at any time, so it isn't like we're spamming them."

Entrepreneurs say some of the most successful MySpace spinoff businesses are now being auctioned for thousands of dollars. "People make a ton of money" selling the sites, says Michael Melen, who operates several MySpace-related services. Melen's offerings include Myspacesponsor.com, which shares ad revenues with MySpace users who put banner ads in their profiles, and Unblockmyspace.com, which allows users to surf the site anonymously.

But some MySpace businesses don't require any particular technical skill or web savvy, just a sense of what the teens and twenty-somethings who flock to the site are interested in. Like poking fun at the fact that MySpace users' profiles come preconfigured, with co-founder Tom Anderson listed as a "friend."

Josh Abramson, co-founder of Connected Ventures, has sold more than 610 $18 shirts in six weeks that take advantage of what is becoming quite a public in-joke. The shirts read, "Tom is NOT my friend."

What P&G Learned From the Veg-O-Matic and Ginsu-Knife

2006-04-10T11:41:00.000-07:00

What P&G Learned From the Veg-O-Matic and Ginsu-Knife
Direct-response-TV Metrics Gain Traction Among Mainstream Marketers
By Jack Neff

Published: April 09, 2006

CINCINNATI (AdAge.com) -- Don't be so quick to sneer at that late-night Ginsu-knife ad. It likely represents the future of TV advertising.
Long considered a second-tier and somewhat tacky sub genre, direct-response advertising is gaining new respectability among major marketers.

Bold predictions
Direct-response TV experts boldly predict that in five or 10 years all TV advertising will be some form of direct-response as mainstream marketers seek greater return on investment and look to switch to a metric that reflects how engaged an audience is with an ad rather than sheer number of eyeballs reached. And as the analytics for measuring DTRV ads are applied to conventional buys, more marketers will start to appreciate the merits of knowing whether or not an ad was on the mark. It's a view shared by the world's largest advertiser, Procter & Gamble Co.

"People think that direct response is all about pills and potions and get-rich-quick schemes," said Michael Kokernak, CEO of Backchannel Media, a DRTV specialty agency in Boston. "But direct response is really just a measure of human engagement. You're going to find it will be the only way TV is bought and sold."

Ad costs rise
Already, direct-response TV -- made up largely of remnant inventory -- has soared in the past two years, and more rate inflation is anticipated for next year. So far, however, the tumult in DRTV is happening largely outside the view of the mainstream advertising industry; TNS Media Intelligence pegs direct-response advertising as a $3 billion segment that grew 16.4% last year.

DRTV time-usually the lowest-rated daypart of the most thinly viewed networks frequented by the bottom-feeders of the industry-is no longer its own media ecosystem, populated by the Little Giant Ladder and the Ab-Lounge. An influx of blue-chip marketers has changed the makeup of the client pool.

After about four years of growing experimentation with DRTV, P&G, the biggest conventional advertiser in the U.S., signaled a much deeper commitment last month when it named its first DRTV media-buying agency of record, Quigley-Simpson Brand Response, Los Angeles.

P&G broadens involvement
P&G quietly broadened its use of DRTV in recent years, from small efforts for low-priority brands such as Dryel to more than a dozen including Cover Girl, Iams and Old Spice.

Last year, P&G's top-spending brand in conventional advertising channels, Olay, made direct-response a major part of its media mix, with 60-second ads by Red, Cincinnati, for microdermabrasion kits and other products directing consumers to its Web site for special offers.

In all, P&G buying in the DRTV space may now be approaching nine figures, according to people familiar with the industry, though P&G and Quigley-Simpson declined to comment on the spending level.

P&G isn't alone. Other general-market advertisers, now labeled "hybrid" advertisers in the DRTV industry, such as Clorox Co., Bose, and several pharmaceutical marketers, also have crowded into the space.

P&G 'very comfortable'
As a result, "We're seeing [rate increases] across the board," said Kristi Moran, VP-media services for Hawthorne Direct. "One of the main contributing factors is that your major hybrid clients [such as P&G] have become very comfortable advertising on direct response."

A.J. Khubani, founder-CEO of Telebrands (see sidebar), has seen his media rates explode 250% the past two years, though he isn't sure why.

Even so, direct-response still offers CPMs 30% to 70% lower than broadcast or national cable prime-time rates, said Gerald Bagg, founder and CEO of Quigley-Simpson.

The consolidation of the WB and UPN broadcast networks-long two reliable generators of DRTV inventory-could fuel even more rate increases, Ms. Moran said. She believes much of what ordinarily might have been DRTV time on CW will be consumed with network promotion at least initially to pump Nielsen ratings that may put much of the time out of reach for DRTV.

Impact of CW consolidation
Yet the CW consolidation leaves many former UPN and WB affiliates without networks. They could end up with more DRTV availability than ever, Ms. Moran said, though in the form of more labor-intensive spot buys. It may be the perfect environment for P&G to apply its massive scale to a small and fragmented market. That's exactly what Quigley-Simpson looks to do as P&G's new DRTV agency of record. "DRTV is a lot more negotiable, since it's in the scatter market," Mr. Bagg said. "When you're buying with the heft of major clients behind you, you can drive those rates down, particularly with inventory that has fallen into remnant."

Mr. Bagg said he's seeing a broader "awakening" among Fortune 50 companies. "In five years every form of advertising is going to be direct-response," he said. "It's just a question of degree. It's going to be having a toll-free number or a URL in it. It's going to be video on demand. It's going to be mobile [phone] response."

What's ultimately driving DRTV, said Erwin Ephron, principal of the Ephron Consultancy, is readily measurable return on investment.

The trouble for conventional advertisers, he said, is that their consumer response rates don't measure the whole impact of their TV advertising, just like click-throughs never measured the brand-messaging impact of online ads. "A lot of the way TV works is not by eliciting response," he said. Still, by measuring comparative response rates on the same ads across different media, he believes advertisers may ultimately be able to apply analytics to the data their DRTV ads generate in order to get a better handle on the comparative value of conventional TV buys.

WSJ.com - Teasing Out the Effects of Clutter

2006-04-05T04:17:00.000-07:00

WSJ.com - Teasing Out the Effects of Clutter
Teasing Out the Effects of Clutter
NBC Universal Is Studying
Whether Shorter Ad Breaks
Give TV Spots More Impact
By SUZANNE VRANICA
April 5, 2006; Page B3
The number of ads crammed into television shows has been a longstanding complaint of both viewers and advertisers. Now NBC Universal is testing whether cutting the "clutter" improves the value of the ads that do run.

In a five-night test that began Monday, one program airing on the company's USA cable channel will feature one commercial break that runs just one minute, considerably shorter than the others, which run about two to four minutes. Only two 30-second ads will air in the shorter break. Insurer Allstate and drugstore chain Walgreen are participating in the test.

NBC Universal, which is working with Publicis Groupe media-buying firm Starcom on the test, wants to see whether viewers pay more attention to ads they watch in a less-cluttered environment. "We want to see if shorter commercial pods impact advertising performance," says Sam Armando, director of TV research at Starcom, which cooked up the deal.

"We are all trying to better understand commercial effectiveness," says Marianne Gambelli, executive vice president of sales and marketing for General Electric's NBC Universal, which owns the NBC broadcast network as well as USA and several other cable channels.

The outcome of the test could lead to changes in the decades-old advertising model. If the test shows that viewers remember the remaining ads more clearly, it could give advertisers the ammunition they need to ask TV networks to cut back the number of ads they air.

Networks likely would recoup the lost revenue by charging higher prices. A reduction in the number of ads would reverse the trend of the past decade, a period in which broadcast networks and cable channels alike have squeezed more ads into each hour of TV programming.

Ms. Gambelli played down the test's short-term significance, noting USA has "no intention to change any [business] model. All this is for later discussion."

Still, changes in the media landscape are increasing pressure on TV networks. Devices such as digital video recorders are making it easier for people to speed through ad breaks.

Media buyers and marketers have long complained that the crowded TV ad environment diminishes the impact of all the commercials. "Clutter affects all our messages," says Eric Plaskonos, director of brand communications for Philips Electronics. Many believe that the more ads that run, the more willing consumers are to change the channel or speed through commercials on a DVR.

Last year, Walt Disney's ABC, NBC, CBS and News Corp.'s Fox each ran an average of about 15 minutes an hour in prime time of "nonprogram material time," defined as commercials, public-service announcements and network promotions, according to research complied by WPP Group's media-buying unit MindShare. USA cable channel, like some other cable channels, aired nearly 16 minutes of "nonprogram" material an hour.

Other media have begun to respond to complaints about ad clutter. In 2004, radio titan Clear Channel Communications reduced the number of ads on its radio stations in hopes of increasing the value and impact of the spots that air.

Cubicle Dwellers' Funniest Home Video - New York Times

2006-03-26T07:10:00.000-08:00

Cubicle Dwellers' Funniest Home Video - New York Times
Cubicle Dwellers' Funniest Home Video

By DAN CRANE
"I love these clips," said Patrice O'Neal, introducing snippets from shows like "Maury" and "Judge Hatchet" in which men ecstatically celebrate a negative result on a paternity test. "Because there's no greater joy in the world than hearing those five beautiful words, 'You are not the father!' "

The montage was originally shown on "Jimmy Kimmel Live," after which it instantly became Internet viral video fodder — sent around via e-mail messages and posted on blogs and Web sites like iFilm.com, YouTube.com and eBaumsworld.com. From there, the video was scooped up by "Web Junk 20," a weekly countdown of Internet videos on VH1 that began in January and for which Mr. O'Neal serves as host. After being properly ridiculed there, the clips could once again be found online at VH1's VSPOT Web site vh1.com/vspot.

That's more or less the path that all the show's Web junk follows, and it may be perfectly suited to today's multiplatform (television, Web, mobile phone, iPod) media universe. "These things are becoming ground zero for pop culture," Brian Graden, president of entertainment for MTV Networks Group, VH1's parent company, said. "It's no longer the moment on the Jon Stewart show, it's 'Did you watch the viral video of the moment on the Jon Stewart show?' "

But many of the videos on "Web Junk" come from viewers — creative people using affordable digital video cameras and desktop software to shoot and edit and post their own clever shorts. "Saturday Night Live's" rap sketch "Lazy Sunday," perhaps the most widely seen viral video of late, has already inspired numerous parodies, including "Lazy Monday" (featuring two 11-year-old Chicago boys lip-synching to the original), "Lazy Muncie" (where the honor of the Midwest is defended) and "Lazy Saturday" (the West Coast answer to "Lazy Sunday"), which was featured on Episode 4 of "Web Junk 20."

It's an updated version of the long-running series "America's Funniest Home Videos," but with a twist: "The distinction," said Mr. Graden, "would be that I would call 'America's Funniest Home Videos' accidentally created, and these are often purposely created by people to express their own sense of comedy and commentary."

As on the original show, you can still see the occasional child mishap, or animal running amok, but on "Web Junk" odds are good you'll also witness someone throwing up, and there will be at least one clip celebrating the passing of gas. Mr. O'Neal, a rotund comedian who peppers his mocking commentary with numerous bleeped-out expletives and off-color jabs, embodies the other difference between the old show and the new: attitude.

"He's an equal opportunity offender," said Michael Hirschorn, the show's creator and VH1's executive vice president of original programming and production. "He's got a willingness to say the uncomfortable things that not everyone is willing to say." For example, "Web Junk" showed "Tom Cruise Kills Oprah," a homespun video that plays off the actor's infamous appearance on "The Oprah Winfrey Show" but uses sound and visual effects so it seems he is electrocuting her. "See what happens," Mr. O'Neal asked the audience, "when white people touch black people?"

True to the nature of the clips themselves, the concept of using viral videos on television is spreading rapidly. Just weeks after VH1's show was first broadcast, Bravo — which had shown a half-hour special last November — began its own series, "Outrageous and Contagious: Viral Videos," which offers some of the same content but less of the mocking commentary.

Most of the clips look much better on the Bravo show than they do on VH1's, where videos are often so pixilated that they become indiscernible. But Mr. Graden thinks image quality doesn't really matter; in fact, he suggests, the worse the clips look the more effective they tend to be. "People want to believe these were completely homemade expressions," he said, "that they were discovered out in the universe and were brought to air. If they look like slickly produced television I don't think people would buy into the utter randomness that is that show."

Slickly produced they are not. While the shows do pay for some of the content (Bravo paid to use the recent computer geek sendup of "Brokeback Mountain," titled "Broke Mac Mountain," according to the clip's creators), it is obviously a lot cheaper to license these videos than it is to shell out for actors and set designers and so on. Additionally, by partnering with video Web portals like iFilm.com, which also is owned by MTV Networks, VH1 gains access to a virtual community of filmmakers and actors constantly uploading fresh content, each member waiting for his or her 30 seconds of fame.

"You can almost see a continuum with reality TV," Mr. Graden said. "Fame has become an overblown aphrodisiac in our culture, and now here you go: put your video you made on iFilm and maybe you'll be on TV next week."

NBC and USA Networks also have viral video shows in development. Carson Daly is to be the host for "The Net with Carson Daly" on NBC, and USA Networks has partnered with the "extreme content" site eBaumsworld.com to exploit its digital content for a late-night clip show.

Ruth Caruso, head of development for Carson Daly Productions, identifies an ambitious goal for the show. "Now that our country is more culturally divided than ever," Ms. Caruso said, "we see networks struggling to find shows that have broad appeal. By tapping into the country's talent pool we hope to cross these gaps, much like 'American Idol' massively accomplishes."

And the more new shows there are, the more opportunities for the nation's grass-roots filmmakers to have their material seen. "The technology has opened up in a massive way so that everyone in some way or another is potentially the next great viral auteur," said Andrew Cohen, Bravo's vice president of production and programming. "I think that's great. I just don't want anyone to hurt themselves lighting themselves on fire or jumping off a building."

So far, nobody has reported doing either — though much of what's shown does look painful: one video on Bravo's show features a man getting a pair of scissors thrown into his arm. Both the Bravo and VH1 shows do encourage viewers to submit content online (as will "The Net with Carson Daly," according to the show's creators), driving increased traffic to their respective Web sites. And as "Web Junk 20's" television ratings have been respectable, VH1 has already seen a record increase in Web traffic to their VSPOT broadband channel and to iFilm.com each week since the show began in January.

With four viral video shows soon to be on the air, what's the next wave of user-generated content? "One could imagine a next generation version of 'Saturday Night Live' that's created entirely by the viewers," Mr. Hirschorn speculated. "It might even be better."

Google's Print Auction Fizzles

2006-03-26T07:05:00.000-08:00

Google's Print Auction Fizzles
Google's Print Auction Fizzles
The search giant's auction of magazine ad space didn't generate much enthusiasm -- or business, in the case of one successful bidder

Google's effort to roll its advertising juggernaut beyond digital and into the world of print publications is struggling. And that may not be a good thing for the print industry.

In February, Google (GOOG ) auctioned off ad space it had purchased in about two dozen magazines, from Martha Stewart Living to Road & Track. The auction -- the latest twist in a six-month experiment with buying and reselling print ads -- was open to thousands of advertisers. However, Google was forced to extend the auction by several days to lure more buyers.

The tepid demand became evident in some of the winning bids, which were recognized earlier this month. Nicholas Longo, CEO of CoffeeCup Software, which makes tools for creating Web sites, wound up paying just $4,000 for each of three half-page ads in Martha Stewart Living. It was a long shot: The magazine's rate card pegs the price of a half-page ad at more than $59,000. Neither Google nor Martha Stewart Living would say what Google originally paid for the space, but it didn't get a similar discount.

SPIN CYCLE. Google can certainly digest a loss of tens of thousands of dollars. The outfit's net profits jumped 267% in 2005, to $1.5 billion, almost exclusively on its thriving business of selling text ads next to Internet search results. A company spokesman acknowledges that demand was light for its print auction, but says Google did little to market the opportunity to its network of several hundred thousand advertisers. Its primary goal, he says, was to test the auction process for print ads. "We're pleased with the data we've gathered and will use it to inform future experiments we conduct on different aspects of the print process," says Google spokesman Barry Schnitt.

Investors, who have bid up Google's stock valuation to more than $100 billion, are expecting the company to successfully diversify its business. Google executives have often stated that they are seeking to expand Google's online advertising stronghold into various offline media, including radio, print, and television ads. In addition to its efforts to broker the sale of print ads, Google in January, 2006, acquired dMarc Broadcasting, which facilitates the sale of radio advertising.

The lackluster appetite for its February auction is just the latest challenge for Google's six-month foray into print ads. Late last year, Google conducted its first trial by purchasing and reselling ad space in a handful of magazines. Although the Internet giant lauded the trial's outcome, a BusinessWeek analysis found that 8 of 10 participating advertisers were disappointed with the results and probably wouldn't buy print ads through Google again (see BW Online, 12/12/05, "Can Google Go Glossy?").

INDUSTRY SKEPTICISM. Several more advertisers spoke with BusinessWeek following the story's publication, echoing similar sentiments. Carl D. Haugen, president of BluePenguin Software, spent $3,000 on an ad through Google, which ran in the November issue of Budget Living magazine. Haugen offered a 20% discount on its antispyware software to Budget Living readers, so he could better track the ad's performance. Over one month later, the ad had only generated $181.37 in sales, says Haugen.

Google's struggle to transfer its online success to magazines doesn't necessarily bode well for the publishing industry. Hundreds of publications have contacted Google about the program, with the hopes that the online giant can extend their reach to Google's army of smaller marketers who otherwise would not consider magazine ads. But the weak performance may indicate that the true value of a page of print lags its list price -- at least in the eyes of Google's advertisers, who are used to high-return search engine campaigns.

Even Longo, winner of the bargain-basement ad space in Martha Stewart Living, is somewhat skeptical. "If at these rates it doesn't work," says Longo, "it never will."

Simmons Chief: Behavioral To Supplant Demos

2006-03-23T12:49:00.000-08:00

Simmons Chief: Behavioral To Supplant Demos
by Kristin Sidorak, Thursday, Mar 23, 2006 7:47 AM EST
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BEHAVIORAL TARGETING, A PRACTICE THAT has been transforming the way marketers target consumers online, is poised to become a big factor in the media world at large, potentially replacing traditional demographic data as the basis for media planning. At least that's what Bill Engel, co-CEO of Simmons Market Research Bureau, told a group of marketing executives last week during a keynote at the 2006 Promotion Marketing Association Conference in Chicago.

"Targeting has become more complex than ever before," says Engel, whose company has transformed itself over the past several years to reflect that change. Once a big player in traditional, demographic-based audience estimates for magazine planners, Simmons in recent years has developed and adapted a wide variety of targeting tools derived from consumer behavior including actual product purchases and media usage. Such behaviors, asserts Engel, trump simple demographic analysis--which assumes that age, sex, income, and educational attributes are good proxies for such behavior.

"Given the proliferation of brands, a consumer who is a value shopper for one category may be a luxury shopper for another category, which seems perhaps counterintuitive," cites Engel as one example.

In another, he cites a consumer who shops at Saks Fifth Avenue to buy high-end haute couture for a ball, but who goes to low-end retailers such as TJ Maxx or Marshalls to buy white polo shirts. Thus, advertisers must understand the luxury versus value-based purchaser, and that they may be one and the same, he suggests.

According to Engel, the big picture concerning behavioral targeting from the advertisers' perspective is that they have their brand, they know who is buying their brand, and their questions are; what media should I buy from, and what messaging should I use? Moreover, he says those ad messages need to factor in what medium a consumer might be exposed to at any given time.

"The technology exists today for a number of clients to target behaviors," says Engel, touting Simmons' Television BehaviorGraphics study as an example. The BehaviorGraphics system integrates Simmons' National Consumer Survey data with actual TV viewing behavior from Nielsen Media Research's national TV ratings.

Some research purists are critical of such data integrations, but research pragmatists are beginning to embrace the practice as a means of correlating consumer behavior with media usage. By correlating Simmons' surveys on consumer behavior, attitudes, lifestyles, and product usage with Nielsen's tracking of TV viewing behavior, Engel claims that advertisers can more effectively target the audiences of national TV shows.

Engel says the application has two benefits: 1) Selecting media buys that target consumers more effectively; and 2) Scheduling advertising messages that are more relevant to those consumers.

MBA'S MAY BE A MARKETING LIABILITY

2006-03-23T04:00:00.000-08:00

MBA'S MAY BE A MARKETING LIABILITY
MBA'S MAY BE A MARKETING LIABILITY
New Study Finds Those With Degrees Underperform
March 21, 2006
QwikFIND ID: AAR52X
By Jack Neff
CINCINNATI (AdAge.com) -- A Master of Business Administration degree is not only worthless, it can work against a marketer, according to a survey of marketing executives from 32 consumer-products companies by consulting firm Ken Coogan & Partners.

The study found that marketing executives from underperforming companies were twice as likely to have been recruited out of M.B.A. programs than marketing executives from out-performing companies.
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The study used scanner and panel data from VNU’s ACNielsen to show marketers from companies with significant market-share gains are far less likely to have M.B.A.s than those from companies posting significant share losses.
Major marketers
The M.B.A. factor wasn’t the only difference, but it was perhaps the most striking one between winners and losers among the companies, which included General Mills, Kraft Foods, Nestle, Pfizer, Clorox Co., Reckitt Benckiser, Energizer, Alberto Culver Co., Hasbro, Cadbury Schweppes, Kodak and Dunkin’ Donuts.
Marketing executives from 18 underperforming companies -- which had sales grow 7% less than their categories on average in the two years ended August 2005 -- were twice as likely to have been recruited out of M.B.A. programs than marketing executives from out-performing companies, which averaged growth 6.2% faster than their categories over the two years. Of executives from underperforming companies, 90% had M.B.A.s vs. 55% at outperforming companies.
Not all master’s degrees appear worthless in the study. Just M.B.A.s. About 10% of the marketing executives at the out-performers had master’s degrees other than M.B.A.s vs. none at underperformers.
That twice as many underperforming companies as out-performing ones participated in the survey may indicate something, too. Possible theories: Underperforming executives, particularly ones with M.B.A.s, spend more time filling out surveys, or are more likely to be in contact with consulting firms like the one that administered the study.
Recruitment practices
The out-performers in the survey got about a fifth of their marketing executives from undergraduate programs and another fifth from advertising or marketing agencies or other industry vendors. None of the executives from underperformers had been recruited as undergrads and only 5% came from agencies or suppliers.
Perhaps surprisingly, the out-performers were understaffed compared to their underperforming peers. Out-performers averaged one marketing executive for every $37.9 million in sales, compared to one for every $28.5 million in sales at the underperformers. But the out-performers spent more on marketing—averaging 12.4% of sales vs. 11.6% for the underperformers.
Ken Coogan, principal of the consulting firm, isn’t sure the marketing-budget differential is significant, but believes the staffing number might be. Possibly, it reflects staffing at both out- and underperformers not having caught up yet with their changing marketplace results, he said. But he said too much staff -- and bureaucracy -- could actually be slowing down the underperformers.
Outsourced marketing services
In a separate bit of counterintuitive research, Mr. Coogan said he has found marketers that outsource marketing-services functions the most actually have higher staffing levels than ones that outsource less.
Though they don’t value M.B.A.s as much, out-performers in the survey place a much higher value on personal and professional development once they hire people. The survey showed the share winners far more likely than the losers to support attendance at industry conferences and seminars, involvement in industry associations and peer-share groups, internal training groups, formal mentoring programs and graduate-level seminars.
The only professional-development perks supported more by the underperformers were -- you guessed it -- executive M.B.A. programs.
Equally unsurprising, executives at the out-performing companies were far more likely to believe career advancement at their companies was based on merit rather than politics. Underperforming marketers were more likely to see politics at play. Overall job satisfaction measures were higher at the out-performers.
Stock option differential
But executives were about equally happy with compensation at both the winners and losers. And the underperforming marketers were more likely to offer stock options than the out-performers. Both findings could create some interesting fodder for executive-compensation critics.
Retention programs that were more common among the out-performers than the underperformers included assignments outside marketing to groom for general management, part-time or job-sharing assignments for managers who request them and giving more tenured executives preference in job assignments.

mcdonalds_bus_stop.jpg (JPEG Image, 320x242 pixels)

2006-03-21T04:46:00.000-08:00

mcdonalds_bus_stop.jpg (JPEG Image, 320x242 pixels)
From AdRants:
Just what you want while waiting for the bus: that mouth watering, tantalizing reminder of how much you'd love to stuff your face with a 1,000 calorie burger only to be reminded later by your stomach it wasn't the best decision you could have made.

Nielsen: Network Prime-Time Clutter Surpasses Cable, Hispanic

2006-03-19T14:16:00.000-08:00

Nielsen: Network Prime-Time Clutter Surpasses Cable, Hispanic
by Joe Mandese, Thursday, Mar 16, 2006 8:15 AM EST
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A NEW REPORT FROM NIELSEN Media Research appears to refute the conventional wisdom that cable is more cluttered than the broadcast networks. The study, based on an analysis of the non-programming time on major national TV outlets during the fourth quarter of 2005, finds that the seven broadcast networks carried an average of 15 minutes and 23 seconds of so-called clutter--advertising, promos, PSAs, and IDs--during the average prime-time hour, 22 seconds more than the average prime-time hour on cable TV.

Spanish-language TV networks, which also are perceived as being heavily cluttered, prove to have the highest percentage of programming time per prime-time hour, with only 14 minutes and 16 seconds of clutter.

"The mix of non-program content varied significantly across the three media: 31 percent of the non-program content on the Spanish Language networks was dedicated to promotional announcements while cable devoted 17 percent and broadcast 15 percent to promos," found the report, released Wednesday by Nielsen's Monitor-Plus unit.

The report, an annual recap of all forms of ad spending during 2005, also found another form of commercialization expanding within programming time: product placements. And the biggest contender was, well, NBC's "The Contender," with 7,502 product plugs during 2005--more than twice the branded mentions of the next closest contender, NBC's "The Apprentice," with 3,577 product mentions during the year.

Prime-time Clutter
Minutes:Seconds
Network TV 15:23
Cable TV 15:01
Spanish-Language TV 14:16

Source: Nielsen Monitor-Plus, fourth-quarter 2005 analysis.

Satirical Superheroes for the Rude Set

2006-03-18T06:21:00.000-08:00

Satirical Superheroes for the Rude Set

By LOLA OGUNNAIKE
They don't leap tall buildings in a single bound or scale skyscrapers. They don't transform into not-so-jolly green giants or zoom around in tricked-out sportsmobiles. Instead, Minoriteam — a motley band of minority superheroes — uses stereotypes to fight their archenemy: racism.

Created by Adam de la Peña, Todd James and Peter Girardi — all alumni of the ribald Comedy Central puppet series "Crank Yankers" — "Minoriteam" is a provocative animated show that sends up bigotry. It makes its debut tomorrow night on Cartoon Network's late-night "Adult Swim" block of animated shows for viewers who have outgrown the Disney Channel.

Having found success with "The Boondocks," the animated series based on Aaron McGruder's comic strip that takes a satirical look at race and class in America, Mike Lazzo, the network's senior vice president for "Adult Swim," said he was more than willing to invest in another show with a distinctive voice on issues. "I think television is well served by social commentary, especially if you can make it feel like it's not a lesson that's being slammed over someone's head."

Metropolis had Superman. Gotham City had Batman. And Corporate City has Minoriteam:

The team's leader, Dr. Wang, is an Asian, wheelchair-bound mathematical genius with a freakishly large brain. He speaks with a heavy Chinese accent and is in the laundry business.

Non-Stop is the alter ego of Dave Raj, an Indian, former professional skateboarder turned convenience store clerk who is incapable of being killed by firearms. After having been shot 235 times during various attempted robberies, his skin is saturated with lead, which serves as a bulletproof armor of sorts; when necessary, his skateboard morphs into a flying carpet.

Landon K. Dutton, a black man awkwardly teaching women's studies at Male University, turns into Fasto, the world's fastest man. His extreme rage propels him to travel at breakneck speeds. When not fighting crime he spends his time "studying" the opposite sex; during one episode, it takes him only seconds to satisfy a roomful of Thai prostitutes.

Richard Escartin, a Mexican oil baron, trades his tailored suits and silk ties for a giant sombrero and a leaf blower when he becomes El Jefe, Minoriteam's hardest working member. El Jefe's blower is no ordinary garden tool. It can suck and blow with deadly force and rip holes through time and space. His kryptonite? Tequila. "I think a lot of people can relate to that," Mr. de la Peña said.

Neil Horvitz may be a wimpy mail clerk in his early 20's, but his alter ego, Jewcano, is a muscle-bound 62-year-old who sports an XXXL yarmulke and has all the power of the Jewish faith and a raging volcano. Watch him shoot molten lava from his wrists (move over, Spider-Man).

The multiethnic crew battles a gang of villains including the sniveling Corporate Ladder (an anthropomorphized ladder with a cape and a pipe), Racist Frankenstein (a bigoted monster) and Standardized Test, whose head is shaped like a No. 2 pencil and whose body resembles a Scantron test. White Shadow, the bad guys' bumbling leader, has a head that looks eerily like the pyramid found on the back of a dollar bill. He spews nonsensical corporate-speak, using words like "synergy" and phrases like "Let's all get on the same page."

"He's an amalgam of a thousand morons that we've all dealt with in our lives, starting with the lackey at the D.M.V. and all the way up to Dick Cheney," Mr. Girardi said. "Shooting your friend in the face is totally something White Shadow would do and Corporate Ladder would be like, 'Boss, I'm sorry my face got in the way of your gun.' " For recreation, the villains enjoy a nice relaxing game of Oligarchy or a racist version of Scrabble.

In one episode White Shadow and his minions travel back in time to destroy the accomplishments of minorities throughout history. Another episode finds Minoriteam on trial in a parallel universe. Their crime? Not being racist. And during the season opener, White Shadow, bothered by the rising power of black-owned business, kidnaps Sebastian Jefferson, a prominent African-American mogul. Grape-soda factories and soul food restaurants immediately close.

But it will take more than playing the race card for this show to succeed, Mr. Lazzo acknowledged. "You have to empathize with the characters," he said. "If the characters aren't interesting, then it will be a one-trick pony and it won't last because our audience will suss that out in a few weeks."

The creators have braced themselves for negative feedback. Surely someone will be uncomfortable watching a Jewish superhero get aroused while chasing a giant glowing nickel, they said. "But who exactly will it offend?" Mr. de la Peña asked. "I have no idea. We're really targeting Eskimos."

Unlike "The Boondocks," which is drawn in a sophisticated anime style, "Minoriteam" is crudely drawn and the show's color palette is limited to those available for comic-book printing in the 1960's, Mr. Girardi said.

"It's not a true animated show," he said, "it's more like a moving comic book, moving very little actually, which is on purpose. Using that style of animation is part of the humor. But we're not parodying those cartoons or cheap animation. We actually really love cheap animation."

The three self-professed comic-book junkies happily recall many an afternoon spent at their favorite local comic-book stores. "Mine was named Comic Book Castle and it was not a castle," Mr. de la Peña said. "It was run by a lunatic man who had a parrot on his shoulder that didn't talk, so it might as well have been a pigeon."

Based in Hollywood, their headquarters is a veritable shrine to Jack Kirby, the comic artist whose résumé included such iconic characters as Captain America, the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, and the Incredible Hulk. Kirby's work fills the cramped office the animators share, and each can discuss the legendary illustrator's contributions to the world of comics in exhaustive detail. "I think that's why we get along so much, because we don't have hierarchal distinctions between fine art and vernacular art," Mr. Girardi said. "To us good is good and Kirby is right up there with Picasso."

Mr. Girardi and Mr. James have known each other since they were adolescent graffiti artists, altering subway trains and abandoned buildings around New York City. "We expressed our youthful rage through urban artistry," Mr. Girardi joked.

Mr. de la Peña, a fourth-generation Mexican-American, was raised in a racially diverse community in Orange County, Calif. He has been a staff writer for "The Man Show" and "Jimmy Kimmel Live" and he co-starred in the 2003 Comedy Central series, "I'm With Busey," a reality show involving the actor Gary Busey.

Mr. Girardi's background is in digital media design. In addition to his "Minoriteam" work, he still runs Funny Garbage, the design company he started more than a decade ago. Mr. James has created logos for rappers like Eminem, Red Man and the Beastie Boys, and he was the puppet designer for "Crank Yankers."

Coming episodes of "Minoriteam" will poke fun at the Internal Revenue Service, illegal aliens and an assortment of conspiracy theories. But Mr. James said, "We're not sitting around and saying, 'Man, we've got to talk about this 'cause it's heavy.' That's not our m.o. It's about justice and condemnation of everyone for everyone."

The Web's First Rock n' Roll Success?

2006-03-18T06:13:00.000-08:00

Friday, 17 March 2006
The Web's First Rock n' Roll Success?
Topic: music
The Arctic Monkeys came out of nowhere.

Well, not exactly nowhere, but a year ago, the impossibly young indie rock quartet were playing small clubs in their native Sheffield, UK. Now they have a best-selling album. They are currently playing a few shows in the major North American cities (all of which sold out in minutes), and afterwards, they will set out on a thirty-plus date tour of Japan and Europe before doing the obligatory festival circuit this summer.

None of this is really remarkable in a music industry that sees two or three overnight successes come and go every year. What makes Arctic Monkeys remarkable is that they are an indie band on an independent label, and that they achieved their sudden success almost entirely through grassroots promotion on the web.

The foursome got together in 2002. They started playing shows around Sheffield and passing out free CDs at gigs. They encouraged their fans to trade the tunes online and to post them to websites and P2P networks. Yes, they encouraged file trading. Eventually, more and more people found them on MySpace or on their website via word-of-mouth, and their reach started to widen. Fans started booking them in venues farther and farther away from their hometown. Wherever they played, everyone in the crowd knew the words to the songs. This is all before they even signed to a record label.

Then, when they finally signed to Domino Records (a UK indie) and released their debut album, "Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not," it hit number one on the UK charts, selling 360,000 copies in the first week. Nobody anticipated those kinds of numbers. In fact, those kinds of numbers made "Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not" the fastest-selling independent debut in UK history.

Their story is remarkable because of one fact: grassroots communication channels like MySpace and P2P file trading networks worked better than the major-label hype machine. The Arctic Monkeys became hugely popular because they wrote good songs, made them available to their fans for free, and encouraged them to share the MP3s with their friends.

Going by the current record company logic, that's a huge no-no. If a band gives away all of its songs for free, then puts out a record filled with the same songs (even re-recorded versions), so the old philosophy goes, nobody's going to buy the record. They already have the songs. It turns out that this scenario is decidedly not the case.

The final version of "Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not," was leaked onto P2P networks a few weeks before its official release. And it didn't seem to have hurt the sales numbers when the record hit the retail shelves.

Many of us on this side of the music business (the consumer side) have been saying that the old logic is a myth, and that trading songs via P2P actually encourages people to buy more music. They are exposed to more bands and a wider variety of music. They get a chance to get excited about new music in a much more direct and natural way. They aren't told about it by an advertisement or a video. They find it on their own or a friend tells them about it. They check it out, they like it, then they go to the store and buy the CD. And they probably buy more than just that one CD while they're there.

Of course, it's irresponsible to say that piracy isn't hurting the record business in some way. It certainly isn't healthy to your bottom line and your longevity to allow people to take your product without paying. And downloading without permission is stealing. But it's also true that downloading a record and realizing that it's a load of garbage is not going to get you excited about spending $17 on the real thing. Good music will always sell, either on CD or in the iTunes Music Store. But if you put out good music and allow people to hear it any way they want, it will sell, and it will sell well.

By the way, the Arctic Monkeys were the top sellers in the iTMS for ten days when their record was released stateside. They only sold one tenth of the amount of records here as they sold in the UK in the first week, but the sales were still rather impressive for a foreign indie act with minimal mainstream exposure.

Another point proven by the Arctic Monkey's success is that the major labels are misguided about promotion and marketing. Pure word of mouth and an open trading policy actually work better than big-budget videos and full-page magazine spreads.

Or maybe the AMs just have a better view of what works and what doesn't when you're promoting a band on the internet. It's probably because they are young — the four members range in age somewhere between 19 and 21 — and they have a sort of hipster radar that suits at the record companies usually lack. They mention ringtones and email in their lyrics. They know their audience.

In the end, the Arctic Monkeys are a really good band, plain and simple. They have good songs with strong lyrics, and they are well-produced. Thousands of bands know that giving away their music for free is the best way to get heard and the best way to reach new fans. They also understand that the fans you find on the Internet are far more loyal — and forgiving — than the fans you find through MTV or corporate radio. So why aren't those other bands succeeding? Maybe they are afraid to give it all away for free, maybe they aren't playing enough shows. Or maybe they just aren't that good.

All it took was one band from this new subculture to hit it big — really big — in order to signal that a change is needed. The major labels are still scratching their heads wondering why the kids aren't buying records they way they used to. And meanwhile, the Arctic Monkeys are selling hundreds of thousands of records and enjoying the success they made for themselves.

Posted by michael calore at 2:03 PM PST | post your comment (0) | link to this post

Americans Get More Channels, Watch Fewer Of Them, Especially Broadcast

2006-03-15T17:56:00.000-08:00

Americans Get More Channels, Watch Fewer Of Them, Especially Broadcast
by Joe Mandese, Monday, Mar 13, 2006 8:00 AM EST
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AMERICANS ARE RECEIVING MORE TV channels than ever before, but they're watching a smaller percentage of them, especially those from broadcasters. Those are the top line conclusions from an important annual benchmark study on the way people watch TV released late last week by Nielsen Media Research. The report, which comes as Nielsen holds its annual client meetings in Orlando this week, shows that the average household received 96.4 channels during 2005, an increase of nearly four channels from 92.6 in 2004. However, the average number of channels tuned barely changed, rising to 15.4 from 15.0 in 2004. The data appears to support a fundamental principle of rising media choice: that given an unlimited number of media options, the average person will still opt to use a relatively small number.
What makes the principle especially interesting for TV, is that Americans are spending more time watching TV than ever before. During 2005, the average household was tuned to their TV 57 hours and 17 minutes per week, a huge jump over 2004, when the average household was tuned to TV 56 hours and seven minutes per week. That's up from an average of 43 hours and 42 minutes per week in 1975, the benchmark year in the Nielsen report.

Not surprisingly, Americans appear to be spending more of their time with cable and satellite TV channels than those from broadcasters. The number of broadcast TV channels tuned by the average TV household actually declined from 16.4 in 2004 to 16.3 in 2005, the first time Nielsen has reported a drop in broadcast channels tuned since it began benchmarking the data.

TV Channels Received Vs. Tuned

Receivable Tuned 1985 NA NA 1990 NA NA 1995 NA NA 2000 61.4 NA 2001 71.9 NA 2002 79.7 NA 2003 85.8 NA 2004 92.6 15.0 2005 96.4 15.4

Source: Nielsen Media Research.

MediaPost Publications - Nielsen Seeks To Engage Clients, Unveils Engagement Panel - 03/15/2006

2006-03-15T05:10:00.000-08:00

MediaPost Publications - Nielsen Seeks To Engage Clients, Unveils Engagement Panel - 03/15/2006
Nielsen Seeks To Engage Clients, Unveils Engagement Panel
by Joe Mandese, Wednesday, Mar 15, 2006 7:45 AM EST
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SEEKING TO ENGAGE CLIENTS DURING the opening session an annual two-day meeting in Orlando on Tuesday, Nielsen Media Research released plans for measuring one of the hottest subjects in the TV advertising business: audience engagement. As part of the plan, Nielsen said it would launch a separate panel next month comprised of households and individuals who are retired from its people meter ratings panel to participate in the engagement research. Households normally stay in Nielsen's people meter panels for two-year intervals, and then are replaced by new panelists. Nielsen has always considered the old panelists a valuable asset for ancillary research projects, because they are already installed with metering technology, they have agreed to participate in TV audience research, and because they have up to two-years worth of conventional TV audience measurement data, but this is the first time it will be utilizing them as part of an ongoing research endeavor. Nielsen has a policy of not conducting tests via its "live" ratings panel due to concerns that it could influence natural viewing behavior that would impact TV ratings.
Once they leave the official ratings panel, the new engagement panelists will continue to have their TV viewing behavior metered, but will also participate in periodic phone surveys to measure the connection between what they watch on TV and their recall, awareness and attitudes toward brands and products advertised on TV.

The new Nielsen engagement panel comes as Madison Avenue has become transfixed with engagement metrics as a solution to growing concerns that people avoid advertising. An industry-wide task force known as MI4 is expected to release its definition for engagement next week during the Advertising Research Foundation's annual conference in New York.

MI4, which describes the engagement effort as the "search for the 21st Century GRPs," a reference to Nielsen's conventional "gross rating points," has been using a working definition of media engagement as: "Engagement is turning on a prospect to a brand idea enhanced by the surrounding media context."

Nielsen is by no means the only researcher to jump into engagement measurement. IAG Research has made that the core focus of its measurement of TV programming, advertising and even product placement, and is expected to expand that soon into other forms of media such as online and print.

Nielsen Senior Vice President-Client Insights Howard Shimmel has been alluding to a Nielsen solution for much of the past year, and had been known to be championing an alternate panel concept.

Nielsen clients, meanwhile, have been developing their own solutions, especially spunky cable networks like Court TV and The Weather Channel, including a variety of custom studies, analysis of conventional Nielsen ratings, and even minute-by-minute ratings analyses.

During the first day of its annual client meetings, Nielsen also announced that it has committed to fund its so-called Council For Research Excellence for a second year for an additional $2.5 million. The council, which as yet to yield any research, currently is evaluating proposals for primary and methodological research, including a study that would measure the impact of the simultaneous use of media.

During Tuesday's session, Nielsen also updated clients on its so-called "extended home" sample, including the measurement of TV viewing done by members of Nielsen households residing on college campuses.

During today's final half-day session, Nielsen CEO Susan Whiting will deliver a keynote on "The Digital Consumer," and how Nielsen plans to measure their media behavior, followed by an overview on the "consumer technology landscape," including digital video recorders and video on demand, as well as long-term research methods and technology solutions by Nielsen's chief research and technology executives.

The event concludes with an open forum discussion between Nielsen clients and Whiting, which is typically a lively exchange.

GIVE UP ON YOUR REGRESSIVE REBUNDLING FANTASIES

2006-03-14T06:16:00.000-08:00

GIVE UP ON YOUR REGRESSIVE REBUNDLING FANTASIES
General Market and Media Agencies Are Split Apart Forever -- and for Good Reason
March 14, 2006
QwikFIND ID: AAR49O
By Jonah Bloom
For an exercise in futility it is hard to beat the argument that ad and media agencies should be rebundled. It was a pointless, if forgivable, polemic when it was first rehearsed in Europe in the late ‘90s and with every rehashing it gets just a little more painful.
Jonah Bloom, executive editor of Advertising Age.
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Today its proponents are not only wasting their time engaging in a nostalgic nondebate, but missing the opportunity to make collaborative progress instead of, Canute-like, ordering back a tide that has already swept past them.

Perhaps it was inevitable, in the run-up to this month’s 4A’s media conference, that a couple of the ad-agency folk who yearn for a time when they held strategic sway over clients’ budgets would yet again proclaim the need to reclaim the media high ground. Yet the terms they used, “bringing it back in-house,” for example, sounded a lot like they were laboring under the illusion that the entire marketing world still revolves around their shops -- “we are the house, these others houses aren’t houses” -- and, in tone, it sounded a lot like whining rather than the spawning of new models that suit their clients.

For the last time
So, hopefully for the last time, let’s get this straight: Media agencies are not going to be integrated into ad agencies. Have you been to MediaVest, Starcom, MindShare or OMD? Can you imagine squeezing them into the ad agencies? The bureaucracy, the politics, the confusion, the office-supply orders ...

The big media agencies are gigantic, busy-to-bursting businesses that plan and buy, between them, more than $50 billion in media in America alone. And, according to my admittedly half-assed, back-of-a-business-card calculations, they make over $4 billion in global revenue for their holding companies. You’d have to be crazy to imagine that Messrs. Wren, Sorrell, Roth and Levy are about to put that at risk by reintegrating those units.

What’s more, while it is critical that media and message are intrinsically linked in the planning of a campaign, it is questionable whether it benefits the client to have the organization that does its communications planning be the same organization that has, historically at least, produced one particular type of communication. That’s hardly the way to get broader, media-neutral thinking.

Linking marketer to consumer
Then there’s the fact that the separation of the media agencies has enabled them to equip themselves better for an era in which the navigation of channels between marketer and consumer is arguably the trickiest task in marketing. Today’s media shops have research arms, planning tools and processes that are way more advanced than anything the old in-house departments had to offer. And the truth is that they still need more data-analytics talent and deeper planning resources to take the reams of research and turn it into meaningful insight for their clients. To take away their P&Ls and return them to ad agencies where they might, in some quarters, still be regarded as second-class citizens, would be seriously short-changing them -- and their clients.

Rather than looking backward, wishing for the impossible and generally sounding regressive, these ad-agency bosses ought to be helping to create new, flexible and collaborative models to serve the client that make the best use of a variety of resources regardless of the name over the door. Some smart marketers have already demanded such arrangements -- think Coca-Cola City or SMG United for P&G -- and no two will look the same. What they will have in common, however, is that they’ll find ways to unite channel or engagement planners with brand planners and message masters without insisting that they all share a stapler.

WHY GUATEMALA'S NEW TOURISM SLOGAN DOESN'T WORK

2006-02-21T11:11:00.000-08:00

From AdAge.com
WHY GUATEMALA'S NEW TOURISM SLOGAN DOESN'T WORK
And Why the Country Should Think Bigger and Change Its Name
February 20, 2006
QwikFIND ID: AAR43G
By Al Ries
Recently, the country of Guatemala hired a global branding consultancy to develop a new tourist strategy.
Photo: AP
Guatemala, which was once a capital of Mayan civilization, is littered with ruins such as this pyramid at Tikal.
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Focus groups
According to the consultants, “Extensive focus groups were carried out to understand the perspective of a broad range of Guatemalans, including the business, artistic, literary, hospitality and indigenous communities.”

“Working from the values of Mysticism, Intimacy, Diversity, Evolution, and Authenticity,” states the consultancy, “we defined a distinctive and credible brand essence.”

Guatemala’s new brand essence: “Soul of the Earth.”

Is Soul of the Earth a good idea? Are there any objective criteria to determine if a new position is going to be effective?

If you’re sitting in a boardroom listening to an agency present the concept for your new advertising campaign, how do you respond? Do you go with your gut? Or do you have another way to figure out whether the proposed idea is going to work?

Reverse strategy test
One test we use all the time is this one: just reverse the strategy and ask if the reversed strategy applies to the competition.

Take “Think small,” the Volkswagen program selected by Advertising Age as the best advertising campaign of the 20th century.

Reverse the strategy and you have “Think big.” Did other automotive brands think big? They sure did. Not only that, their advertisements at the time boasted about how big and long and low their automobiles were.

Prospects don’t think in a vacuum. They accept or reject a new idea not just on its merits, but also on whether the new idea fits in the mind with all the other ideas they have accumulated over the years about the category.
Photo: AP
A hieroglyphic expert and archeology student Ana Torres clean a newly excavated altar stone from a Guatemalan Mayan site. The country continues to discover new ruins that shed further light on Mayan culture, which was North America's most advanced prior to the arrival of Europeans.
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A new cola brand, for example, has to fit in with everything the cola drinker thinks about Coca-Cola, Pepsi-Cola and the other brands in the category. If there’s no match, there’s no acceptance of the new idea.

Avis example
Take the Avis program, selected by Advertising Age as the 10th best advertising campaign of the 20th century. “Avis is No. 2 in rent-a-cars, so why go with us? We try harder.”

Reverse the strategy and you have “Hertz is No. 1 in rent-a-cars, so they don’t have to try as hard.” Sounds reasonable to car-rental prospects, so they buy into the Avis position.

Most advertising strategies fail miserably on the reversal test and the reason is clear. They sell the category rather than the brand. Take American Airlines, “We know why you fly,” and reverse it. Other airlines don’t know why you fly?

Come on, American. Every airline knows why you fly, but what they need to figure out is why you should fly American. Or Delta. Or United.

Very few advertising strategies pass the reversal test and I think I know why. Having participated in many agency brainstorming sessions, I find that most creative people zero in on the essence of the category rather than the essence of the brand. The strategy then becomes “pre-empt the category with advertising messages that capture consumers’ minds through their sheer creativity.”

The Nike exception
Sometimes this strategy will work, especially if the competition is weak and the client has enough money to spend. Nike’s “Just do it” is a good example. Through brilliant advertising and massive amounts of money, the idea has become associated with the Nike brand.

Most clients don’t have the money or the patience to make a category campaign successful. Having visited Guatemala, one of the poorest countries in Central America, many times, I can assure you that the country doesn’t have the resources to take a category idea and make it successful.

Soul of the Earth? Reverse the idea and what do you get? Soul of the Sky? Most reversals of category ideas don’t make any sense and it’s certainly so for Guatemala’s new brand essence.

What should Guatemala’s new strategy be? Actually, Guatemala is a country rich in heritage. It was the cultural center of the Mayas, the most advanced civilization in all of North and South America before the arrival of the Spanish. Even today, 43 percent of Guatemala’s population of 14 million people are of Maya descent. Many still speak dialects of the Maya language.

Spectacular ruins
With mountain ranges as high as 10,000 feet and a culture seemingly unchanged for 500 years, Guatemala is a tourist paradise. Scattered throughout Guatemala are hundreds of spectacular Maya ruins. Cities, temples, houses, playing fields. The relics of a glorious past. More spectacular than the Pyramids of Egypt or the Taj Mahal of India, and built for the living rather than the dead.

Guatemala: “Center of Maya civilization.”

Reverse the strategy and what do you have? “Other countries might have some Maya ruins, but they weren’t the center of Maya civilization.” The reversal sounds reasonable.

There’s one problem, however. Even though Guatemala was the center of Maya civilization, there are Maya ruins scattered over Belize, El Salvador, western Honduras and southern Mexico. (Even worse, in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula a marketing group has formed to promote the “Riviera Maya.”)

Besides the Maya confusion, there’s also the country confusion. In addition to Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador and Honduras, there are three other countries in Central America: Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Panama. It’s going to be hard for the average consumer to associate “Maya” with just one of these seven countries.

Change the country's name
How do you solve the country confusion problem? You change the name of the country from Guatemala to Guatemaya.

Guatemaya would solve both problems. Guatemaya pre-empts the Maya position and it serves as a memory device to link the Mayas to the county which contains the most spectacular Maya artifacts. (It also solves a third problem. “Mala” is Spanish slang for “bad woman.”)

Soul of the Earth or Center of Maya Civilization? The two approaches to developing an advertising strategy.

You pays your money and you takes your choice.

Throwing All Cultures Into the Marketing Pot

2006-02-21T10:29:00.000-08:00

From NYTimes.com
February 21, 2006
Advertising
Throwing All Cultures Into the Marketing Pot
By HILLARY CHURA
MARKETERS are embracing America's mishmash of cultures as the influence of immigrants is felt in areas like cuisine, music, holidays and clothing.

"You don't see it creeping up," said Luke Visconti, co-founder and partner in DiversityInc Media, which measures diversity management at large companies and publishes a magazine on the subject. "You don't see the changes unless you go back and think of it."

These days, contemporary men seek advice from old-world marriage brokers; home sellers consult feng shui practitioners before an open house; shops selling Asian-style bubble tea (made with tapioca) are opening in central business districts. And the results of earlier waves of cultural immigration, like Brazilian-inspired bathing suits and Caribbean cocktails, have given way to Cossack-inspired fur coats and sparkly Indian slippers. Many dishware manufacturers seem to offer square Asian-inspired dishes.

Some insurance covers acupuncture. Japanese anime comic books are becoming more popular. The Japanese pop music group Puffy AmiYumi performed during the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, and Broadway has had at least two Latino-influenced plays — "Forever Tango" and "Latinologues." Companies like Pepsi-Cola and Ford Motor are tapping into reggaetón, which mixes Spanish-language hip-hop with the rhythms of Caribbean music.

Marketers seeking innovations may need only to commandeer ideas from home, tweak a flavor, change packaging or borrow from an old-country holiday. "The Chinese New Year in a generation or two could be what St. Patrick's Day became a long time ago," said Robert Thompson, professor of popular culture at Syracuse University. "Hunan and Sichuan food is served in school cafeterias, and you've got sweet and sour sauce with your McNuggets."

Immigration may have had its greatest impact on the palate. Before the 1980's, a city's ethnic offerings may have started and stopped at chop suey and pizza; today, it could include Vietnamese, Thai, Korean, Ethiopian or some fusion of two or more cuisines. Shoppers and diners have their choice of Greek yogurt, ready-to-drink mojito mixes, short-rib flautas, tortilla chips with tamari seasoning, sushi and Mediterranean olive bars. Asian ingredients like lemon grass and bok choy increasingly show up in recipes.

So, too, do peppers like chipotle and jalapeño and fruits like mangoes and guavas. "These weren't mainstream until the Hispanic population grew," said Marcia Mogelonsky, a senior research analyst for Mintel International.

According to the Census Bureau, by 2020 the Hispanic population will account for 18 percent of the total population, up from 6 percent in 1980. But the trend has moved well beyond Spanish-speaking Americans to include Indians, Chinese, Russians and other ethnicities. While immigrant influence remains greatest in major metropolitan areas, these enclaves have expanded to smaller cities.

Children's television reflects that diversity. Disney now shows "American Dragon: Jake Long," featuring a pint-size superhero who is half-Asian and half-Caucasian, hangs out with blacks and whites and consults a wizened Asian elder.

Other crossover shows include Nickelodeon's "Dora the Explorer," a 7-year-old Latina cartoon heroine who has several merchandise deals, including Campbell's soup. Last year, she spun off "Go, Diego, Go" that features her equally bilingual cousin.

Some marketers are inching forward. Bank of America sponsored a Manhattan family music festival — promoted in English and Spanish — with a Chinese music ensemble and a gospel choir from Soweto. McDonald's spun off the Chipotle Mexican Grill chain this year and still owns a big stake.

Last year, Schieffelin & Company rolled out Navan, a vanilla cognac intended to play off the spice's appeal to Hispanics but also to blacks and Asians. Diageo last year introduced the high-end Brazilian rum Orinoco.

Procter & Gamble is trying to expand sales for its Ariel laundry detergent, which is popular in Mexico, into Wal-Mart in the United States, said one Procter & Gamble marketer who asked not to be named because he is not authorized to speak to the media.

He said a mainstream marketing campaign for Pantene shampoo, likely to begin before July, will be based in part on market research that showed Latina women prefer long, straight hair.

At the same time that Asian chains like 99 Ranch Market have grown more popular with non-Asian customers, Wal-Mart and other supermarkets have expanded their ethnic food aisles, said Saul S. Gitlin, executive vice president for strategic services at Kang & Lee, part of WPP Group's Young & Rubicam Brands.

In introducing the Ford Fusion four-door midsize sedan in 2005, Ford's general market advertising campaign borrowed from its Asian campaign's soap operas, said David Rodriguez, multicultural marketing manager for Ford, Lincoln and Mercury brands.

He said the Ford Fusion Mixer, a Web-based music mix that includes genres like R&B, salsa, reggaetón, Asian, hip-hop, rock and alternative music, was developed for Fordenespanol.com but now runs on all company sites.

"In many cases, we will very much acknowledge that what is multicultural today very much will be general market tomorrow," Mr. Rodriguez said.

Pepsi-Cola North America is bringing Manzanita Sol, a popular apple-flavored soft drink in Mexico, to Southern California, Texas, Arizona, New York City and Miami. It is aimed primarily at Latinos but is also tied to the American affinity for apple juice.

Lara Montilla, senior marketing manager for multicultural marketing at Pepsi, says the drink is selling well, in part because of nonethnic consumers.

"The U.S. consumer is exploring different flavors more now than before," Ms. Montilla said. "We definitely will see a lot of crossing paths when it comes to innovation — innovation that is targeted to ethnic consumers but crosses over to the general market."

She said only a handful of companies had figured out how to achieve that crossover and that Pepsi-Cola North America had learned from its sibling, Frito-Lay. The snack company introduced Doritos Guacamole for Latinos but expanded it to the general market. She said aguas frescas, a drink with fruit pulp, sugar and water that is popular in Latin countries, was an area of interest and that Pepsi was considering how to make the category more prevalent here.

Expanding a product from a specific ethnic group to the general market makes good business sense.

"A lot of major companies have tried developing merchandise just for specific ethnic groups and may not have gotten the volume," said Peter Krivkovich, president and chief executive of the Chicago-based advertising agency Cramer-Krasselt, whose clients include Barton Beer, which imports Corona, and H. J. Heinz. "For large companies, small brands are just not worth it."

The tactic, however, could also alienate a brand's core clientele, said Tom Pirko, president of the beverage consultancy Bevmark. "A lot of people, if you give them something other than what they want or expect, will reject your product, boycott it," Mr. Pirko said.

Mr. Rodriguez of Ford said the automaker would accelerate ethnic efforts this year, taking into account how many immigrants were big adopters of technology and were more accepting of the Internet, broadband, text messaging and mobile marketing.

"As fluency levels increase," Mr. Rodriguez said, "you are going to see more opportunity via different media mixes to reach out and connect with these people in more creative and innovative ways."