Archive for the 'Product Placement' Category

Here’s the idea. When you go to hulu.com, the website set up by NBC Universal and Newscorp to compete with YouTube, to watch a video clip you can choose what ad you want to watch with it. “You want a sports coupe ad with that clip from the Office, sir? Or perhaps you’re more in the market for a SUV? Let me get that for you straight away.” Hmm.

“It’s choose-your-own-adventure advertising,” enthuses Jean-Paul Colaco, Hulu’s ad guy quoted in today’s Financial Times. Yeah, JP, it’s a veritable adventure. One bad car ad over another, that’s real consumer control. He recognizes that online vid viewers (OVVs) get bugged by having to watch the same old “pre-roll” ad at the for the first 15 seconds of the video and hence the solution - a nod towards relevant content (rather than simply, you must be a young adult if you’re watching this stuff so we’ll plop an ad for a product targetd to you lot before the real entertainment begins).

But it is just a nod. And is a very blunt way of targeting. The viewers won’t, for instance, be able to forgo watching the an ad altogether; they can just choose from a very limited selection which one to play.

If they want to see the damned clip, they have to just grin and bear watching the godawful ad too! Got it?

YouTube’s approach, announced a couple of months ago, is a little different. There will be overlay ads on the bottom quarter of the video screen which viewers can expand to fill the whole screen or, thankfully, block out altogether.

This is better than forcing people to watch the ads, but is still a far from perfect solution; one that uses the medium as the interactive experience it should be. I always loved “Pop-Up Video” on VH1 - you know, the music video show in which trivial facts about the videos popped up as they played - and now dream that online video could do the same thing. For online video the pop-ups wouldn’t come up automatically - as, on a screen that small they would obscure the whole picture and only doesn’t irritate on much repeated content, such as music videos you’ve seen a hundred times before - but would pop up if you, the viewer, decided you wanted to know more: more about the character, the production or maybe even the stuff (aka “the products”) shown. Rolling the mouse over the cool car in the clip could give you a price and some specs, perhaps mention a promotion or invite you to click for a test drive.

Thing is, that technology is available now (see the demos on videoclix.com), it’s just that using it would take too much effort for advertisers to individualize the pop-ups to each different video. They like a one-size-fits all approach, treating the audience as one homogenous demographic, rather than recognizing that in this new Punk world marketers need to customize their messages.

Oh well, I’ll keep dreaming, and probably avoid altogether watching the online videos with pre-roll ads.

We all know the saying “Do as I say, not as I do.” But what happens when instead you preach “Do as I say, because if not I’ll climb down my insanely high horse and nail you to the courthouse door”? Well, you get the Elliot Spitzer story. Scratch that, the Spitzer Catastrophe.

While some are using this as an excuse to reargue the Clinton impeachment – “See? Slick Willy deserved to hang!” (which a lot of us know as “a vast rightwing conspiracy turned a BJ into a national catastrophe, yet it’s OK to lie about WMDs?”) – all that does is miss the evident point.

Facing a blood-seeking Republican Congress, Clinton lived to see the end of his presidency; Spitzie on the other hand was forced to resign within days of being found otu. Is it because one committed adultery while the other spent an estimated 80 Gs on prostitutes? Maybe. Or the real difference is, we think, Branding.

Sidebar: $80,000, wow, what were those women doing that made it worth $4500 a pop? I really can’t figure it out! If they haven’t started a how-to book, they’re need an agent. “Thousand Dollar Sex for Dummies,” there’s the title.

I’m back…. Politicians, like all public figures, consumer products, or corporations, are brands. They each use publicity and marketing to craft an image in the public consciousness. Clinton felt our pain cause he was one of us. He scarfed Big Macs, took an occasional toke, chased a little skirt. Was a dude!

But Spitzer, he was so much better than all of us, or at least that’s what he portended. The man used a shield of incorruptibility and a sword of integrity to smote those too morally weak to obey the law. He went after pillars or conmen of Wall Street (not to mention a few prostitution rings…I tell you undercover research must be mad fun) while glaring with open contempt down at those who failed to meet his standards. If your image is holier-than-thou Mr. Clean, you better make sure there’s truth in advertising.

When building a brand, you’ve got to leave room for human error, which is always inevitable as the absolute law of the universe. People make mistakes. PR and marketing strategies need to be flexible enough to allow for gaffes, lapses, peccadilloes, and, what the hay, even the occasional scandal.

It’s not what he did, right, but the hypocrisy that was immediately associated with the actions he pulled. Those nighttime activities conflicted with his brand and messaging. Were his actions that horrible? I don’t think so. But he was so buried in his own rhetoric that he had no choice but to step down before he was laughed down!

Want proof? Take Louisiana Senator and prostitute-lover David Vitter. After his recreational habits were outed by Larry Flynt, Vitter plum apologized. The verdict is not in on Vitter’s Hoegate, but it’s worth noting how, yep, he’s still there. While Vitter might have disappointed his constituents, nothing close to outrage followed.

So the lesson: Don’t let the messaging outstrip reality. And if you see a copy of “Thousand Dollar Sex for Dummies,” get it before the prurients protest it off the shelves. Cause according to a former high-ranking public official it’s worth the price.

We threw Blockbuster into the collective wind years ago, along with The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers and Contempo Casuals. The glory days of Blockbuster are long gone…long, long, long gone. Once upon a time it was actually cool to have a Blockbuster card. That Cookie Monster Blue and Big Bird Yellow…oh, the good old days. Nobody bought movies back then, we rented them. And most of the time we rented them from Blockbuster. (Unless we wanted one of those movies..then we forked it over.) Want a relaxing night at home? You went to Blockbuster. It was a Blockbuster night, ahh.

Now RETURNING the video, that was the hard part. Who could do it on time? And the late fees! More people were in collections over those fees in the 90s than for missed car payments. (Or maybe not, but doesn’t it feel true?)

Of course that was a different time. Today, orphaned by its corporate parent Viacom, those fat late fees a distant dream, Blockbuster has become passé. Want a relaxing night at home? Now you pick up the latest DVD at Target. Or on demand from the cable company. Or if you’re cool (and you know we are), you get it from Netflix.

On one hand, the company caught up. They’ve worked hard, and invested millions, in staying relevant. Their online rental business is arguably better than Netflix’s. They’ve dabbled in digital downloads and streams. But on the other hand… Blockbuster is boring. Over. U-N-C-O-O-L. A Van Damme in a Gyllenhaal world. (Awww, poor Jake. What? Too soon)

While Netflix is on its way to becoming a verb (the holy grail of branding!), Blockbuster is fading away. How many consumers know the significant strides the company has made? And worse, do they care?

Then it happened. This week during Bravo’s Project Runway the little engine that could, did. Mr. Tim Gunn took the designers on one of his wildly entertaining and slightly over the top field trips to SPANDEX WORLD. During the field trip, the designers were introduced to the Divas of the WWE. (By “Divas” they mean incredibly terrifying women who could easily take all of Britney’s bodyguards.) Gunn informed the designers that their challenge was to create outfits for the wonderful women of the WWE – every designers dream.

In order to get a feel for the Diva’s “style” the designers ordered old WWE clips from Blockbuster! Not only was the Blockbuster envelope on the table (glorious blue and yellow ablaze), but the designers even dropped verbal Blockbuster plugs. Go Blockbuster! Blockbuster has a real chance to shed its stagnant image, to move beyond tired commercials (“Rent Over the Hedge on DVD!” Woohoo?), and make an honest connection with their present and past customers.

Blockbuster isn’t a dinosaur struggling to stay alive! Blockbuster gets it now, and gets it better than anyone they’re competing with. Let’s keep it going, buddy! Product placement is all the rage these days, but it is only one step in the giant and winding staircase Blockbuster needs to walk up.

To misquote The Graduate: “I want to say one word to you. Just one word. INTERNET.” Digital distribution is the future, and right now no one, not the Yahoos nor the Studios nor the Bit Torrents of the world have a lock on that business. So why not Blockbuster? They could even could even partner up with Time Warner and put their content on demand. (We totally need to be Blockbuster execs.) This is Blockbuster’s chance to leapfrog NetFlix in the next generation of media.

And what about social networking communities? Lets get (channel Olivia Newton-John here vi-i-i-ral! Currently there is a Blockbuster application on Facebook that has less than 300 subscribers. I know people with more friends on Facebook! (And some of them kind of suck.) This is an easy, efficient, and effective way to reach a huge, relevant, impressionable population. Build an application that allows users to compare movie tastes with friends, order rentals online, and (when possible) download/stream content. This is doable! You’re Blockbuster, you still have the money, the relationships with content creators (Studios, Networks, etc.), to make it happen.

Blockbuster needs to articulate a forward-looking and innovative message that puts the company in the future of entertainment. It just takes some smart PR, a little bit of Punk attitude and stop talking about late fees already, dudes.

I don’t spend a lot of time in the cinema itself, it’s all payperview and downloaded crap these days, but I was with my parents and it was a choice between Atonement and… Wait! What about “Juno”? I happen to be a huge Michael Cera freak (www.clarkandmichael.com is mad hilarity) and so we went. Turns out the film’s fabulous - and finally a director, young Reitman, whose deft skill at creating coming AND serious turns, makes me sit up and go “I’ll tell everyone.”

However, there is a main character, Orange Tic Tacs, that actually threw me for a loop. Not since “My Big Fat Greek TV Movie” and the Michael Considine obsession with Windex, has a major American product placement (non-paid, I am told) been featured so “cool-y” in a major motion picture. And yet Ferrero USA, makers of the Tic Tac thang, have not done a thing to capitalize on Paul’s (Cera’s) nonstop fascination with the little orange one calorie treats (they actually use those words in the flick!).

I remember a billion years ago (94) when Quiz Show came out and Geritol was featured as a sponsor and it took six months and a few Oscar nods before that brand did anything to make hay with the news. And back then, social networking did not exist- not to mention the fact that Geritol was a sponsor of a SCANDALIZED show within the movie, so in fact it wasn’t too positive.

But heck, Ferrero, most known for Nutela and other badly-named old brands, has an opportunity to go for broke here with the one movie everyone is talking about that doesn’t star Johnny Depp.
They have their arms folded, I can tell, and it’s probably because “Juno” is about a 16-year-old pregnant kid — a brilliant and mature one, mind you — and they don’t want to get caught up in a debate about whether the candies support unwed young Mommies.

This is where the Punk mentality about making noise comes in handy. I can only hope that the Tic Tac makers out there somehow, somewhere, get their shit together and create a Tic Tac Orange subsite for people to share what’s orange about their lives — and even maybe create a little old chat room for lovers of this fine new American-made talk of the town. I want to see a Tic Tac character that, like that dancing baby of yore, appears in the oddest places throughout our Wide Web world.

If not, they are going to have orange mud all over their face. And in the DVD, you can best be sure a clever mini-doc on how Reitman and screenwriter Diago Cody (whatta name) “chose the Orange Tic Tac” …will be a wasted opportunity because by then we’ll have moved onto the next gimmick in our fast and fickle lives.

As viewers continue to tune out or fast forward through the TV commercials, network excecutives, desperate to keep the advertising dollars in house, are trying all manner of “creative” - by that we mean desperate - means to disguise the ads as something else. Ed Swindler (no seriously, that’s his name!), exec VP of ad sales at Universal NBC puts a friend-of-the-consumer spin on it: “No one on the creative side or the business side wants to make commercials intrusive, but we do need to commercialize efficiently so viewers can afford to get free television.”

A common ploy is to put original content into the breaks (the implication being that commercials cannot be described as such). For instance, next fall NBC Universal will be pepping up ad breaks with Jerry Seinfeld to keep the viewers watching (and to promote his new movie). And the kind folks at ABC are considering clever ways to hoodwink viewers into thinking they’re still watching their favorite show when the commercials have already started. For instance a TV set that Ugly Betty is watching might dissolve into the commercial break. (Maybe Betty will fast-forward through the real ads on the pretend show… No, probably not.)

Robert Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University, understands that what we really need to do is to make commercials that don’t suck as much: “A commercial has to be like a DVD extra. It has to be an added value, not an inconvenience.” Then Mr. Swindler and his friends wouldn’t need to find sneaky ways to trick the consumers into staying tuned.