Brand Noise

All Over the World, Teens Crave Empowerment

Last season, Frontline/World ran a story from the Middle East that introduced viewers to the fastest selling comic book in the Arab world, The 99. The comic features characters with super powers based on the concept of Allah's 99 attributes, including wisdom and generosity, as taught in the Koran. Its creator, Naif al-Mutawa, is a 36-year-old from Kuwait who was educated in the United States and who, as a boy, devoured Marvel comics and the Hardy Boys mysteries.

Reporter Isaac Solotaroff followed al-Mutawa as he marketed his comics throughout the Middle East, hoping to spread a moderate, modern image of Islam to the world. In this update, Solotaroff catches up with al-Mutawa in Jakarta, Indonesia, where the comic creator is trying to sell his work to the largest Islamic country in the world, a country that accounts for one in six of all Muslims worldwide. An ensuing documentary, Wham! Bam! Islam!, is in the works. Go, Isaac!

Even more compelling will be to see how the Islamic comic fans evolve. Will the cosplayers take it to the next level? Spirituality already underlies many a Manga. And, apparently, you can even see lotsa hijabi girls in Malaysia attending cosplay events. Could cosplay become the common ground the world needs? Can kids who think change the world? In our own research we've found the cosplay kids to be some of the most open-minded serious global thinkers. It belies the initial impression often viewed simply as kids in costume. These are not the Star Trekkies of past generations.   

The Kids are Alright

In fact they're so alright, they're the key to grown-up marketing.

Early reports on the ill health of the kids upfront have been greatly exaggerated, according to network ad sales executives, who hope to swap out Chicken Little projections of a flat to down market in favor of a more blustery Foghorn Leghorn outlook.

"Synergies between TV and digital are very strong," says Brad Davis, vp, ad sales for Disney Online. "The buyer culture is really starting to change from a planning perspective. And at the client level, most decisions are now being made from a 360-degree standpoint."

Like Disney Channel, Nickelodeon has aggressively gone after clients looking to reach parents who watch along with their kids. Since 2006, when Nick did some $50 million in nonendemic business, categories like insurance, automotive, travel, financial services, consumer electronics and wireless have become a sizable part of the network's business model. Who knew?

Read the whole story.

Sci Fi Programming Proves Girls Go For Details

Once considered a network exclusively for sweatpants-clad men residing in their parents' basements, [The Sci Fi Channel] has in recent years been attracting increasing numbers of female viewers. Ghost Hunters, which is entering its fourth season in March, actually draws more women than men-once unheard of for the Sci Fi Channel specifically or science-fiction programming in general. Other shows on the network, like Eureka, are also skewing female.

The network's increasing appeal to women is no accident, but rather orchestrated by its president, Bonnie Hammer, who focuses less on interplanetary warfare than she does on so-called "Earth-based" dramas.

These are shows with complex characters, romance and elements of the supernatural—all of which resonate with women in focus groups.

Read more.

Final Word from Kellogg Super Bowl Advertising Review Panel

Well, now that the Super Bowl and its ad legacy are behind us, we can all be Monday morning quarterbacks.

Everyone seems in agreement: Many commercials that appeared during Super Bowl XLII took a satiric tack, spoofing movies, television shows, video clips, celebrity misbehavior and more...For the most part, it worked. The tone was a welcome contrast to last year’s Super Bowl, filled with crude and cartoonish violence.

Kellogg School Super Bowl Advertising Review panel awarded A's to four brands: Tide, E-Trade, Coke and FedEx. Tide-to-Go won with an "entertaining," "memorable" spot which "clearly communicated the relevant product benefit." Runner-up E-Trade's ad was "attention getting" and "funny." The panel thought Coca-Cola was particularly effective in connecting with their audience.

The panel had significant concerns about the advertising efforts for the lowest ranked advertisers: SalesGenie.com, CareerBuilder.com and GM's Yukon brand. Panel members said SalesGenie.com's ads were "offensive to some," and lacked a clear description of the site. CareerBuilder.com's "I Quit" spot received mixed reactions; members of the panel were "turned off" and found the spot "disturbing."

The 41-member Kellogg Super Bowl Advertising Review panel ranked each advertiser based on innovative criteria known as ADPLAN. The acronym, developed by Kellogg faculty, instructs viewers to grade ads based on attention, distinction, positioning, linkage, amplification and net equity. Unlike other reviews which may rank ads on likeability alone, the most entertaining spot may not be the panel's overall winner. This year, the panel members identified E-Trade which received an A, as the most likeable. The brand successfully connected with the audience and communicated its position.

Reality TV Moves Beyond Trash

Hardisty is a Canadian Pacific Railway town about 200 kilometres southeast of Edmonton with a population, according to the entry sign, of 743.

Last June, 117 women - about 85 per cent of Hardisty's female population - were whisked away on buses sans cellphones to set the stage for a 10-part Canadian reality series. Their destination? A luxurious week last June at a Canmore resort in the Rocky Mountains. They left their husbands, fiancés and boyfriends behind to fend for themselves and care for their children.

Hardisty accepted its role in hopes of gaining a bit of marketing exposure. Replete with farmland, essential services, a recreational lake and nine-hole golf course, Hardisty has lots for sale at $1 per square foot (prices negotiable by town council) and is keen for new residential, industrial and commercial development, officials say.

CBC said The Week the Women Went attracted an encouraging 770,000 viewers, comparable to Royal Canadian Air Farce, but not quite in the same league as Hockey Night in Canada, which gets more than one million viewers on average.

"All of a sudden we're not a small little community nobody knows about," Mr. Kulbisky said. "Everybody in Canada and beyond knows about us."

As reality tv matures and participants get more savvy as to what they can get out of it, the nature will change, bringing it closer to the participatory experience audiences are requiring from all avenues of entertainment.

Read more.

Successful Entertainment Requires Participation

As the writers’ strike has made clear, art and entertainment in the digital age are highly collaborative, and none of it can thrive without engaging audiences more actively than ever before. Fans today see themselves as doing business with television shows, movies, even books. They want to rate, review, remix. They want to make tributes and parodies, create footnotes and concordances, mess with volume and color values, talk back and shout down.

Case in point: “Friday Night Lights”

Grown-ups cry — DVR-owning grown-ups especially, according to Media Life magazine — while watching “Friday Night Lights.” They also pine for more and deeply dread the show’s extinction. However, viewers have to keep watching or the show might die...the show’s numbers are lousy.

The fault of “Friday Night Lights” is extrinsic: the program has steadfastly refused to become a franchise…It generates no tabloid features, cartoons, trading cards, board games, action figures or vibrating brooms.

This may sound like a blessing, but in a digital age a show cannot succeed without franchising…It’s a mistake to see this imperative to branch out as a simple coarsening of culture…Without a sense of being needed or at least included, fans snub art — at least when it takes the form of prime-time TV. They won’t participate in online dialogues and events, visit message boards and chat rooms or design games. As a result, platforms for supplementary advertising aren’t built, starving even the shows fans profess to love of attention, and thus money, and thus life. Aloof and passive fans kill their darlings.

Read the whole article.

Mighty Morphin' Male Personas

The LA Times had an interesting piece last week on how love/hate TV show sensation Mad Men could be ushering in a new male aesthetic. 

...the term "metrosexual" had better watch its waxed back. A new buzzword -- "menergy" -- is muscling its way into the cultural lexicon to describe the ultra-masculinity in designer menswear.  Read more

Tom Green Bubbles Back to TV

Tom Green is taking his late-night talk show from the Internet to television, partnering with Debmar-Mercury to make the show available to stations in January 2008.

The plan is to roll out the show on a handful of stations, mainly in late-night time slots, and then try to grow its footprint. (Tyler Perry’s House of Payne, originally debuted on 10 stations.) "That way we can let the show speak for itself instead of trying to sell a pilot first," said co-president Ira Bernstein.

One recent version of Green’s Internet show drew 20,000 viewers live, but he said about 650,000 clips from the show were seen from YouTube to MySpace or downloaded on iTunes within days.

Read more.

Joost: Early Users Hold Highest Standards

The Moral: Early adopters (in this case 40,000 beta testers) are key in pulling brands through as their word resonates ever wider. Don’t short-change them. Make them part of the evolutionary process.

The Story: The peer-to-peer powered Internet TV network, created by the founders of Skype, has been in private beta for over a year. Starting today, any user can visit Joost.com, download the newest version of Joost software and watch television shows and movies.

Joost offers an odd and incomplete mix of new shows (“CSI”, clips from “the Late Show,”) old ones (“Lassie”, “Babylon 5”), music videos and a truly random movie selection, among other stuff.

The biggest challenge for the London-based company: convincing people to put their Web browsing on hold, lean back in their computer desk chairs and tune in.

This is not the Joost you saw in spring…My guess: the company saw a wave of users trying out the service back then, many of whom, like me, didn’t stick around. They’ll have to bring us back if Joost is ever going roost.

Read more.

Commercial Culture Gets Its Due

Circa 1985, my kid brother who is now a middle school dean was obsessed with Commercial Crazies, the VCR game populated by classic commercials by Joe Sedelmaier. Except he’d never play the game, he’d just watch the videotape over and over—and over. (I wonder if he’s ever confessed this to his students?) Who knew he was at the forefront of commercial culture?

This morning I was wistful for those slacker days when Firebrand held its first press conference introducing its "commercials as content" programming. Except now the commercials reach outside the mind of a single creative director and come from everywhere and everyone. They’re chosen according to the likes and preferences of a panel of Gen Yers. You can view them on TV, online and via mobile. And you can click-through to buy merchandise. Industry pioneer John Lack who launched MTV and Román Viñoly, son of architect Rafael Viñoly, are spearheading the project.

There was chatter from the invited guests about how brands are scrambling to reach consumers where they are at, rather than silo-ing consumers to Firebrand. Yet, for now--and perhaps for always, the commercials will live within the domain of Firebrand, and will not be brought into syndication. The first six months will be an exercise in building trust among participating brands.

It’s about establishing behavior and filling the need of consumer expectation. No one expects viewers to tune in to the site or the tv block for more than a few minutes at a time. It’s more than they’re getting now out of traditional TV advertising.

Crayon is handling the social media aspect of Firebrand. This is where we see the brand thriving at its best among Gen Yers, as well as moving beyond them. To start, check out YouTube, Myspace, Facebook, Flickr and Delicious Links.

Firebrand is slated to launch at the end of October on the ION Television Network, weeknights at 11 pm in 94 million households, as well as 24/7 on the web at www.firebrandtv.com and www.usanetwork.com, www.adweek.com on hand-held mobile devices, initially through iTunes, and MSN when available.

Investors Microsoft, NBC Universal and GE’s Peacock Equity Fund, ION Television, as well as Adweek, Brandweek and Mediaweek, among others, joined Firebrand at its announcement during Advertising Week at the Paley Center for Media.