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‘Dumb’ Dominates Cannes Lion Hunt


Small-budget marketers from small countries stood tall at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

Pereira & O’Dell scored its third Grand Prix in the film category when that jury, in an unusual move, awarded two Grands Prix, one to the Toshiba laptop campaign and one to the single-film “Dumb Ways to Die,” the entry Cannes juries just couldn’t get enough of last week. “Dumb Ways to Die” is an Australian train-safety-themed music video that went viral and inspired karaoke-style parodies; was sold on iTunes; and featured various digital components, including a mobile game.

The festival has only awarded two film Grands Prix once before, in 2008 to Cadbury Dairy Milk’s “Gorilla” spot by Fallon, London, and the “Believe” video-game campaign for Xbox 360/Halo 3 by T.A.G/McCann Worldgroup, San Francisco.

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‘Mad Men’ Recap: Yep, That’s How the Ad Biz Reacted to a 1968 Tragedy


It’s the evening of April 4, 1968, and a ballroom full of New York City advertising executives has just received word that Martin Luther King Jr. has been shot to death. The program they’ve assembled for, naturally, has ground to a halt. But after just a few minutes, the lights are repeatedly dimmed, beckoning the ad folk back to their tables.

Can this depiction on “Mad Men” possibly be how the ad industry really dealt with one of the most horrifying moments of the 20th century, a murder that threatened to destroy the civil-rights movement and push an already-fragile country toward the brink? Did they really think it was enough to have a half-assed assassination intermission, as though on a break during “Bye Bye Birdie”?

Actually, yes.

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Foursquare Planning to Offer Check-in Data to Target Ads on Other Platforms


Foursquare has started pitching digital agencies on a new ad product that would use Foursquare’s location and behavioral data to contextualize ads on other platforms, executives familiar with the situation said.

The ad product is still in development and will eventually allow advertisers to use Foursquare data to target ads purchased through ad exchanges or networks.

When launched, it will mark Foursquare’s first attempt to generate revenue outside its app.

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How to Capitalize on Your Brand’s Unplanned Star Turn on ‘Mad Men’


It seems almost unfair: Big brands like Lincoln Motor Co. and Johnnie Walker laid out big bucks for commercial time during the season premiere of “Mad Men,” but Koss Corp. slipped into the script without paying a cent. And there was no DVR-powered skipping through the headphone-maker’s airtime, either.

The downside for Koss, of course, was a total absence of control.

Koss, the Milwaukee-based company, only learned it was being used at the last minute and had absolutely no say on the matter. Like other brands written into “Mad Men”‘s universe, its executives didn’t see the episode before it aired or have any input on a script that used Koss in a central way: to allow Peggy Olson to show off her creative and crisis-management chops.

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Are Sports Prices Too High To Deliver Return on Investment?


Along with death and taxes, add spiraling sports costs to the certainties of life. During good times and bad for advertising, prices keep climbing for the ultimate reality TV: live sports. But recently companies like DirecTV are pushing back against rights fees and marketers like Anheuser-Busch InBev are struggling with ways to justify them, it raises the question: Can sports continue to defy gravity?

Reliant on dependable ratings winners at a time when nothing else is a sure thing, TV networks and cable and satellite operators are shelling out double, or more, what they used to spend to carry live games from the National Football League, Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association, Nascar, college football and basketball and other sports.

Consider the size of some recent deals: Starting in 2014, MLB will roughly double its annual payday thanks to national-TV renewals worth $12.4 billion with ESPN, Fox and TBS. After the 2014 regular season, ESPN will pay an estimated $7 billion to televise college football’s new national playoff through 2026. Time Warner Cable will spend an estimated $8 billion over 25 years to create a new regional sports network around the Los Angeles Dodgers, according to Sports Business Journal.

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NBC Ratings Fall Hard Post-Football


NBC was the only broadcast network to score a ratings touchdown in the fourth quarter, thanks to “Sunday Night Football.” Early in 2013, however, the Peacock is getting tackled.

A drama, “Do No Harm,” was canceled within weeks of its debut. The lead actress of sitcom “Up All Night” is leaving the series in the wake of an NBC decision to rework its premise. The second season of much-ballyhooed “Smash” crashed in the ratings. And Friday nights have been filled entirely with news programs, including the ailing “Rock Center.”

It all points to continued struggles for the once-great NBC and an over-reliance on football that may have implications for the broader TV market.

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Tax Preparers Come Out Swinging With Negative Ad Campaigns


Just when you thought you could take a post-election breather from attack ads, here come the tax wars.

This is normally a frenetic time of year for tax preparers like H&R Block, Intuit’s TurboTax and Jackson Hewitt, which have fewer than four months until April 15 to convince customers their products and services are superior. And given the finite number of people who need their taxes prepared, the tried-and-true way to increase business is to steal market share from competitors. “That’s what’s been creating a more-intense marketing approach,” said Jay Baer, founder and president of Convince & Convert, a social-media and content consultancy.

This year is especially aggressive, thanks to changes in tax laws in 2013, which makes the process more complex and raises the stakes for marketers who “think this is the year they can acquire new customers for life,” Mr. Baer said. As a result, there has been name-calling and finger-pointing in ads that have landed some of the players in court.

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For a Master Class in Trolling, Just Turn to The New York Times


It’s become fashionable to complain about the state of online “journalism” as various sites do what needs to be done to boost page views and goose the most-emailed list. Even as we envy all that sweet, sweet traffic, we castigate. We roll our eyes at Gawker’s latest hit job on a beloved pop-culture icon. We tut-tut BuzzFeed’s latest slideshow, a Frankenstein’s monster of memes and photos cribbed from elsewhere.

But as I was angrily banging the Facebook share button recently, I realized something. All these Johnny-come-latelies are rank amateurs compared with The New York Times.

What set me off was an article titled “An Apartment With Guest Potential.” It’s a harrowing 1,100-word tale of a 26-year-old Columbia grad’s struggle to buy a $700,000 Manhattan apartment with her parents’ money. Time was of the essence. As was space. Because, as she said, “something very California is to have friends over to your home where you can host them.”

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Twitter Tops List of 2012’s Most ‘Social Brands’ With 2.8B Mentions


Not only is Twitter the place where most online conversations are unfolding, it’s also the brand most likely to be mentioned in those conversations.

Research conducted by the social-media analytics firm Infegy — which has ad-agency clients such as MEC and Ogilvy PR — found that Twitter was far and away the most “social brand” of 2012 with mentions in more than 2.8 billion posts. Runners-up Apple and Facebook were far behind, with mentions in roughly 1.1 billion and 1 billion posts, respectively.

The posts examined come from three sources, according to Infegy’s CEO Justin Graves. The Twitter firehose and public Facebook posts (roughly 1 to 2 million each day) account for roughly 60% of the data, while blogs and news sites where people are leaving comments make up the other 40%. Infegy’s web crawler is largely looking for RSS feeds in the latter instance.

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The Big Machine Behind ‘Nashville’


Despite shaky ratings that have marked the end of countless primetime dramas in the past, ABC’s fall entry “Nashville” was recently picked up for another season. Whom might it have have to thank?

His name is Scott Borchetta.

As Big Machine Label Group president-CEO, Mr. Borchetta has the reputation of a betting man in the country-music industry. A race-car-driver-turned-record-executive at Dreamworks, Mr. Borchetta is known for discovering and betting big on the musical talents of many of country music’s biggest stars, including those of a curly haired blonde girl now known by the world as Taylor Swift.

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