ECUAdvertising

A campaign is under way in New York to promote a weeklong celebration of the Academy Awards — the film industry’s equivalent of New Year’s Eve in Times Square

The campaign is being sponsored by NYC & Company, the city’s official tourism, marketing and partnership organization, which is staging the week’s events in collaboration with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The goal is to stimulate interest in the 82nd annual presentation of the Academy Awards, scheduled for Sunday, with activities in New York carrying the theme “Oscar and the City.”

The public events, which start on Monday, include screenings of Oscar-winning films with New York themes as well as exhibits of Academy Awards and film posters. The week is to culminate with an “Oscar Night and the City” viewing party on Sunday, at Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center, where paying guests can watch the ABC broadcast of the show.

Name these companies: 1) The computer for the rest of us 2) Networking networks  3) The world's information in one click 4) Personal video broadcasting network These are not tag-lines. The companies who expressed these words successfully positioned the value proposition and differentiation within a simple ‘one-liner’. Founders and executives delivered these one-liners to everyone who would listen and whom they needed to fold into the cause – investors, landlords, lawyers, recruits, customers, and partners.

Information today flows every which way.  The "shape" of the brand in the minds of customers may be more varied now. Some percent of the variation is not good, but some may very well be. Over-constraining the ‘position’ with too much specificity would not reduce variation (provide management control) anyway. Therefore craft a simple, succinct statement that does a better job of absorbing or exploiting complexity (variation) rather than avoiding it.

The rules are pretty simple: Allstar Products Group, the maker of Snuggie, is inviting people to enter the Snuggie Choice Film Awards via SnuggieFanClub.com.

All you have to do is create your own tribute, parody, song etc. — no longer than three minutes — and submit it to the webpage above. The contest ends on September 1 at midnight, at which point six finalists will be chosen by Snuggie fans. The finalists will be flown to New York in October. Awards () include a $5,000 grand prize and $2,500 for second and third place, Snuggies (natch), and the chance to appear in future commercials.

Even when served in the most contextually relevant and targeted environments, most banners struggle to achieve click rates in excess of 0.10%. Even within the demographically information rich environs of Facebook, banner click rates are abysmal. At a recent SES Conference, Sarah Smith, online sales operations manager at Facebook said that the average campaign click-through rates on the social network were as low as 0.05%.

In his outlook for 2010, industry analyst Imran Khan predicts that spend on display banner advertising will increase by 10.5%.

Khan identifies two important developments in this regard: greater creativity in banner ad formats and a better integration of mechanisms to capture real-time consumer intent data.

Once upon a time, Schwinn pretty much owned the American bicycle market and, with models like Varsity, Continental, and of course, the Paramount, defined American-made bicycling dominance. But that was back when a carbon frame was something you made with a pencil, and brands like Trek, Specialized, Cannondale and Giant had not climbed onto retail bike racks.

Schwinn is hoping to get its brand mojo in high gear with a new campaign aimed squarely at a vast consumer base of recreational riders:

The $5 million-plus marketing push -- Schwinn's largest in at least a decade -- includes TV, print, Internet banners, a new Web site (RideSchwinn.com), social media, and a major retail rethink for Schwinn's big-box and independent bike shop retailers, based on the idea that a forest of bicycles on store racks does not a brand make.

Preparation tactic 1: Keep your eyes on the prize

Count the votes

Have a POV

If the phrase “an embarrassment of riches” can be applied to any advertising campaign, it can certainly be applied to the long running series of GEICO TV commercials. In the past 15 years, GEICO has made the pedestrian line “Fifteen minutes could save you 15 percent or more on car insurance” memorable through a shrewd combination of good, old-fashioned sheer repetition and one of the most prolific and varied advertising efforts in living memory. They’ve made advertising icons out of a Gecko and modern-day, still-living-among-us Cavemen, along with a veritable cavalcade of odd characters, near-celebrities, and even other consumer products. Here’s a brief sampling of some of the best GEICO TV work of the past decade, and then some. This is a completely unscientific sampling. And no googly-eyed “Kash” spots either. Just sit back and enjoy.1. Self-Licking DogThis is the proverbial “oldie but goodie.” Just the right amount of “eww” and a harbinger of things to come.2. Squirrel Hi-FiveWe always knew there was a great squirrel conspiracy. We just had no idea it went this far.3. Mrs. Butterworth“Someone’s placed a logo right over my face!” Simply classic.4. The First Gecko SpotIf not for the Screen Actors Guild strike of 1999, we may have never seen the birth of this endearing character voiced here by none other than Kelsey Grammer.5. Airport CavemanTo this day, perhaps the most enduring spot of the Caveman series. Sold lots of singles for the band Röyksopp, too.6. Into the wall"Listen, go-kart track, grocery store, those remote-controlled boats; when it comes to Mike Wallace, the story ends with me putting him in the wall."7. Butta and JamIt was this one or “Free Pie and Chips.” In the end, the Gecko’s “That’s a complete dramatization, of course, but you get my point,” puts this one over the top.8. Caveman Therapy OneTalia Shire! Brilliant casting, and who doesn’t love “My mother’s calling; I’ll put it on speaker”?9. Trust ExerciseTwo words: “Oh, dear.”10. Charlie DanielsBest of the new Robert Stack “Unsolved Mysteries” Parodies. “That’s how you do it, son.”

To help decide which celebrity is the best choice for a film role or product endorsement, entertainment and marketing executives can tap into a host of numbers to gauge public figures' star power. So many, in fact, that the numbers leave a dizzying portrait of who's hot and who's not. At least four companies regularly track opinion on public figures in entertainment and sports. The venerable Q Score, in its fifth decade, surveys consumers once or twice a year by mail. Three newer competitors rely on the Web, enlisting panel participants to weigh in more regularly. The numbers are marketed to advertisers and casting directors to help them identify celebrities for product pitches or starring roles. But the various ratings sometimes show sharply different results.

Last July, 65% of respondents to an E-Poll Market Research poll who were aware of Mr. Woods said they liked him, or liked him a lot. That proportion dropped to 26% in their latest rating, earlier this month. Some 31% found the golfer insincere, while only 2% found him trustworthy (compared with 1% and 28%, respectively, for Tom Hanks in the most recent poll, last April).

Davie Brown Entertainment, a unit of Omnicom Group, began polling in 2006, after talking to marketers and ad agencies about the attributes most important to them in celebrity endorsers. The company settled on seven attributes, including appeal, influence and trust. Respondents who recognize the celebrity are asked to rate him or her on each of those attributes on a six-point scale. Then their scores are averaged, and that attribute average is combined with awareness, which is weighted more heavily, to produce the Davie Brown Index. Assigning so much weight to name recognition can yield perplexing results. Mr. Woods's index dropped only modestly, to 80.9 just before his apology from 89.2 a year earlier, in part because slightly more people were aware of him. This helped overcome a plummet in trust, to 43.7 from 68.8. "The overall DBI number is very, very important, but we look at everything," says Jeff Chown, president of Davie Brown Entertainment's talent division. The newest entrant on the scene, Millward Brown, rates celebrities and brands on the same scale, to identify the best marketing fit. Like the Davie Brown Index, Millward Brown's Cebra scores also emphasize familiarity, which is averaged with likability and "buzz," or media attention. Mr. Woods's Cebra score dropped only slightly, to 67 this month from 70 last September. A crash in likability, to 46 from 69, was mitigated by a surge in buzz, to 85 from 74; and a small bump in familiarity, to 70.

From Bill Bernbach selling the Volkswagen Beetle by telling consumers to “think small,” to Dan Wieden and David Kennedy telling us to "Just Do It" for Nike, Art & Copy is being billed as the "real-life Mad Men" although only a handful of these people were alive then (and Lois has vehemently denied that it was all martinis and misogyny).