Making Entertainment: Macy’s, Inc.

Macy’s continues to garner attention for the future launch of a 10-episode documentary style series that will follow the lives of five young people who want to break into the music business. The series will premiere this fall and promotes the American Rag brand.

The Web series is part of a growing trend of marketing initiatives that blur the lines between advertising and entertainment.

It is being developed by MEC Entertainment, which is owned by WWP Group. The show is being cast with amateurs, contestants selected from 12 college campuses around the country.

The general concept is to dress the cast in American Rag clothing and feature some segments with the cast shopping for the clothing across the country. YouTube viewers will be able to purchase the clothing from the Macy’s site.

While Macy’s is interested in the viral potential of the series, RepNation, which provides a consumer powered media network, says it’s an acknowledgement that it’s more difficult to reach college students through traditional channels. What makes this an important footnote is that marketers and advertisers coming to the conclusion that what once was an online opportunity is fast becoming necessity.

Adding Value: Print Shifts To Lead Generation

Magazine Publishers of America (MPA) is set to release a new study about the effectiveness of URLs being included in print magazines. The study confirms what many advertisers already know, magazine advertisements with URLs are more likely to drive readers to advertiser sites.

Specifically, MediaDailyNews said that home ads were 103 percent more likely, women’s services were 98 percent more likely, and travel categories were 186 percent more likely to drive consumers to Web sites. URLs on fashion ads also provided a 58 percent bump.

The study provides a solid case for integrated communication, with print advertisements serving as a lead generator for Web sites. Consumers are generally taken in by the singular message of the print advertisement and then explore Web sites for more options.

Consumer magazine Web sites are also showing strong traffic gains, up 11 percent over the first quarter of last year. With those Web sites averaging 70.7 million unique monthly visitors, well-planned media efforts can expand an advertiser’s total impression and total reach by reinforcing the print advertisements on magazine Web sites.

Both findings represent that the boundaries between traditional marketing and social media are not so opaque. What has changed seems to be that traditional advertising is shifting toward Internet lead generation as opposed to image advertising or direct sales.

Sharing Silence: Memorial Day

A bugler blows taps. Memorial Day. Margraten Cemetery, Holland. 1945.

Advertising Connections: Branded Content

A little more than a year ago, I was the guest on the Recruiting Animal Show to talk about a subject that few people believed would ever happen. Branded content, a variation of income marketing as I sometimes call it, was already taking shape.

A few months later, Procter & Gamble made it sound more serious. And most recently, Digitas, which is part of the Publicis Groupe, formally became of one the newest entrants into the branded content game.

"It's more and more difficult for brands to get their messages in front of consumers," Mark Beeching, global chief creative officer at Digitas told AdAge. "But at the same time there are more opportunities for brands to create content."

Digitas punctuates a social media concept on its Web site. Beeching's quote even sounds like the message we share and shape every day.

"Instead of marketing at customers, our job in the digital age is to get customers working with us and for us,” he says. “And you do that by working with them and for them. This is where the new marketing energy and breakthrough results are to be found."

It’s refreshing to hear it in advertising, and underscores that agencies are more than ready to move forward into the social media space. Their approach? Here are the first three:

• new ways of listening harder to customers for actionable insights
• ideas that earn customer engagement through valuable and motivating experiences
• new ways of being responsive to customers across channels and over time

And to think all this time that some people thought advertising was a dying one-way communication art form. No. Like all art and media faced with new possibilities, opportunities, and technologies, it survives, adapts, and improves.

We look forward to seeing what they cook up next at Digitas. It's about time.

Tightening Reigns: Drug Advertising Gets Tougher

On the same day that Merck & Co. agreed to pay a $58 million settlement over the marketing of the painkiller Vioxx, Reps. John Dingell and Bart Stupak called on several drug companies to voluntarily curb advertisements targeting consumers.

"To date, we have not received adequate assurances that the leading pharmaceutical companies share our commitment to providing consumers with accurate information about drug therapies," Dingell, head of the U.S. House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee, said in a statement on Tuesday.

The letter, sent to chief executives at Merck & Co. Inc., Pfizer Inc., Johnson & Johnson, and Schering-Plough Corp, asks them to refrain from marketing products to consumers until certain studies are completed. It also calls for a moratorium on new drug advertising.
The letter must have dampened the message from Merck & Co., which maintains that the company “intended to fully comply with relevant regulations.”

"Merck remains committed to communications that help patients and their physicians choose medicines based on accurate, fair and balanced information," said Bruce Kuhlik, executive vice president and general counsel of Merck. "Today's agreement enables Merck to put this matter behind us and focus on what Merck does best, developing new medicines."

As part of Merck & Co.’s settlement, the company is already banned from ghostwriting articles or studies, deceptively using scientific data when marketing to doctors, and failing to disclose conflicts of interest involving its speakers. All new consumer-targeted television commercials must be submitted to the Food and Drug Administration for approval, which all drug companies are required to do anyway, as of last month.

Meanwhile, Pfizer is still smarting after pulling its long-running advertising campaign that primarily employed Dr. Robert Jarvik as spokesperson for Lipitor. The advertisement was found to be misleading, according to the FDA.

Drug makers spend $30 billion a year marketing products in the United States, up from $10 billion in 1998. The FDA believes that most advertisements are going beyond persuading consumers by misleading them into believing that drugs are safer or more effective than proven.

With the continued poor choice of statements that some companies use in their news releases, it’s a wonder consumers trust them at all. To date, only a lone Johnson & Johnson spokesperson seemed to have it right. She said that they would cooperate with the committee. Perfect.

Taking Aim: Nuts To Nielsen

It’s not a great year to be Nielsen. Every time the company attempts to move forward with Anytime Anywhere Media Measurement — A2/M2 — someone is ready to stop them: clients, competition, consumers.

For Project Apollo, a three-year joint project with Arbitron to monitor buying and radio-television habits of 5,000 households, it was clients. They did not want to pay for the results. Consumers weren’t thrilled with the number of tasks they were asked to perform either. It’s not as cool to be a Nielsen family anymore.

It might not be that cool to work at the company either. Jericho fans dumped 4,000 pounds of peanuts on the company’s property last week. It’s a statement to Nielsen that its small sampling sizes are costing consumers their favorite shows, even when they have enough fans to support a convention.

"It's an antiquated rating system that does not count 99.999 percent of actual TV viewers," Jonathan Whitesell, a Jericho fan and organizer of "Nuts To Nielsen!", told Tampa Tribune on May 10.

"We respect the passion of the 'Jericho' fans, but the decision to cancel the show was made by the network, not by Nielsen," spokesperson Gary Holmes said in a statement after receiving the nuts. "We measure programming that is viewed live, on a video recorder and on a PC, and we are confident that our ratings provide a fair measure of what people are viewing."

But fewer and fewer agree. Diane Mermigas, editor-at-large at MediaPost, recently called Nielsen the “about as inane an advertising value as can ever be justified” in her article about other initiatives to find effective measures. She’s not alone.

The differences between Nielsen ratings and other measures continue to grow, more and more shows are seeing 20 percent to 25 percent ratings gains when DVR viewing is calculated and some other are shows doubling their viewership online. It’s easier to get the numbers from TiVo or local cable companies that can count everyone.

A recent Universal McCann study supports how much the Internet has changed. More than 80 percent of the online population watches video clips online and their choice of viewing options goes well beyond YouTube. If you forget to set the DVR, there is always Hulu, CBS, or Apple iTunes.

It’s also one of the reasons CNN’s Veronica Del La Cruz asked how many people watch live news last Friday night. “Fifty percent? Maybe?”

We’re paying attention, she said, before outlining CNN’s iReport, which allows anyone to submit live reports and videos online. More than 900 of these videos have also been featured on CNN. The idea, which originally grew out of citizen submitted coverage of Hurricane Katrina, represents an opportunity for anyone to decide what might be newsworthy.

“Use the tools you find here to share and talk about the news of your world, whether that's video and photos of the events of your life, or your own take on what's making international headlines. Or, even better, a little bit of both.” — iReport.

What makes this significant for Nielsen is that if the company hopes to survive the long-term, it might consider that it has customers on two sides of the aisle. As consumers continue to lose faith in Nielsen, the more likely consumers will pass on being a Nielsen family. Not to mention, no one wants one company to collect all the data.

In fact, from what Whitesell and Jericho fans tell me, Nielsen is not to be trusted. And these fans are not alone.

Anyone who has a show facing cancellation (most recently, the show Moonlight) is continuing to send Nielsen a message — Nielsen might be confident in the rating system, but they are not. It’s a mounting public relations problem that Nielsen has yet to successfully address. For many consumers, Nielsen’s truncated research, not actual viewers, is the only reason their show was cancelled.