Television

Are consumer advertising mashups as beneficial as today’s buzz suggests?

When Mixercast announced in June that its ad mashup initiatives surpassed one billion monthly page views, social advertising supporters celebrated. Soon after, the Contagious and Leo Burnett agencies delivered a pro-mashup presentation at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival. Ogilvy Worldwide proclaimed “revolutionary” mashups the Dada of the 21st century.

But there’s a flip side to each promised benefit.

Hollywood's oldest talent shop, the 110-year-old William Morris Agency, is partnering with a triumvirate of digital media, wireless and advertising executives to create a joint venture called Agency 3.0, a digital-marketing-services company seeking to marry digital technology to strategically developed content.

The site's Web video player is built on Microsoft's Web application framework, Silverlight. According to Miller, the broadcaster has been planning the project over the last nine months, with more intensive coding work done on the backend with Microsoft over the last four months or so.

Cisco seems to be showing up in all kinds of entertainment mediums, and is bringing digital signage to the forefront when advertising or doing product placement in those mediums. In addition to the digital signage placement in the video game Rainbow Six Vegas 2, Cisco is also working closely with major networks such as CBS, FOX and NBC to integrate its products into TV shows, such as Heroes and CSI.

How popular is Nickelodeon's fictional webcaster Carly Shay? The Web companion to her show iCarly now accounts for a big chunk of all of Nickelodeon's Web traffic. Either 18%, according to Nickelodeon's internal numbers or 33.8%, according to comScore.

In the 1950-51 television season, among the top six shows were Texaco Star Theatre, Philco TV Playhouse, The Colgate Comedy Hour, and the Gillette Cavalcade of Stars. NBC apparently remembers, and is reviving the full program sponsorship. Liberty Mutual is first off the blocks, adding its name to a pair of TV movies. It's a sensible tactic. When viewers start skipping those "words from our sponsors," you'll still get attention with shows from our sponsors.

Advergames inspire millions to engage with your brands for hours online. The trick is luring gamers to come to your game. USA Network believes the answer is making its characters a part of the action in games like Malibuland and Monk Shui. In addition to the game play promoting the programs, the games include product integration, site sponsorships, and in-game interstitials.

Erick Schonfeld of Tech Crunch has gotten thinking about what needs to be done to make TV advertising as relevant as video advertising. We have a long way to go, he says, but it boils down to two things: 1) replacing 30-second commercials on TV with relevant ad overlays that pop up at exactly the right moment during a show, and 2) automating the buying, creation and placement of TV ads to make it more like buying search ads.