Tim's Picks

Tim's Pick: Sleeping With the 'Frenemy' ON ADVERTISING

Summary:

On a July day in Chicago, Google employees swarmed a conference room at the advertising agency Leo Burnett, taking in couches and beanbag chairs to create a lounge. They gave away candy and showed off Google's advertising technology. Throughout the day, they emphasized a single message: Google is a friend to ad agencies. No, really.

Advertisers are grappling with the idea as Google, which spent many of its early years avoiding - and infuriating - advertising agencies, has suddenly started embracing them.

 

Tim's Pick: ICE Online Launches Revolutionary Online Ad Widget

Summary:  ICE Online (Interactive Commerce Exchange), www.theiceedge.com, a technology company focused on the interactive ad space, announces the creation of a new revolutionary interactive online banner ad widget, the ICE AdWidget(TM). The patent pending technology behind ICE will now allow for the online shopping experience to occur anywhere an advertiser advertises on the web.

The ICE AdWidget is the first no-redirection traveling ad widget of its kind where the online ad serves the widget rather than the more commonly experienced ad branded widget. The ICE AdWidget is also the first web-based widget that is fully accessible on any HTML-capable mobile device.

 

Tim's Pick: BlackArrow Unveils New Tools to Manage Ad Placement Opportunities Inand Around on-Demand Video

Summary:

BlackArrow, the independent provider of multiplatform advertising systems for viewer-controlled video, today announced BlackArrow AdMaps(TM), a sophisticated toolset that enables content providers and distributors to easily define and manage ad avails in and around video content. The AdMap suite extends BlackArrow's advertising system by introducing tools to manage ad-placement opportunities for programming delivered over broadband and SCTE 130-5 compliant video on demand (VOD) environments. AdMaps provide a time-saving workflow to create new advertising inventory, integrate new ad formats easily and update ad-sales models quickly - all without requiring changes to the existing infrastructure or media player code.

 

Tim's Pick: TiVo Expands Push Into Viewer Data

Summary:

In an effort to learn more about how digital video recorder usage is affecting television viewing, TiVo has quintupled the number of homes in its StopWatch ratings service to 100,000.

Early results: Viewers are watching more TV than they did a year ago.

 

Tim's Pick: DVR usage making big changes in television viewing

Summary: Figuring out a prime-time schedule is usually one of CW network chief Dawn Ostroff's most important duties. Never, however, has it seemed to matter less.

The promise inherent in digital video recorders — that viewers can be in control of their own TV schedules — is rapidly being fulfilled this fall, and the business is changing around it. Nearly 30 percent of the nation's TV homes have at least one.

 

Tim's Pick: One in Four Homes Has At Least One DVR: Study

Summary:

Digital video recorders are now found in more than 27% of U.S. households but their presence isn’t having a significant impact on television viewing habits, according to a report by consumer research Leichtman Research Group Inc.

And more than 30% of U.S. homes have at least two DVRs and 87% of DVR owners said they would recommend the device to a friend. On a scale of 1-10, 81% of owners rate their DVR 8-10 with 45% assigning it a perfect 10.

 

Tim's Pick: TV product placement dips

Summary:

At first blush, it's a finding that sounds like cause for celebration for culture-over-commerce purists: According to a report by Nielsen, product placement on primetime programming for the first six months of 2008 was down nearly 15%.

 

Tim's Pick: Identifying the Value of Advertising Networks

Summary:

Ad networks are hard to define properly and those promoting them have muddied the waters with confusing jargon. It's no wonder that marketers are confused and wondering how best to allocate adspend. Michael Hoare reports A central part of any online marketing strategy, ad networks in Asia are beginning to attract the kind of attention they do in the West. But compared to the relative vitality of the affiliate marketing sector, the offerings from the major ad networks are looking a little jaundiced to advertisers, causing widespread disillusion.

 

Tim's Pick: Can MySpace's Grand Experiment Help Save the Music Industry?

Summary:

MySpace's grand music experiment is launching this month -- and it'll be as much a test of how advertisers can help underwrite the music industry as it will be of the portal's most ambitious launch since, well, its own birth four years ago.

McDonald's, State Farm and Toyota are the first three advertisers to sign sponsorship deals around MySpace Music, a joint venture among the popular social network and major music labels that will milk many different revenue streams, including advertising and sponsorship, paid song downloads and ringtones, and concert-ticket and merchandise sales.

Tim's Pick: Why NBC Is OK Having Google Sell Cable TV Ads

Summary:

It's one of those deals that might one day be marked on a timeline of historic moments in the TV industry.

With NBC Universal's alliance with Google, the Peacock appears to have let the fox into the henhouse. In inking the pact, one of the nation's best-known media brands and a giant of the broadcast and cable worlds has decided to allow a third party to sell some of its ad inventory -- and not just any third party, either. This is Google, which -- despite its repeated demonstrations that it's a technology company that can help monetize other companies' ad space and time -- is still perceived as a huge threat by many in media.