Number of Lions awarded: The U.S. won the Grand Prix, but picked up only eight other press Lions (three Silver and five Bronze). Brazil won six of the 25 press Gold Lions, including one from an agency in northern Brazil's Bahia, far from the Sao Paulo agencies that dominate the market. Brazil in general is having a phenomenal year at Cannes. Ogilvy Brazil alone had won 28 Lions by Wednesday, including 12 for its Dove "Sketches" campaign, which has been a Gold-winning contender for the Grand Prix in multiple categories.
Advice for next year: "We were questioning what print really does today," said Steve Simpson, chief creative officer for North America at Ogilvy & Mather. "Print is threatened. We fight the temptation to turn print into a tactical vehicle. Print can do branding really well. Juries in the future ought to consider how we bring that exquisite craft into the future."
]]>A correction has been made in this story. See below for details.
Sony has selected WPP's Mediacom to handle media for its worldwide mobile business and support electronics in various global markets.
Sony only reviewed electronics in select markets, not including the business that IPG’s UM supports in North America and India
]]>Randy Stone
Long-established marketing-mix models are coming under attack, with critics saying the approach was wrong all along and has only gotten worse with the emergence of digital and social media.
]]>Don Scales, president and CEO of iCrossing, is stepping down from his role exactly three years after Hearst acquired the digital shop.
David Carey, president of Hearst Magazines, said in a statement: "Everyone at Hearst would like to thank Don for leading the creation of iCrossing, which Hearst acquired in 2010, and since then has been a key element of the company's digital strategy."
Brian Powley, president of North America, will succeed Mr. Scales in the role and take on the position of global president. He joined iCrossing in 2007 as managing director of the San Francisco office and became chief client officer later that year.
]]>More TV highlights and video ads are coming to the Twittersphere.
Viacom has signed a deal to tweet sponsored video clips from shows across the company's portfolio, which includes MTV, Nickelodeon, BET and Comedy Central. The clips will include pre-roll video from advertisers, a Viacom spokesman said.
Viacom will lead sales on the pre-roll videos while Twitter will offer its suite of ad products, such as promoted tweets, to increase the posts' circulation.
]]>Apple hasn't yet gone into the TV business, but it will soon be selling video ads on televisions.
ITunes Radio, Apple’s free streaming music service available due out this fall, will include video advertisements, according to a source briefed on their plans. Once launched, the service will come preloaded on a slew of Apple devices including Apple TV, marking the first time Apple has sold ad space specifically designed for televisions.
All iTunes Radio ad inventory will be sold through iAd, the Apple ad network that, until now, was catered solely to serving ads on iPhones and IPads. Apple recently redesigned its iAd website to tout its new TV-based ad products.
]]>While some traditional media companies try to keep upstarts like Aereo from shaking up their business models, Turner Broadcasting is trying to join in on the disruption. Last year the owner of CNN, TBS and TNT introduced a startup accelerator called Media Camp to cozy up with companies trying to shape the new media landscape. Now it has selected five startups for its second 12-week summer program in San Francisco: ChannelMeter, Cinemacraft, Meograph, Plumzi and Tomorrowish.
“As you might expect, companies of our size and maturity often don’t move as fast as we’d like," said Balaji Gopinath, VP-emerging technology at Turner Broadcasting. "Here’s a way for us to spread out the innovation across the startup ecosystem and work collaboratively to define what entertainment might look like in the years to come.”
The summer program aims to get participating early-stage outfits up to speed on the media industry. Each startup is assigned two executives as mentors from Turner or parent company Time Warner, and other media industry higher-ups -- not only Time Warner employees -- will drop in for dinners to meet with the startups.
]]>A trade group focused on advancing media measurement is seeking tech companies to develop a would-be warehouse for video content viewing data. Ultimately, the goal is to ensure that viewing numbers provided by publishers are standardized, validated and normalized to create more trust among video ad buyers -- and, in turn, more spending on video ad inventory.
The Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement counts among its core members some of the largest video content publishers including Viacom, Discovery, A&E Networks, CBS and TimeWarner, in addition to big ad spenders such as P&G and Group M. The four-year-old organization wants interested companies to bid to design and build a system allowing participating video publishers to submit as well as access viewing data. CIMM is putting out an RFP today for the project; proposals are due by July 15, 2013.
]]>Chevrolet will return to advertise on ABC’s annual Academy Awards telecast next year after a 5-year absence. But the General Motors division's return to the Oscars will come with a twist, said Paul Edwards, GM’s executive director of global marketing strategy.
Chevrolet will work with the MOFILM creative community to invite aspiring filmmakers to create their own 30- and 60-second-car stories. The global ad contest will be judged by a panel that includes director Spike Lee, producer Jon Landau, Chevrolet Chief Marketing Officer Tim Mahoney and Commonwealth Chief Creative Officer Linus Karlsson.
They’ll offer contestants tips and advice, then choose the winning commercial,l which is expected air alongside regular Chevy TV spots during the Academy Awards telecast on March 2, 2014. The automaker is expected to discuss the Oscar ad contest during a panel on crowdsourcing at the Cannes Lions advertising festival Wednesday
]]>Michael Stone
Today is only the first day of the annual Licensing Expo in Las Vegas, but I am already struck by how many new brands and players are either embracing licensing for the first time or choosing to exhibit here for the first time.
]]>The media Grand Prix was awarded to a small Dutch funeral-insurance company that encouraged people to say something wonderful about the people they care about while they're still around to hear it.
The campaign was done by media agency MediaValue and Ogilvy & Mather, Amsterdam, giving the Ogilvy network three Grand Prix in the eight competitions judged so far this week at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. (Ogilvy Brazil won the promo and activation Grand Prix with an organ-donor campaign for a soccer team, and Ogilvy France and IBM took the top outdoor prize).
What it is: Drawing on its insights from being in the funeral-insurance business, Dela knew that a huge regret among the bereaved is often not spending time and talking more with a loved one. That led to the campaign “Why wait until it’s too late? Say something wonderful today.” Dela gave people the chance to share their thoughts and feelings on websites. Those stories were made into TV commercials and online documentaries and posted on billboards. Newspapers ads appeared with the single word “Dear ...” to inspire people to fill in the rest. Dela took over a TV channel for an evening to broadcast the stories.
]]>Two of the three finalists on NBC's "The Voice" are country acts, so the genre has good odds of producing a winner when host Carson Daly announces the results tonight. But that would only be the latest sign that country music, which brought in $1 billion in sales last year and is drawing the increasing attention of Madison Avenue, is on the move in media and marketing.
Country singers are appearing in a wide range of ads, not to mention their own TV show in ABC’s “Nashville” and a prominent presence on "The Voice," where country star Blake Shelton is a coach. Even New York City, about the last place you'd expect to find fans of songs about pickup trucks and drinking beer, christened its first country radio station in 17 years in January. More than a quarter of U.S. adults now call themselves country fans, according to to Scarborough.
And its fans are willing to spend. While sales of R&B, alternative and pop dropped in 2012, country sales jumped 4.2% to 44.6 million albums out of 316 million, according to Nielsen SoundScan. It was the only category to show an increase other than rock, which edged upward just 2%. Only 13 of Billboard's top 100 songs last year were country, but four of the ten top-selling artists came from the genre: Taylor Swift, Jason Aldean, Carrie Underwood and Luke Bryan.
]]>Samsung's Jay-Z promotion is may be getting more press, but the company's recent video collaboration with Grammy-winning R&B singer Usher has generated almost three times more online video views, earning it the top spot on this week's Viral Video Chart.
]]>Scott Donaton, who was recently named global chief content officer at Interpublic Group of Cos.' Universal McCann, is back on the branded content and entertainment jury at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, this year as president. He explained how the category, only in its second year, has evolved and what it means for the future of marketing.
Keep on with all the events at Cannes this week at Creativity's hub here.
]]>The console wars are set to erupt again, and someone is going to get pwned -- but it's unlikely to be the media.
It's been seven years since Microsoft and Sony went head-to-head with new gaming consoles. Both Microsoft's Xbox 360 launch in 2005 and Sony's PlayStation 3 launch the following year were supported by strong ad budgets -- Xbox hiked its spending 21% in 2005, according to Ad Age DataCenter figures; Sony topped that with a 28% increase.
This year will differ in that the next generation of each, the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, will go on sale simultaneously this fall in time for the holiday season. That sets the stage for a spending surge well above the $120 million the two spent collectively last year.
]]>Conde Nast has named Connie Anne Phillips, the publisher of Time Inc.'s InStyle until last month, as VP-publisher of Glamour, one of the company's biggest brands. The move marks a return to Conde for Ms. Phillips, who had spent 14 years at Vogue before joining InStyle four years ago. She left Time Inc. in May, provoking rumors that she was on her way back to Conde.
"This is a homecoming for me -- I'm elated to reconnect with my friends and talented colleagues at Conde Nast, one of the most influential media companies in the world," Ms. Phillips said in a statement released by Conde Nast.
Ms. Phillips is taking over Glamour from Bill Wackermann, the exec VP-publishing director responsible for the title and previously Glamour's publisher since 2004. Conde Nast named Mr. Wackermann exec VP and publishing director at Conde Nast Traveler. That fills the opening created last week when Conde shifted Carolyn Kremins, who was VP-publisher at Traveler, to its Epicurious food site.
]]>For the better part of season six, Bob Benson was an ingratiating hollow man, a handsome, eager-to-please cipher whose mysteriousness enabled any number of Internet conspiracy theories -- like the particularly ludicrous one placed him as a secret agent sent by the government to spy on Don Draper. Now we find that Bob Benson is Don Draper. Ish.
There are a few differences. Bob is ambiguously gay and over-obliging, while Don is all-too straight and a real pain in the ass. What unites them is that they’re both frauds that have concocted their backgrounds out of the ether. The connection was there all along if you saw the Easter egg in their names, both alliterative and with the same number of letters in both the first and last names. Bob, like Don, isn’t who we thought him to be. His blue blood is more like West Virginia moonshine, his education faked. And his corporate experience is limited to being a man-servant for a Brown Brothers Harriman executive who takes him to Europe in what, after Bob’s recent pass at Pete, sounds like a coded gay tryst.
This knowledge comes to Pete Campbell through the most delicious of conduits: the detective work of Duck Phillips, who Pete has enlisted to remove Bob from the agency. Bob is an impediment to Pete’s desperate search for relevance, now that he’s insinuated himself into a Chevy account-management role that’s up for grabs after Ken Cosgrove is wounded on a hunting trip with those boorish General Motors executives.
]]>Netflix, the dominant subscription video-streaming service, has agreed to a multi-year deal with DreamWorks Animation SKG to obtain original programming to lure subscribers.
It is the largest contract for original content in the history of Netflix, the company said in a statement. The deal covers more than 300 hours of new programming, including shows inspired by characters from DreamWorks Animation’s franchises, new feature films and its Classic Media library. DreamWorks Animation movies include "Shrek," Madagascar," "Kung Fu Panda" and "How to Train Your Dragon."
The first series are expected to be streamed in 2014 and will be available in all of Netflix’s territories, according to the statement.
]]>​Mitsubishi's ad campaign to launch its redesigned 2014 Outlander crossover -- built around the tag line “Find your own lane” -- also will have to help the brand find a route back to relevance in the U.S.
Backed by a marketing budget that's been doubled for the current fiscal year, the campaign includes national cable TV, a return to network prime time for the first time since 2005, and the brand's largest digital ad outlay, said Francine Harsini, director-advertising, Mitsubishi Motors North America.
She wouldn't reveal this year's budget. But based on comments from a person close to the company about last year's figure, Mitsubishi will spend about $170 million in the fiscal year that ends next March.
]]>One day a kid named Eddie comes up to you on the playground and says, "Don't ask me how I know this, but your mom and dad have been reading your diary." You don't believe him at first, but he quickly convinces you he knows what he's talking about.
You are soooooo mad. How could they do this to you?
You decide to confront them about it. But -- and this is weird -- when you do, they're really nonchalant about it.
]]>