Anheuser-Busch has secured its position as the exclusive alcohol advertiser at the Super Bowl for the next six years by adding NBC broadcasts of Super Bowl XLIII in 2009 and Super Bowl XLVI in 2012 as part of a comprehensive six-year multi-sport agreement signed recently.
With an unlikely mixture of brutal honesty and advertising guile, Ford is telling the story of its turnaround efforts with a weekly online-only series of fifty 3-5-minute short films titled “Bold Moves. The Future of Ford,” reports AdAge (via MarketingVOX). In the first episode, Mark Fields, Ford president of the Americas, says the company should “rip out the BS and political posturing.” The series is produced by WPP Group’s JWT, Detroit and New York, and directed by Radical Media, New York.
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Radio Disney has joined forces with mSpot to launch the radio network on mobile phones, Radio Disney announced yesterday. This is another step in Radio Disney’s efforts to reach listeners as they pursue a more active, on-the-go lifestyle, particularly important as consumers are currently spending more time out of their homes than any generation previously.
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Auto dealers continue to shift budgets from traditional advertising to internet marketing programs, with dealers on average spending about 9 percent of their advertising budget in 2005 on paid search, third-party lead-generation sites and other web marketing programs, according to the National Automobile Dealers Association, writes Internet Retailer (via MarketingVox).
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Two poker sources - Card Shark Media and Card Player Magazine - will provide a daily poker feature for newspapers titled Tournament Hand Matchup. The column complements one written by Daniel Negreanu which is carried by more than fifty newspapers with a combined circulation approaching 5.5 million readers, the companies announced.
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Liz Claiborne Inc. has confirmed its commitment to its development of direct-to-consumer marketing in 2006 with the appointment of Jill Granoff, former president/COO of Victoria’s Secret Beauty, to the new post of group president, direct to consumer, DM News writes.
Star Jones Reynolds made a surprise on-air announcement Tuesday, saying that she will be leaving The View, after having said in a People magazine interview that she felt she was fired, the AP reports. Barbara Walters, the creator of the show, has said that she was taken by surprise by the announcement, because an announcement had been planned for Thursday. Walters said that she “loves” Reynolds and had been doing everything she could to “protect her,” even though ABC network chiefs had decided not to renew her contract.
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The proliferation of film festivals intended for gays and lesbians has given marketers hoping to reach those audiences new advertising options. For example, Stolichnaya vodka is underwriting a documentary, called Be Real, along with a website (stoli.com/bereal) which will present “stories from queer America,” writes the New York Times. This is a sign that advertising venues for marketers reaching out to gay and lesbian consumers have broadened beyond print, according to the article.
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Slate.com unveiled a full site redesign on Monday to celebrate its 10th anniversary. The new design incorporates two new kinds of ad units, highlights more content on the front page, and is optimized for the wider screens and faster connections of its users, according to MediaPost.
CBS is nearing the end of its upfront business and is expected to take in between $2.3 and $2.4 billion - similar to last year’s upfront sales, according to Mediaweek. However, CBS still has some business to write, and insiders believe that if some agencies are unable to come to agreements with ABC - which wrote business at the highest CPM increases of all the networks - CBS may get more business still.
CBS has nearly completed its upfront sales and is expected to finish with $2.4 billion in ad commitments for next season, down slightly from last year’s total which was $2.5 billion, writes AdAge. CBS is expected to top all broadcast nets in upfront take for the second year in a row, with ABC following at around $2.2 billion, if industry estimates are correct.
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Gross deliverability rates of permission-based email marketing messages for European internet and email service providers were better than for U.S. ISPs and ESPs in the first quarter of the year, according to J.L. Halsey subsidiary and email marketing solutions provider Lyris Technologies. European ISPs achieved an impressive 94 percent, while U.S. ISPs’ average gross deliverability went down 6 percentage points from the previous quarter, to 86 percent.
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