• by August 27, 2003

You'll Definitely Want To Make This Disney Land The Last Stop On Your Travel Plans: What does Roy P. Disney, the wily great-nephew of Walt Disney Co. founder Walt know that the rest of us in the marketing and media industry do not? With just about everyone in the business chasing coveted young demos and properties - the very same kind embodied by some of his family's namesake media empire - Roy has just gone out and bought a cremation company. The question is, does Roy have the same marketing prescience about the tail end of the demographic spectrum that his great uncle had a half century ago about the front end? If that's the case, maybe Roy P.'s dad, Disney vice chairman Roy E., should convince his board to swap ABC for the apparently demographically ascendant CBS.

No wonder they call it the red planet: It only took 60,000 years, but Mars is a hit again. Well, not exactly a hit. Not even a true close encounter. But at a mere 34,648,840 miles from earth, the fourth planet from the sun has suddenly gone into terrestrial media orbit. The problem is, nobody seems to be capitalizing on it. Sure, it's generating plenty of temporary awareness for astronomers and observatories, but there doesn't seem to be anyway for Madison Avenue to participate directly in what could be an astronomical marketing opportunity. Even on Nasa.gov - a very cool site made even cooler by fresh Martian images - there's nary a banner in sight. Okay, so it's taking some heat off our space aces for other recent foibles and misfortunes, but goodwill will get you only so far. Where's the tie-ins, the cross- platform opps, the product placement deals. Of course there is one obvious promo opportunity for a certain fledgling media and healthcare research unit owned by Sir Martin's WPP conglom, but few on Madison Avenue are likely even aware of its name. That's: Media And Research Study, or MARS for short. Then again, maybe it's just a trademark infringement deal.

Speaking of the universe: It seems the statisticians at Nielsen once again have expanded theirs. Beginning Monday Nielsen Media's universe will grow by 1.7 million households to 108.4 million. The obvious implication is that each national TV rating point will be worth 1.6% more than it was last year and 2.7% more than it was two years ago. Now we know these estimates are derived from scrupulously calculated U.S. Census statistics, but has anyone else noticed that the timing of these restatements always occurs just in time for the start of a new television season, when networks faced with eroding ratings are obligated to deliver certain levels of viewers to national advertisers? Meanwhile, in a potentially alarming note, Nielsen finds some key components of its universe are actually contracting, most notably the younger ones. Whereas kids 2-11 accounted for 15.1% of viewers during the 2001-02 season, their representation will fall to 14.3% this year. Teens 12- 17, meanwhile, will dip from 8.9% to 8.7%. It seems Roy may be right after all.

Lot's of relationships, but a little too few customers at CRM event: For reasons we care not go into, the Riff found itself milling around the floor of New York's Javits Center this morning. The occasion: Day Two of the Customer Relationship Management Conference. Now, we haven't been to a CRM event before, so it would be a little difficult for us to gauge this one, but it sure seemed to us that it wasn't representative of the hot new marketing trend everyone's been cracking it up to be. As a trickle of attendees dribbled into the cavernous convention center, an all too familiar chorus could be heard: "Are we in the wrong place." "Are we early..." "Did a bomb go off in here?" One attendee tried to attribute the poor turnout to the warm weather and the timing a week before Labor Day. "There was a decent crowd yesterday, but just after the 3:00 it dropped off like a cliff. There was actually a guy up at the podium speaking to an audience of one." Now that's what we call one-to-one marketing.