Reuters, February 20, 2005
PepsiCo Inc. may be only the world's No. 2 soft drinks maker, but in terms of product placement on the big screen it outranked every other brand on the planet in 2004. Brandcameo, a product placement offshoot of consultants Brandchannel (www.brandchannel.com), awarded its top tongue-in-cheek "accolade" to the maker of Pepsi, Aquafina and Mountain Dew on Sunday after the Pepsi brand featured in no less than one in five No. 1 U.S. movie box office smashes last year.
The New York Times, February 18, 2005
Eighteen employees who in recent days abruptly left the flagship New York office of Saatchi & Saatchi, where they had worked for years on the big General Mills account, are expected to announce, perhaps as soon as next week, an agreement to join the Interpublic Group of Companies.
The Economist, February 17, 2005
Will Bob Iger be the next boss of Disney?
AdAge.com, February 17, 2005
The fledgling branded entertainment industry, originally spawned by the fear of new consumer-controlled communications technologies, is now looking to those very technologies for its ultimate salvation.
CBS News, February 17, 2005
Funny but foul-mouthed Chris Rock says he can stop cursing long enough to host the Oscars, but he'll welcome ABC's time-delay broadcast as a "safety net," he tells Correspondent Ed Bradley.
Business 2.0, February 16, 2005
For a cable channel that launched just two years ago, Fuse boasts numbers that are, like, totally awesome. Nielsen Media Research says Fuse has the highest concentration of 12- to 34-year-old viewers of any channel. And it's the top-ranked TV network in the likelihood of female teen viewers to trust advertising and pay attention to commercials, according to Jack Myers Teen Media Brand Tracker.
The New York Times, February 17, 2005
At a time when the civic realm is blanketed with corporate promotion, from lampposts to landmarks, the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude have shown that it is possible to hang 1,067,330 square feet of nylon in the heart of Manhattan - almost 50 acres of potential display space - without a slogan, trademark or logo.
Bloomberg News, via The New York Times, February 17, 2005
The House of Representatives passed a bill yesterday that would raise the maximum fines that could imposed on broadcasters that run indecent material to $500,000 for each violation. The bill, endorsed by President Bush, would also increase the maximum fines the Federal Communications Commission could levy against individual performers to $500,000 from $11,000, and would make it easier to impose such penalties. Broadcasting companies can now be fined up to $32,500 a violation.
The New York Times, February 17, 2005
Two years after it began efforts to convince investors that Merrill Lynch is not just for buying stocks and bonds anymore, the company is intensifying the image makeover with a bold campaign that takes a certain familiar animal by the horns. Television commercials that are part of the campaign, scheduled to start on Feb. 27, use special effects to make it seem as if Dollar the bull, the well-known Merrill Lynch advertising character, is charging full tilt into a gigantic stock-market ticker tape made of glass.
New York Daily News, February 17, 2005
Roll out the red carpet and make way for the Academy Awards - and a raft of hot commercial debuts. In what's looking like another Super Bowl ad-fest, an unprecedented number of brand new commercials are gearing up for their launch at the upcoming Oscars.