NBC is betting heavily that its huge $894 million investment in the Summer Olympics in China will pay off in ads and promotions. But it's a risky bet, considering how the stature of the Games has decreased over the past few decades, say some insiders. NBC will offer a combined 3,600 hours of coverage, far more than Athens in 2004, on its flagship outlet and many NBCU cable and digital outlets. It's not an easy strategy to figure out with "everything moving so fast online and trying to integrate advertisers into new media. It's like hitting a moving …

Digital marketing agency AKQA has unveiled AKQA Film, a broadcast division to create and distribute digital programs and content. The new entity will combine the agency's motion graphics and broadcast staff to create a team of 20 people in the London office. They will work on client and independent feature-length films, branded content, programming and entertainment content. The services extend to all clients, including Nike, which produces a number of films for its Supersonic and Football (soccer) brands companies. Tom Bedecarre, AKQA's CEO, said, "AKQA Film and brings together our creative talent and collaborators to launch a new …

Editor-in-Chief Ian Birch and at least two other senior staff members were laid off from TV Guide Wednesday as parent company Gemstar-TV Guide International prepared to sell itself to Macrovision Corp., a video technology company, today. Macrovision will consider selling some Gemstar assets after the $2.8 billion deal closes, including the TV Guide print magazine and the TV Guide cable channel. The publication, once a staple of living rooms across America, has struggled since TV providers started offering on-screen programming guides. In mid-2005, the magazine slashed its guaranteed circulation by two-thirds and relaunched in a larger size, …

Assuming that media and communications will evolve nearly beyond recognition in the next several years, what would a media plan in 2015 look like? Blogger and Group M Interaction executive Rob Norman spells it out in his fictional "Message delivery plan Fiscal 2015" for a throat spray campaign. His statistics show that the evolution of the content delivery systems has little impact on the popularity of the content. The big difference is that "message delivery goals for 2015 will operate at the individual level -- which we then scale up -- rather than at a broadcast level which …

Apple Inc. said Thursday that new movies from a slate of major studios will now be available for purchase over iTunes the same day they're released on DVD. The announcement comes a day after Warner Bros. offered the same service for its movies, with research showing allowing that early downloads do not hurt retail sales of DVDs. The change is sure to help iTunes compete better against DVD retailers. It also will help Apple control more of people's "digital entertainment experience including use of its Apple TV set-top boxes," which stream content from users' computers to their television …

Could a sick economy actually keep the ad industry healthy? This recessionary era finds mass marketers dealing with a fractured Web and old-media environment and they are desperately seeking a wide range of ways to reach consumers. "That desperation plays right into the hands of the giant holding companies that now own everything from traditional ad agencies to media planning and buying businesses," according to this analysis. Online advertising has a leg up in hard times because the return on investment is significantly easier to track and explain to the boss. But online alone isn't the answer, because …

As urban newspapers, such as the Los Angeles Times and Seattle Times go increasingly online, they are banking on local content to drive ad dollars. Sure, national ad networks are the rage, but new online features designed to serve local audiences are generating needed revenue. The Los Angeles Times, for instance, plans to use "local flavor" to grow online revenues to 20% of the paper's cash flow by 2011, per GM Rob Barrett, speaking at this week's Kelsey Group media conference in Seattle. What's local? Typical Southern California topics such as environmentalism, Hollywood, car culture and immigration, …