But out of the blue, and as if to contradict that growing consensus, OMD USA pens a $1 billion-plus one-year cross-platform ad deal with the great mouse of Burbank. The agency will be buying across every conceivable Disney platform, except perhaps tattooing Minnie’s butt: from broadcast and cable to mags and Web, radio, and syndication. According to reports, the sports properties, ABC and ESPN, were especially attractive to OMD in this deal, which will be buying media for mega-brands such as McDonald’s, Pepsi, Nissan, and VISA, among others. Price also may have been an important incentive to this deal. According to reports, OMD may have secured CPMs at 1% to 2% below the going rates for some Disney properties.

Primedia’s Integrated Sales and Marketing Group is using cross-platform advertising to sell, well, cross-platform advertising. Starting with June placements in Ad Age and then moving onto the Web, direct mail and shows, the print/TV/Web/trade show combine is running a "Jargon" campaign to promote the multimedia reach of its seven "passion platforms" (i.e. auto, teens, affluent, B2B, et al.). We can only hope that someone, anyone, over there in Primedia marketing saw the double-entendre potential in "passion platform" and plans to wring it for all it’s worth.

While she is known as the "Mistress of All Media," we don’t expect to see anything like a "pleasure platform" pitch from Martha Stewart (well, we imagine there are some twisted fans with a chintz fetish). Nevertheless, Martha Stewart Omnimedia does know how to sell the goods across media. DaimlerChrylser will be sole sponsor of Road Trip stories in the Martha Stewart Living and trip-related content on TV, radio, and the Web. Sweepstakes and invitation-only events are part of the mix as well. Does this mean Martha will be traveling cross-country … with a crew?

Online<\B>
Counting Clicks<\I>
by Masha Geller, masha@mediapost.com
The online advertising world is still obsessed with counting responses. It needs to know who, when, where, and — most importantly — why someone clicks on an ad or otherwise responds. And why wouldn’t it be? Unlike in other media, all these questions can be easily answered for ongoing online campaigns.

For those campaigns still in the planning stages, here are some pointers courtesy of DoubleClick.

The company‘s latest Email Marketing Trend Report indicates that emails from catalogers and retailers have the highest click-through rates compared to other industries. The data also provides early indications that the best day to receive high click-through rates on email offers differs for publishers and marketers.

The report, which contains data gathered through DoubleClick's DARTmail system, reveals that within the marketer segment, catalogers had the highest email click-through rate at 9.5%, with the retail segment close behind with 9.1 %, compared to the hospitality segment with 4.4%. These figures indicate that catalogers and retailers are successfully integrating email marketing into their traditional direct marketing campaigns, and are effectively using email to communicate timely and relevant messages to their customer base. In addition, the data found that pass-along rates were high for both the catalog segment, with 0.4%, and the retail segment, with 0.6%, compared to the BtoB segment, with 0.2%, which implies that consumers see the importance of spreading retail and catalog email messages to others.

DoubleClick also found that the best days to achieve high click-through rates on email campaigns varied for marketers and publishers. The data reveals that marketers have the highest click-through rates between Tuesdays and Thursdays, with an average of 6.5%, while publishers have the highest click-through rates on the weekends, with an average rate of 9.4%. These results indicate that consumers tend to respond to marketing offers during the week — possibly from work, where the connection speed is higher — while they prefer to read newsletters from publishers on the weekend, when they have more leisure time.

On the non-email side, rich media rules. DoubleClick found that click-through rates on rich media ads were six times higher (2.4%) than on non-rich media ads (0.4%). Its data also shows that click-through rates on the recently published IAB-size ads are marginally higher than on non-IAB-size ads. On average, 20% of the 2 billion ads that DoubleClick serves daily are rich media.

The data also shows that although DoubleClick served more than 8,000 different ad sizes in May 2002, the percentage of ads that adhere to the IAB's voluntary Interactive Marketing Unit ad formats has grown from 3.4% in September 2001 to a current average of 5.5%. Interestingly enough, among the static ads served by DoubleClick, there is a marginal difference between the click-through rates of the ads that adhere to the IAB formats (0.5%) and those that do not (0.4%).

All this said, it bears repeating that click-throughs are only one way of measuring ad effectiveness.

Streaming Media<\B>
Controlling the Flow<\I>
by Ken Liebeskind, kenl@mediapost.com<\B>
The data is in: Streaming advertising generates much higher brand awareness than traditional banner ads. Recently released data from Millward Brown shows that a single streaming ad increases brand awareness by 24%, compared with a 4% lift for a single traditional banner.

"They create a stronger emotional response and a greater degree of involvement with the ad, and allow the advertiser to communicate more complex TV-style messages," Millward Brown says.

Streaming advertising’s ability to brand is undoubtedly an important factor in luring large traditional advertisers online. "It gives us the ability, not unlike TV, to invoke thought, feeling, and emotion, which is harder to do with other units," says Jeff Lanctot, chief media strategist for Avenue A, an interactive agency.

Major advertisers like Coca-Cola and BMW are renowned for streaming ads that brand their products like TV ads. But in fact, they may do more than that. Streaming ads can be more than TV commercials — they can include click-throughs or additional panels that provide more information to further brand a product. Coca-Cola is planning a campaign that will include additional product panels beneath the 30-second TV spot it streams. The panels will provide information on other Coke products, generating an additional branding message.

A campaign for the city of Seoul, Korea, recently launched at Fortune.com, features 40 minutes of video, an initial spot like a TV commercial, plus a series of longer videos on specific sub-genres such as business, which are meant to attract companies seeking to locate there. The idea is to take the initial branding experience and burrow down further for fuller information. Another benefit of streaming a branded message online is that the audience can be measured, meaning the branded message can be sent to an identifiable audience. The message can go to specific audiences, such as young and mobile teens and adults who are harder to reach on TV, according to Paul Palumbo, research director of Accustream IMedia Research.

The ability to brand messages to specific audiences is helping to increase the use of streaming, which is up 300% this year, according to Palumbo. There is also more streaming inventory available, which provides advertisers the opportunity to "slot it into content that is being viewed and deliver it to audiences from specific demographics," he says. There are also more types of streaming media available, which gives advertisers more choices and the ability to test different formats to determine which works best.

iTV<\B>
Advertisers Strike Back<\I>
by Lee Hall, lee@deadlinemedia.net<\B>
Will consumers pay for broadcast television they same way they pay for cable or satellite? If you read between the lines of recent statements of people like Turner Broadcasting chief Jamie Kellner, such a revolution could be in the works.

Kellner opened the can of worms a few weeks back when he told Cable World, an industry trade magazine, that skipping over commercials on their VCRs or digital video recorders (DVR) was tantamount to theft. When NextResearch, Inc., a Memphis-based research firm, surveyed owners of DVRs like TiVo and ReplayTV, it found that three out of four (74%) "always" or "frequently" fast-forward through commercials.

Until recently, TV executives haven't worried much about this problem. There are only about 3 million DVRs in use today. The market may be about to explode, however. The Carmel Group, a California research firm, projects DVRs will be in 29 million households by 2008 — that's almost one in three TV households. That's a huge group of people with the newfound ability to hop right through those intrusive commercials.

What's an industry to do? Turns out there are plenty of possibilities. The "big three" TV networks (ABC, CBS and NBC) have sued SonicBlue Inc., maker of ReplayTV, ostensively over the device's ability to permit users to record and share programming. Buried within the lawsuit, however, is the charge that commercial zapping violates U.S. copyright law. Ads are part of copyrighted programming, the networks claim, and must not be excluded.

Programmers can also finagle software to disable the fast-forward function during commercials, similar to what is done now with the FBI warning on recorded DVDs.

The most likely weapon, though, may come from Hollywood's legendary creativity. If people won't watch commercials, they may have to suffer through a flurry of product placement deals in which advertisers pay to have their products prominently displayed within regular programming.

Some creative advertisers, such as electronics retailer Best Buy, have struck deals to deliver combination entertainment/commercial packages to TiVo subscribers. When viewers later watch a Best Buy spot, they see an on-screen icon that links to the programming package. Miller Brewing Co. and TiVo entered into an arrangement last year that gave Miller 30 minutes of pre-loaded content on newly purchased TiVo units.

This evolving situation bears close watching. Most of the top cable operators have either deployed, or have announced plans to deploy DVR units contained within the set-top box.

As viewers get used to the new tools, it could force radical changes in the way TV advertising is delivered. Stay tuned.