• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, October 9, 2008

The old days of big TV advertising stories were about $100- million-or-more deals. With the advent of digital TV, such stories are rare these days -- very rare, to nonexistent.

With the Internet and mobile TV platforms now on the loose -- also looking for their own PR spin -- media dollars come from a different perspective. In reality, it's no longer about dollars. For example, American Honda has decided to buy up all advertising space on Sony Pictures Entertainment's Internet and mobile media and TV platforms to promote its new Honda Fit model -- for an entire week.

Research has suggested one-off, limited-run TV digital campaigns don't amount to much. Hand it to Sony, then, to offer up everything in its digital space to one advertiser. This isn't new in TV land. New TV shows -- especially cable TV shows -- have made it somewhat of a standard ploy to offer commercial-free or limited-commercial premieres of shows, all to gain some bigger marketing and PR spin.

In the digital world, this now seems to equate an entire library of one TV programmer's wares -- for an entire week. I'm betting Honda Fit will show results, especially for its younger target audience, where these digital platforms play well.

What's the future to hold? Look for smaller video, traditional-looking TV platforms, such as DirecTV, with its 17 million subscribers, to do more of this. It signed up Vaseline to sponsor the commercial-free debut of "Friday Night Lights," the shared-with-NBC, critically acclaimed drama.

With even smaller audiences for network and cable TV shows on the way, more of these kinds of deals will have to take place. And we are not just talking about all the branded entertainment and product placement stuff that is usually attached to these deals. All that is still secondary to the main tool in a TV programmer's marketing toolbox -- the one where viewers can see a direct commercial message somewhere in their typical dramatic or comedic video content.

The Honda deal with Sony didn't have a price tag of $300 million, $25 million or $1 million. According to the Wall Street Journal it went for half a million dollars - for an entire week of Internet and mobile advertising!

In the old days, that wouldn't even make a TV business reporter's eyes blink. Now, it's a story -- because digital media dollars don't tell the whole story.