• Coca-Cola, Shelf Space And Contential Longitude
    In 1985, I was invited by the executive management at McCann Erickson to run Coca-Cola's national broadcast buying group. Pepsi had signed pop singer Michael Jackson ("Billie Jean") as spokesperson, and its market share was skyrocketing. For the first time in the cola wars, price and volume were giving "the event" drink a run for its money. Blindfolded, I was ushered into a meeting room. The first words I heard were "I had a dream." To my surprise, we were in a room full of Caucasians -- and the dream was to successfully launch a "new" Coca-Cola, sweeter, like Pepsi, …
  • Interactive TV: Marketing's Next Frontier
    Television viewers are using their remote control just as they would a mouse: to request information, ask for free samples, or even to buy products. The marriage of technology and marketing is available in over 65 million homes, but in their rush to discover the next big thing and jump on the latest bandwagon, all but the most progressive marketers (albeit a growing list) are completely unaware of interactive TV's power as a super-charged marketing communications tool.
  • Jack Myers' Think Tank: In a Week of Great TV and the Super Bowl, Diller Vs. Malone Is Classic Battle
    Strike or not, with "American Idol," "Lost" and the Super Bowl, this week is one of the best network TV has experienced in a long time. And to top it all off, we have Super Tuesday, Feb. 5. But for all the hype and excitement surrounding television this week, plus the hundreds of stories about companies, investments, executives, economic conditions and more, the one I'm fascinated by is the Barry Diller and John Malone soap opera.
  • First The 'S' Word, Now The "R'...
    No matter where you turn these days, all you hear about is the "R" word: recession. From The Wall Street Journal to The Hollywood Reporter -- recession, recession, recession. Is it really time to panic? Maybe. Then again, maybe not. With the Commerce Department reporting this week that gross domestic product growth slowed in the fourth quarter to 0.6% growth compared with a rate of 2.2% for the year, it seems that Hollywood is now abuzz with something new to talk about. But is it warranted?
  • Super Bowl Ads -- The Exception, Not The Rule
    So -- we're heading up to the Big Weekend Showdown. A proverbial clash of the titans, where the best in class and most expensive of their kind roll out to do battle in a bone-crunching, arduous contest for the ultimate prize -- and that's just the ads. The other thing we can expect plenty of is the usual hype around the commercials themselves. Nothing wrong with that, in principal. I'm all for the ruthless leveraging of any marketing campaign through secondary media and PR activity. I do, however, have a problem with the claims that the Super Bowl fuels relating …
  • The Fellowship of the Digital Ring
    Last week, I was surprised to learn that National Cable Communications (NCC), the nation's largest spot cable advertising representation firm -- and owned by the country's largest cable systems operators -- has been retained by telco Verizon to handle local inventory sales for its video service FiOS. I've always thought that the telco's IPTV plans to enter the video service realm would be construed most dangerous to the local cable operator - another entity competing for "fair share" of local market TV advertising budgets.
  • Jack Myers' Think Tank -- Two Sundance Film Festivals: Which Will Survive?
    There are two Sundance Film Festivals. One hosts several thousand film enthusiasts, movie industry professionals and others with passion for and/or professional interest in independent films. The other Sundance plays hosts to thousands of guests who have marginal interest in films or even relevance to the independent film community.
  • Whose Research Is It, Anyway?
    I've always been bemused by the view that "people don't want to interact with their TV. All they want to do is sit back and watch." It's a view that in my opinion amounts to little more than a failure of imagination. So it was interesting to see a release yesterday on a study from Harris Interactive that looks into attitudes toward remote-control-based interactive functionality on TV.
  • Broadcast Network Broadband Video Forays
    The broadcast networks and their parent companies are in the throes of developing responsible fiscal strategies to exploit their content in our ever-changing, evolving digital universe. Whether we credit Disney Chairman Bob Iger (iTunes) or News Corp.'s Rupert Murdoch (MySpace acquisition) for throwing down the gauntlet in the second half of 2005 by challenging its executives as well as competitors to pursue untested digital distribution methodologies, which in theory could undercut their traditional revenue-generating practices, the media business has never been the same
  • Jack Myers' Think Tank: Prime-Time Ratings Will Increase Thanks To The Strike
    I'm going out on a limb to forecast that broadcast network ratings might actually increase in the next three months compared to last year's averages.
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