Agency Spy

Seriously, too bad Jamie Lynn Spears wasn’t paying more attention.

“Targeted mass media campaigns alone can be effective in convincing high sensation-seeking, impulsive decision-making young adults to adopt safer sex practices, according to a study conducted by the Department of
Communication at the University of Kentucky with funding from the National Institute of Mental Health.”

“The 21-month-long study assessed the impact of a televised public service announcement (PSA) campaign on changing safer sex beliefs and behaviors. Specifically, the study found that the campaign effectively increased condom use among high-risk young adults, on average, by 13 percent. Similar effects were found on intentions to use condoms in the future and in perceived ability to use condoms. Impact analysis suggests
that the campaign may have resulted in 181,224 fewer unprotected intercourse occasions among the targeted population than would have normally occurred without exposure to the PSAs.”

Advertising can keep you from having sex? No shit. Ask anyone working right now whether that’s true. Sigh.

Read the whole press release here.

The New York Times is reporting that Firebrand, the great hope of advertising, has finally burned out. Mr. Elliott reported today a spokesman for NBC Universal, Cory Shields, said Tuesday afternoon that: “we are not putting any additional capital into the company.”

And also that: “Mr. Shields responded to a question from a reporter who was told by an executive of Firebrand that the company had shut down, effective immediately. The executive was not authorized to discuss the status of the company and as such declined to be identified.”

Mr. Shields didn’t seem to want to talk about how much cash investors dumped into Firebrand either. Partners included NBC Universal; Microsoft; Ion Television, part of Ion Media Networks; and the Peacock Equity Fund, a venture of NBC Universal and a unit of General Electric with the goal of the trend of ads as entertainment. YouTube had everyone believing that commercials were awesome enough to be considered content all on their lonesome.

Sadly, that just ain’t true.

Despite the annual Oscar party night rituals, this year’s event was the lowest rated ever. Nielsen has the broadcast making history - the ABC telecast averaged 32 million viewers, the smallest amount of eyeballs ever. Between 2007 and 2008, the show lost 8 million viewers. Eight fricking million! Nothing to sneeze at.

Mediapost got this quote from Brad Adgate, senior vice president and corporate research director for Horizon Media: “I thought it would be the reverse. There was no Golden Globes, no People’s Choice Awards. It wasn’t about saturation. It wasn’t because of a lack of award shows.”

Who is to blame? E! is making a case that the show was male dominated excluding women from what many call a “Super Bowl for the ladies.”

“Last year, with host Ellen DeGeneres at the helm, the Oscars was up across the board with women viewers… The show’s disconnect with its target audience might have stemmed not so much from Stewart, who generally won good reviews, but from the top nominees, a pack of films with nary a female touch, led by Best Picture winner No Country for Old Men, that [Jon] Stewart himself jokingly described as “psychopathic killer movies.”

We’d buy that, but the films were also not “mega movies.” Michael Clayton, which we loved, wasn’t seen by too many folks. Consider that the most watched Oscar broadcast ever, with 55 million viewers, was the 1998 show where Titanic was the main attraction. Didn’t everyone and their mother see that film? Mass appeal, y’know?

And then, maybe there is something to be said for the public having their fill of celebrity. The Grammys, were also in a slump this year. Could it be that with blogs like Perez, the mass amount of daily celeb junk rags, shows like TMZ hawking all angles of celebrity life that consumers feel no need to rush over to the telly and gawk at the stars during the Oscar’s? Why run to the TV when you can get all the highlights on YouTube and check out the dresses complete with snarky commentary on Jezebel the next morning?

No matter the factors, brands such as General Motors, American Express, and Mars Inc.’s M&M are surely not going to dump their $1.8 million for a 30-second spot next year.

We received a press release stating that a majority of marketers believe that television advertising has become less effective in the past two years. The survey findings will be revealed at the ANA’s TV & Everything Video Forum on February 28. Ohh! Are you all clutching your chests and
shivering with excitement? This survey is coming from the ANA and Forrester’s (natch) and is about to tell you what you already know! Again!

Here’s the lowlights:
- Sixty-two percent of marketers believe television advertising has become less effective in the past two years, but close to half of the advertisers surveyed have already started to experiment with new ad types to work with DVRs and VOD programs.

- Eighty-seven percent of advertisers believe branded entertainment will play a stronger role in TV advertising in the coming year.
Advertisers are eager to try new ad formats, including ads in online TV shows (65 percent), ads embedded in VOD (55 percent), interactive television ads (43 percent), and ads within the set top box menu (32 percent).

- Over 50 percent of marketers reported that when half of all TV households use DVRs, they will cut spending on TV advertising by 12 percent.

- Eighty-seven percent of respondents said they intend to spend more on Web advertising this year.

- Seventy-two percent of marketers are very interested in having individual commercial ratings rather than average commercial ratings.

As a follow-up to Berlin Cameron’s broadcast spot with Vincent Gallo for Belvedere Vodka, WE HEAR THAT… Next up on to get the Terry Richardson treatment is awesome rapper Rza. They’re currently shooting in Los Angeles, as we type. We liked the concept, the commercial and the prints ads that went with the vodka maker’s new modus operandi.

Full disclosure: We love RZA.

The de facto leader of the Wu-Tang Clan is a genius MC and also created/produced the original music for Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill series. He’s managed to be a leader in the often retarded rap game. We didn’t see him making any cookie-cutter TV shows that were bound to be canceled for their ridiculously lame plot lines. Look, dude was even in the train wreck film that was Miami Vice and managed to hold it down.

We salute The Boys Club on this one - way to incorporate all angles of your target demographic. Let’s just hope that the corresponding commercial is just as stellar as their choice of celebrity. Fingers crossed… Eyes closed…

That IO ad we talked about loving yesterday? A reader was kind of enough to let us know that it comes out of the Globalworks agency. Check out another one of their reggaeton-themed spots above.

CEO Yuri Radzievsky founded the agency in 1999 as an agency that tackled branding, culture and technology in one swoop. In 2000, GlobalWorks joined with Liquid Digital, to form GlobalWorks Group, LLC. They have a division called HispanicWorks, which created these ads. That division is headed up by William Ortiz, a former Vice President of diverse markets, at JPMorgan Chase. Besides that, the agency asserts that they can handle almost any cultural communications from Hispanic to African American, Russian to French, Chinese to South Asian. Not bad. Clients include Cablevision, Chase, Citizen’s Bank, etc.

It’s like the Head On spots all over again. Who made this? Someone please tell us!

The USA Today Ad Meter is up ranking the 10 most popular Super Bowl ads. And it goes a little something like this:

How the Ad Meter works: USA TODAY created the Super Bowl Ad Meter in 1989 to gauge consumers’ opinions about TV’s most expensive commercials. USA TODAY assembled 136 adult volunteers in Tampa and electronically charted their second-by-second reactions to ads during the Super Bowl.

Meanwhile, AdBowl has them in a different order:

As does Nieseln’s social networking site:

Everyone agrees on the number one spot and everything is just jockeying for position.

Our vote for the worst super bowl ad? Naomi Campbell’s Sobe Water spot. It made zero sense. And um… who likes this girl anymore? Is she really the chick you want repping your brand? Really?

We don’t normally read AdAge, but today, it got nasty and caught our eyeballs. Jonah Bloom and his troops rolling in the mud talking about sex? Hot.

One of today’s articles comes with the title, “Not So Nice Beaver!!” It’s about a recently banned Super Bowl ad that features the word beaver, in lieu of vagina. That’s right. We said. VAGINA. We give writer Mike Tunnicliffe props for purposely redacting the name of the company. Check out the behind the scene video above if you have no idea who we’re talking about. Props also go to Register.com’s CEO Larry Kutscher, who is one of the nameless company’s rivals, for this statement:

“[Company name deleted] for the fourth year in a row has run a commercial in the Super Bowl that doesn’t talk about its customers, its services, or what they do. Instead, it has elected to focus on scantily clad women and shock value for the purpose of creating some buzz. We believe businesses are looking for answers, not just flash and sex.”

Okay, seriously? Forget about their stupid ads and the stupid stunt of making something so offensive that it has to be banned. They just have crappy service and their website? It’s a consumer nightmare.