Today advertisers are integrating their brands into content in order to capture the attention of digitally empowered audiences. Significantly, many brands are turning to “social media influencers” to endorse, demonstrate, and promote products from within their social media content. To keep it as authentic as possible, brands often let these “influencers” integrate the brands as…
In case you missed it, I recently wrote about some of the parallels I hear between some podcast advertising and the advertising of “golden age” radio. In both eras, concerns about keeping audience attention–and not annoying audiences–shape some advertising strategies. You can read the full Antenna post here.
In case you missed it, I wrote a piece on how Time Warner’s strategies have changed fairly dramatically since 2012. You can find the Antenna piece here.
I attended the Media Summit NY 2014 as a Carsey-Wolf Research Fellow and wrote up a report on “things to know” about branded entertainment. You can find my piece, “Branded Entertainment Reshapes Media Ecosystem,” here.
This summer AT&T’s reality show @summerbreak, filmed and edited as the summer progresses, returns for a second season to track the adventures of a group of Southern Californian teens. Back in the 1940s-50s, AT&T sponsored a very different radio and television program, The Bell Telephone Hour, featuring classical music and opera stars. Despite their obvious differences, the two…
Old ads look funny to us today in part because advertisers believed the purpose of ads was to educate consumers about the product. Direct hard sell didacticism resulted in repetitious ads, heavy with product attributes. Today few ads include product information; most ads work by creating associations, such as with celebrities, making emotional appeals, or…
AT&T has produced a teen reality program, @summerbreak—seen not on TV but on social media platforms, such as Twitter, YouTube, and Tumblr. General Electric is sponsoring articles in the magazine The Economist. And Pepsico has a blog site, Green- Label, devoted to skateboarding, rap music, and other interests of “millennial males.” These examples of branded…
A recent advertising column by Stuart Elliott in the New York Times describes a new advertising strategy by the retailer Target. Characters from three different ABC situation comedies (Modern Family, The Middle, and Back in the Game) will appear in three different 30-second commercials giving each other gifts—from Target, of course. Having characters from different…
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