Author: Brian

Kevin Townsend on the Spot

Brian

http://www.adweek.com/aw/esearch/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003538566

Jan 29, 2007
-KAMAU HIGH

When the managing partner and founder of San Francisco-based Science + Fiction watches television, he doesn’t pay much attention to the advertising. Yet the branded entertainment executive, 46, has been blending brand message and TV content in such high-profile projects as The Rookie: CTU, a co-marketing partnership between Fox’s 24 and Unilever’s Degree Men, for which he wrote and executive produced original content. A former vp at Lucas Digital, Townsend, married and the father of four, is also a retired member of the Guardian Angels. –Q: Consumers are getting savvy about branded entertainment. Should we expect the same fast-forwarding they do with spots?

A: The new 800-pound gorilla is somebody that’s half copywriter, half scriptwriter—a person who can balance marketing and advertising with character development. Those are the people that hit the sweet spot, so you won’t get people flipping through branded programming.

Are big agencies stumbling in the branded-entertainment arena?

The reason Science + Fiction exists is because the big agencies have not responded. Advertisers turn to them for solutions and, this is a generalization, the big agencies said you should do more 30 second [spots]. … It’s not about online or DVD or television, it’s about the skill set to create engaging stories and characters that have longevity. … They have stumbled.

Can you point to some examples?

You look at Crispin. They do good stuff, but you would hope that some of the bigger agencies would have reacted a lot sooner. I think advertisers just finally said, “You know what, forget it.” More than two times we’ve been brought in to create programming and the creative agency has been asked to step out of the room [after being told] your presence here is more destructive than it is helpful. … That’s because advertising agencies are unprepared for the tectonic shift that happened. … Look at the latest Degree-24 stuff—there’s a support advertising campaign, but the major distribution platform is online and that’s controlled by Unilever.

I was going to bring that up because it’s driving traffic through a spot on network TV.

Well, I would beg to differ. I’m not going to discount the validity and the effectiveness of the campaign, but I think that to say that’s the main reason or the only reason would be to underestimate the online social networking aspect. Degree and 24 share an audience and … once we tap into that audience, then the great thing about what’s been created is it’s very portable. I can tell you about it and you can tell your friend about it and I can access your network and his network. …The strength of online is your ability to create concentric and almost never-ending distribution channels.

How Digital Media is Evolving: It’s a Matter of Science Fiction

Brian

How Digital Media is Evolving: It’s a Matter of Science Fiction

PodTech recently interviewed Kevin Townsend, Managing Partner at Science+Fiction, about the evolution of digital media. Here are some snippets…
For most of us this is trite, but worth highlighting – the advertising world changed a few years ago dramatically, in that advertisers realized that the traditional medias; print, radio and broadcast commercials, weren’t nearly as appropriate for reaching their audiences anymore, especially because their audiences weren’t what they thought they were.
As a result Kevin, who has worked with George Lucas, says that advertisers need to go multi-platform. I totally agree – anyone not multiplatforming is crazy, lazy and/or about to be sideswiped by competitors.

Multiplatforming means that it is not only about seeing a television show or a movie, it’s about seeing something online, it’s about seeing something in a game, it’s about hearing something in a podcast, it’s about being able to talk to people across multiple platforms, sometimes simultaneously. And each of those platforms has its own pluses and minuses, and the content needs to be able to reflect that, so the consumer gets the best possible experience. The reason why that’s important is because the advertisers are starting to use those individual platforms, to create content as a means of reaching their consumer.

Kevin talks about advertisers being in the best position to create content, because they inherently understand best what their customers are looking for. He calls this a self-publishing model…what’s going on with advertisers is they know their audience well; so they know what their audience likes and dislikes. And one of our clients is Red Bull, the energy drink; and they know that their target audience really enjoys the action sports world. So we created programming that revolved around athletes and events within the action sports world that we knew that the Red Bull consumer would really gravitate towards. And then, in order to make it as strategically appropriate as possible, we also created it so it could be distributed across multiple platforms simultaneously. So not only can you get it in one format or on one platform, but you can get on multiple platforms at the same time. So that gives the choice back to the consumer; do I want to watch television, do I want to be online, do I want to watch a DVD? Whatever choice is, that allows Red Bull to having more quality contact with their consumer, it allows the consumer to have a better experience via the brand. And then going back to Red Bull again, it allows that brand to open up more of a dialog with its customers.

ABC Bets “Motherhood” Can Make a Leap from the Computer Screen

Brian

An online video series created by a marketing company for Sauve and Sprint is being developed into a network television show.

The video series “In the Motherhood” features the stories of real mothers and streams on MSN.com, where it has recorded 21 million video views. The television series “In the Motherhood” will air on ABC later this year or early next year, turning into yet another example of branded entertainment, where the products are embedded in the story lines.

At ABC’s upfront presentation on Tuesday, advertisers seemed to enjoy the clips of Leah Remini, Jenny McCarthy and Chelsea Handler playing funny, frazzled moms. Stephen McPherson, the president of ABC Entertainment, said the show might be ready in time for midseason.

MindShare Entertainment, a unit of the media services agency MindShare, developed the series about 18 months ago. If the series is shown by ABC, it would represent the first branded entertainment campaign to leap from the Web to television.

Marketers have jointly developed shows on television for decades — soap operas were a genre created to sell Proctor & Gamble soap — but prime time exposure for those shows would be something new. “It’s a new world out there,” David Lang, the president of MindShare Entertainment, said. “It goes to show that great ideas and great creativity can come from anywhere.”

By developing a separate script and storyline for the television version of the series, MindShare and ABC hope to avoid the problems that plagued “Quarterlife,” a show about Web-savvy twenty-somethings that debuted online before being picked up and rebroadcast by NBC. The show was pulled off NBC after one airing. Additionally, the online sponsors for “Quarterlife” were not attached to the TV version the way Suave and Sprint will be involved in ABC’s “In The Motherhood.”

Moms Find Move of ‘In the Motherhood’ From Web to TV on ABC a Hard Shift

Brian

By BRIAN STELTER
Published: March 24, 2009
The story of “In the Motherhood,” appropriately enough, began with an unusual conception.
This tale of three moms, which has its debut on ABC on Thursday, was created by a marketing company as a Web video series. After drawing millions of views online in the past two years, it was transformed into a traditional network sitcom, making it the first Web show to be remade for network television. But what made the Web series unique — an interactive style of storytelling — was quashed by the legal engine of Hollywood.

On the MSN.com edition of “Motherhood” (since discontinued), short segments about funny, frazzled mothers were inspired by the real-life stories that viewers submitted via an Internet forum. ABC, similarly, asked for story submissions on its Web site (itm.abc.go.com) and said that they “might just become inspiration for a story by the writers.”

But ABC’s call for ideas from moms drew the attention of the Writers Guild of America, which said this type of request for submissions was “not permissible” under its contract with the network. This week ABC abruptly removed the language about “inspiration” from its Web site, effectively saying that the writers may not be listening to viewers’ ideas, after all.

Fast and Furious

Brian

LOS ANGELES — A tuned up “Fast & Furious” zoomed to No. 1 at the weekend box office, selling an unexpectedly strong $72.5 million in tickets in North American theaters.

The result — more summer than spring, which is typically a quiet moviegoing period — reignites a film franchise that had been dismissed by Hollywood, if not Universal Pictures, after a disappointing third installment in 2006. That movie, “The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift,” stalled after selling just $62.5 million at domestic theaters, less than half the total of each of its two predecessors, “The Fast and the Furious” and “2 Fast 2 Furious.”

But Universal and its financing partner, Relativity Media, decided to place another bet on the street-racing franchise. Research showed that audiences were still keenly interested in Vin Diesel, who moved on after headlining the original “The Fast and the Furious.” If it could get other members of the original cast to return, Universal figured moviegoers would turn out for a fourth movie — and bring their kids.

“I’m euphoric that our production team had the foresight to do this even though people snickered,” said Nikki Rocco, president of Universal Pictures distribution. “We saw an opening for a big action movie in April and decided to bite the bullet.”

Alan Mulally

Brian

http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1894410_1893837_1894182,00.html

It is extremely rare for one leader to play a major role in two of America’s top industries. Alan Mulally is that rare case.
As president of Boeing’s commercial-airplane business in the late 1990s, he revamped the company’s product mix, transformed production and embraced digital technology. In the process, he made Boeing a model for global manufacturing. He also guided the company through the aftermath of 9/11, which dealt a nearly crippling blow to the aerospace industry. Fast-forward to 2009 and the challenges facing Detroit and the entire global auto industry are daunting. As CEO of Ford Motor Co., Alan, 63, is restructuring a 100-year-old industrial powerhouse in the midst of a crisis that threatens the very survival of our auto industry.
I’m rooting for him. My support is both emotional and rational. My father worked at Ford for more than 30 years. On the business side, the auto industry is an important customer and partner for Microsoft, with a long track record of shared technological innovation.
Changing industries can upset even the most seasoned executive. Not Alan. He understands the fundamentals of business success as well as any business leader I know. He has smartly and sensitively made the transition from airplanes to cars, inspiring confidence and trust in employees, suppliers, shareholders and customers. As the auto industry steers through this critical period, leaders like Alan are essential to delivering on the vision of new energy-efficient vehicles and connected technologies. Ford is fortunate to have a man of his qualities at the wheel.

The End of Car Culture

Brian

http://www.esquire.com/features/data/nate-silver-car-culture-stats-0609

This is surely one of the signs of the apocalypse: Americans aren’t driving as much as they used to.

In January, according to statistics compiled by the Federal Highway Administration, Americans drove a collective 222 billion miles. That’s a lot of time spent behind the wheel — enough to make roughly eight hundred round-trips to Mars. It translates to about 727 miles traveled for every man, woman, and child in the country. But that figure was down about 4 percent from January 2008, when Americans averaged 757 miles of car travel per person. And this was no aberration: January 2009 was the fifteenth consecutive month in which the average American drove less than he had a year earlier.

This is, historically speaking, highly unusual behavior. If there have been two seemingly immutable trends for the American consumer, they’re that he’s eaten more every year and driven more every year. The late 1960s are sometimes assumed to be the height of car culture. But in January 1970, the average American drove only about 393 miles in his vehicle, or about half of what he drove every month until recently.

The one thing that has sometimes caused Americans to put on the brakes is higher gas prices. Although driving is a relatively inelastic activity — a doubling of gas prices reduces miles traveled by only a small fraction — it has nevertheless been somewhat sensitive to changes in fuel costs. Vehicle miles traveled fell between 1981 and 1982, for instance, when the price of gas was the equivalent of three dollars in today’s prices, and between 1990 and 1991, when the Persian Gulf war triggered a temporary spike in the price at the pump.

Discovery and Hasbro Play Nice

Brian

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/discovery-hasbro-play-nice-83198

Discovery Communications is rebranding another of its channels, partnering with toy giant Hasbro in a 50/50 venture to relaunch Discovery Kids Network.
As part of the deal, in which Discovery will receive $300 million, the venture will also take a minority interest in the U.S. version of Hasbro.com, which will expand to offer video, games and other digital content.
The rebranded channel’s name is yet to be finalized but won’t include Hasbro. A search is under way for a CEO to head the network, eyed for a debut in late 2010 with content aimed at boys and girls ages 14 and under.
Last year, Discovery Communications — which owns seven U.S. channels, led by flagship Discovery Channel and TLC — formed a 50/50 partnership with Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo to relauch Discovery Health as the Oprah Winfrey Network. And Discovery Home Channel was rebranded with the eco-moniker Planet Green and Discovery Times as Investigation Discovery.
“Discovery Kids is unusual as it’s not squarely in our wheelhouse of nonfiction programming, and we felt we needed a great partner to take it to the next level as a brand that enlightens, empowers, educates and entertains,” Discovery president and CEO David Zaslav said.

Love Beyond Boundaries

Brian

http://movies.nytimes.com/2008/11/21/movies/21thin.html

Plugging the same two actresses into different Sapphic scenarios may be a valid filmmaking strategy but it can be an extremely boring one. When we last saw Sheetal Sheth and Lisa Ray (in New York and Los Angeles, that was just two weeks ago) they were playing would-be lovers in “The World Unseen.” Now they’re back to continue making eyes at each other in “I Can’t Think Straight,” yet another weightless confection from the writer and director Shamim Sarif.

This time Ms. Ray is Tala, a spoiled Jordanian who has bailed on three previous suitors and is about to be married to fiancé No. 4. But as Tala’s wealthy family plans a lavish Christian wedding in Amman, the bride-to-be is dallying in England with Leyla (Ms. Sheth), a coy Indian Muslim who writes flowery fiction and has difficulty keeping a boyfriend. Fortunately, a succession of glowing Hallmark moments on polo field and tennis court lie in wait to nudge the ladies toward sexual reorientation.

Will Tala once again dump her betrothed? Will Leyla’s nosy parents find her K. D. Lang CD? Before these and other burning questions can be answered, the plot must plod through a confetti storm of obstacles — religion, ethnicity, overbearing mothers — all of which are overcome in dewy, unsmudged close-up. This isn’t a movie, it’s an alternative-lifestyles campaign for Maybelline.