Brief Spring 2010 by Shanna Green

GAME CHEATS: HOW PUBLISHERS ARE WINNING AUDIENCES MARKETERS USING PR TO RELIEVE SOCIAL ANXIETIES

INSIDE THE NETWORK TOOLBOX THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF MEDIA MARKETING, PROMOTION AND DESIGN

SPRING 2010

PLUS

THE MANY LIVES OF FRED SEIBERT

CONTENTS

BRIEF SPRING 2010

UPFRONT

Rise of the Frederator p. 8

Watch Dog

Creative Brief

News and Events

News Brief IN FOCUS

A Northwest Movement p. 24

Color Codes p. 26

Brand/Rebrand

Executive Summary

Spot Watch

Media Brief

Brief Encounters

Design/Dissect SPECIAL REPORTS

Community Arcades p. 28

Video Game Marketing

PR, Social Media and Outreach

Creative Design Tools LAST LOOK

Playing Tag p. 74

Picture Tube

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Viewpoint

ON THE COVER Design by studioFREAK www.studiofreak.tv

PromaxBDA Staff PRESIDENT/CEO

Jonathan Block-Verk GENERAL MANAGER

Jill Lindeman CFO

Randy Smith CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER

Lucian Cojescu VP OF CONTENT INNOVATION

LETTER FROM THE PRESIDENT

Chris Pursell People in the ‘sexy’ side of the TV business would like to believe that their ‘Content is King.’ But for most of us in the marketing side of the content business, those whom are tasked with bringing audiences together so that a business can proﬁtably operate, content is far from King. Times have changed: Content is a commodity; Community is King.

EDITORIAL MANAGER

Shanna Green DIRECTOR, SALES AND BUSINESS INTEGRATION

Laura Coones When it comes to community, the challenge is not just to engage audiences, attract new ones and give them exciting points of entry, but to do it again and again in fresh and innovative ways. Which is what we’ll be examining at the upcoming PromaxBDA Conference, June 22-24 in Los Angeles! We’ll not only be showcasing some of the best multi-platform work occurring in the international entertainment industry, we’ll also be dissecting everything from social media strategies and augmented reality to media planning strategies and optimized promos. All focused on making you better and more effective at everything you do.

PRODUCTION AND LOGISTICS DIRECTOR

Genevieve Gragnano AWARDS MANAGER

Stacy La Cotera AWARDS COORDINATOR

Jessica Kaiserman

We’ll take in-depth looks at new opportunities emerging for the traditional design studios, businesses, agencies and creative services. From new design platforms and strategies to data visualization and social media design, this years’ PromaxBDA is shaping up to be the most informative and innovative yet.

MEMBER OUTREACH DIRECTOR

And yes, the rumors are true! This years’ Lifetime Achievement Award winner will be none other than the legendary Hugh Hefner. There is no denying the social, cultural and creative impact the Playboy brand has had over the past half-century. CNN’s Larry King will host a ﬁreside chat with The Hef, to discuss the art, creativity and cultural signiﬁcance of the Playboy brand.

CIRCULATION MANAGER AND RE-VERIFICATION COORDINATOR

We’ve got an amazing group of partners this year including NCM Media, People magazine and Entertainment Weekly and others are coming on strong. There’s never been a better time to support the organization — and your business — by partnering with this year’s Conference. Please reach out to us if you’d like to develop a package that makes sense for you!

EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT AND OFFICE MANAGER

Finally, be on the lookout for announcements about PromaxBDA’s new Sports Media Marketing Awards, taking place in November 2010. We have an all-star advisory council and the event is sure to be a screaming success. Reserve your tickets early and be sure to get your sports-related marketing together for the call for entries, which begins this June. See you in LA! Cheers, Jonathan Block-Verk President/CEO

Kristen Hufﬁnes MANAGER OF MEMBER SERVICES

Anush Payaslyan

Eileen Rasnake ACCOUNTANT

Wolfgang Thiele

Jessica Henning CREATIVE AGENCY OF RECORD

bpg www.bpgadvertising.com PromaxBDA is a global, non-proﬁt association dedicated to being the leading resource for education, community, creative inspiration and career development for marketing, promotion and design professionals within the entertainment and information industry.

Spring 2010 Volume 2, Issue 2 EXECUTIVE PUBLISHER Jonathan Block-Verk GENERAL MANAGER Jill Lindeman EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Chris Pursell EDITORIAL MANAGER Shanna Green CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Hillary Atkin, Kate Bacon, Wayne Friedman, Daisy Whitney

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

As we roll into our annual MI6 conference, I opted to assign myself the video game marketing feature that anchors our special reports section in this issue, as I have always taken my long history with video games as a personal pleasure and distraction over the years. What came out of the interviews, however, was something far more indicative of the very nature of marketing in this era: the rise of the community. The strength of gaming isn’t personal and hasn’t been for some time. Whether it was my mom requesting help on Facebook for “FarmVille;” my wife, aka Lady Fingers, raking in virtual chips playing poker; my son rising up the world leaderboards of “Mario Kart;” or my daughter accessorizing another player’s house on “Toontown,” they are all connected not only with their friends but around the world by a happy kinship. Of course, that’s just the way branders want it: three generations of people who are not only actively engaged with the product, but walking billboards for the title. But as long as the product is solid, the players, in my family at least, are all happy to do it.

DIRECTOR, SALES AND BUSINESS INTEGRATION Laura Coones EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT Jessica Henning EDITORIAL ASSISTANT Rebecca Job MAGAZINE DESIGN

bpg www.bpgadvertising.com CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS

Kevin Lynch www.kevinlynchstudios.com Patrick Buckley www.patrickbuckleyphotography.com

Community is a theme you’ll see throughout this edition of Brief. It’s a theme in my interview with Fred Seibert, and it’s broken down in our quarterly roundtable. Community breeds the word-of-mouth buzz that marketers in any industry are perpetually trying to tap into. This has been hugely prodded along by social media, of course, and in our special report on Social Media and PR, you’ll ﬁnd that the idea of community has shaken up the corporate structure and changed how entire departments interact.

All letters sent to Brief or its editors are assumed intended for publication. Brief invites editorial comment, but accepts no responsibility for its loss or destruction, however it arises, while in its ofﬁce or in transit. All material to be returned must be accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope. Nothing may be reproduced in whole or in part without the written permission of the publisher.

It’s hard to believe that in the next issue we’ll be well on our way to the Conference. In it, we’ll take an insightful look at the state of the key art industry, talk with one of the few people in the world who is a walking brand and put the spotlight on the next generation of marketing gurus with our annual next-gen special.

US Postmaster: Send address changes to Brief, 1522e Cloverﬁeld Blvd., Santa Monica, CA, 90404. Printed in the United States.

Chris Pursell Editor-in-Chief and VP of Content Innovation

Brief is a quarterly publication, plus special issues as a part of member outreach for non-profit organization PromaxBDA, which publishes this magazine. For a membership to PromaxBDA, please contact our main office in Santa Monica, Calif. email: anush@promaxbda.org. Brief 1522e Cloverfield Blvd. Santa Monica, CA 90404-5567 (310) 788-7600 www.promaxbda.org

President, Commercials Division & Corporate EVP Digital Domain

Kurt Sutter. Creator/Show Runner Sons of Anarchy Stephanie Gibbons. EVP Marketing & On-Air FX Network Peter Ligouri. COO Discovery Networks

PromaxBDA 2010 is where the world’s most innovative creatives, marketers, strategists, designers and thought leaders gather to give you unprecedented insights, business secrets and revolutionary tools that will help your company grow.

Hugh Hefner. Chairman/Founder Playboy Enterprises

Who Should Attend:

Larry King. Host Larry King Live

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Tony Sella. President Fox Features Marketing JD Roth. CEO, 3Ball Productions Executive Producer/Creator The Biggest Loser Neil Ashe. President & CEO CNET/CBS Interactive

Rishad Tobaccowala. Chief Strategy & Innovation Officer Vivaki Anne Mullen. Senior Vice President Nickelodeon On-Air

How You Will Benefit: Acquire, refine and develop the skills to: ƌɄ 0 ..!0''4Ʉ$(+' ( )/Ʉ ɄǂŲɄ( $ Ʉ+' ) ƌɄ /- ('$) Ʉ$)/ -) 'Ʉ - /$1 Ʉ + -/( )/. ƌɄ ) " Ʉ4*0-Ʉ./ ŦɄƧ ) Ʉ4*0-. '!ƨɄ/*Ʉ& +Ʉ/# (Ʉ!* 0. ƇɄ motivated… and profitable ƌɄ '+Ʉ4*0-Ʉ. ' .Ʉ + -/( )/.Ʉ" ) - / Ʉ$) - ( )/ 'Ʉ marketing-based revenue ƌɄ 3$($5 Ʉ- 1 )0 .Ʉ/#-*0"#Ʉ - ) Ʉ$)/ "- /$*). ƌɄ 1 '*+Ʉ *./Ɲ. 1$)"Ʉ + -/( )/ 'Ʉ Ů $ ) $ . ƌɄ 0+ - # -" Ʉ4*0-Ʉ+-*(*/$*) 'Ʉ./- / "$ . ƌɄ / 4Ʉ - /$1 '4Ʉ$).+$- Ʉ ) Ʉ 3 0/ Ʉ/# Ʉ ./Ʉ2*-& ƌɄ ) -./ ) Ʉ) 2Ʉ/ #)*'*"$ .Ʉ ) Ʉ2# /Ʉ/# 4Ʉ mean to your business ƌɄ ./ '$.#Ʉ4*0-. '!Ʉ .Ʉ Ʉ/#*0"#/Ʉ' -ƆɄ ƌɄ Ʉ(*- Ʉ - /$1 ƌɄLead your company into the future

Don’t miss out on one of the most important events of your career! Register by May 28 and save $400 off the on-site price. Go to promaxbda.org or call us at 310.789.1509.

John Miller. CMO NBC Universal

Blake Callaway.

*- Ʉ.+ & -.ɄƎɄ. ..$*).Ʉ ))*0) Ʉ $'4ƆɄ Be the ﬁrst to ﬁnd out on

WATCH DOG

Jersey Shore Network: MTV Date: January 21, 2010 Viewers: 4.8 Key to Success: Letting the cast speak for themselves

UPFRONT

Anyone who has seen an episode of MTV’s hit reality series “Jersey Shore” knows that the cast members have no trouble making their voices and opinions heard. So when MTV put together its promotional campaign for the show, they opted for a hands-off treatment, allowing the actions and antics of its over-the-top cast to shine through. “At its heart, we saw ‘Jersey Shore’ as a comedy,” said Tina Exarhos, EVP marketing and multiplatform creative for MTV. “The cast and the show speak for themselves. The strategy was to highlight them, in their own words, unﬁltered. No editorial POV, just an introduction to the show concept and to each of them as real people.” The campaign, executed primarily through on-air promos with some targeted cable ads, sparked immediate conversation – and controversy. The highly publicized

BRIEF 6

backlash against the show’s now-defunct use of the terms “guido” and “guidette” only served to further stoke the ﬁre, which spread to the digital realm as hundreds of YouTubers posted and re-posted the trailers for the series. On social media networks, the “Jersey Shore” phenomenon snowballed, with ubiquitous Twitter and Facebook posts and a host of user-generated content, including “Jersey Shore” name generators, which played on the quirky nicknames of cast members such as Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi and Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino. MTV gave back in kind, with a tongue-in-cheek “Jersey Shore Yourself” game on their website, where you can deck out your avatar in true “Jersey” style. “We started the conversation, but fans owned the conversation,” said Exarhos. Q

The Pregnancy Pact

Spartacus: Blood and Sand

Network: Lifetime

Network: Starz

Date: January 23, 2010 Viewers: 5.9 Key to Success: Family ties

“I think the key to Lifetime’s new success is getting the two demographics – the older teenage girls and then moms – sitting down to watch our tent pole events, said Bob Bibb, Co-CMO for Lifetime. To achieve this, Lifetime reached out to the college crowd, with mall postings in ﬁve key markets, print ads on college campuses in 11 markets and place-based video media in more than 200 colleges. In addition, they broke down the key art for display ads on digital mediums, using the tagline “Not all teen pregnancies are unplanned.” Lifetime also aggressively marketed “The Pregnancy Pact” in conjunction with the premiere of the hit show, “Project Runway,” which debuted a week and a half before “The Pregnancy Pact.” Q

Date: January 22, 2010 Viewers: 1.2 Key to Success: Marketing both inside and outside the box

“There was no cookie-cutter approach to the marketing,’” said Nancy McGee, EVP of worldwide marketing for Starz. “We approached this show for what it was – a unique, original, compelling series – and then forged an appropriately innovative marketing campaign to emphasize that.” Starz approached their campaign for “Spartacus: Blood and Sand” in both traditional and nontraditional ways. Along with the standard magazine print ads, billboards and promos on 16 Starz and Encore channels, the marketing team forged a relationship with Men’s Health magazine, which created a Spartacus workout for their January 2010 issue and sponsored a Spartacus-themed gladiator boot camp in Los Angeles, complete with an appearance by the very buff cast members from the series. Q

Super Bowl Network: CBS Date: Feb 7, 2010 Viewers: 10 Key to success: Building on the brand For this year’s Super Bowl, CBS let the built-in popularity of the sports world’s annual mega-event take the lead in its advertising. “Because it’s the biggest event in America, we don’t spend an extraordinary amount of time to promote our coverage,” said Ron Scalera, EVP and creative director for CBS Marketing Group. “Luckily, the Super Bowl promotes itself – so our main job is to brand it as a CBS property.”

—Rebecca Job

SPRING 2010

CBS began its campaign at the start of the football season in September, with a series of spots looking back at the network’s 50-year history of televising the NFL. Each spot ended with the tagline, “Home of Super Bowl XLIV: CBS Sports.” Following the AFC and NFC Championship games, the network ran promos highlighting the star quarterbacks from both teams, as well as the underdog sensation created by the New Orleans Saints’ survival of Hurricane Katrina and progression to their ﬁrst-ever Super Bowl appearance. Q

CREATIVE BRIEF UPFRONT BRIEF 8

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NEWS & EVENTS

MOUSE ROARS AT LATIN AMERICA AWARDS

TECH PANEL SET TO EXPLORE LATEST TOOLS AND TRICKS

As winners of the 2009 PromaxBDA Latin America Awards were announced, the awards season proved fruitful for a number of companies including a certain mouse house, which landed as the biggest winner of the night.

As part of a continuing effort to keep members well ahead of the technological learning curve, PromaxBDA has announced the ﬁrst of a continuing series of sessions to be hosted quarterly by its Innovations Committee, with the inaugural panel set to take place on April 22nd, 2010 in New York.

Despite the strong collection of contenders in the various categories, The Walt Disney Company Latin America walked away with the highest award count, at 29. The company’s bounty included eight golds for categories including: Overall Print Campaign, Holiday/ Special Event Promotion and General Branding/Image Campaign. Disney also garnered 14 silvers and seven bronze for its marketing and design work.

UPFRONT

Other companies to boast strong performances were Warner Channel, with 11 awards, including a gold for On-Air Program Packaging for “Fringe” and Turner International – In House Design, scoring eight awards and winning gold for On-Air Identity. Discovery en Español also took home 19 awards, scoring the second highest trophy count from the competition. Logistics for the 2010 PromaxBDA Latin America conference and awards show are being locked down, but the event will be held in Buenos Aires this October. Q

The Walt Disney Company Latin America

The event will include a presentation from the people, companies and innovators on the leading edge of technologies affecting the future of the entertainment marketing industry and will be open to all PromaxBDA members who wish to attend. Alexis Rapo, VP, digital media at ABC Television Network and PromaxBDA Innovations Committee member, said that addressing the rapid evolution of new technologies in consumer marketing is something the committee will seek to achieve through this special session. “We are witnessing a blurring of lines between content and marketing and an explosion of platforms, applications and devices that are empowering consumers in unprecedented ways and changing the way that we communicate with them,” said Rapo. “This committee’s goal is to expand our

Rapo

focus on emerging trends and technologies and expose PromaxBDA members to the people and companies who are changing the landscape of our business.” While the final schedule of panel members has yet to be announced, Rapo affirmed that the event will be a great opportunity for members to get a sneak peek at the newest technologies and tools revolutionizing the way they develop content and campaigns. For information on this exciting new addition to the PromaxBDA repertoire, or to attend, please contact Kristin Huffines at (310) 789-1525, or via email at kristenh@promaxbda.org. Q

$1 MILLION GRANT HELPS JUMPSTART PROMAXBDA PREDITOR CERTIFICATION PROGRAM Los Angeles County’s Everychild Foundation has awarded the South Bay Center for Counseling and Community Development (SBCC) a $1 million implementation grant that will be used in part to move forward with the development and execution of a PromaxBDA partnered program to train under-privileged minority youth in careers in the entertainment marketing, promotion and design industry.

BRIEF 10

The educational program will train at-risk teens to cultivate their creative talent into long-term job security via a preditor training curriculum being developed by the two organizations. With the proliferation of new media platforms, preditors have grown as an in-demand position throughout the media industry, although there are currently few outlets available for teaching a student the nuances of the producer/editor hybrid position.

To develop a proper curriculum for youth to learn the skills needed for the job, PromaxBDA executives and the SBCC developed a top-level advisory committee to coordinate the speciﬁcs of the program. The Career Pathways advisory committee includes such esteemed executives as Drea Besch, Jim Vescera, Veronica Davidson, Ola Kudu, Swampy Hawkins, Jay Curtis, Robert Gottlieb, Stu Weiss and Brian Dollenmayer. “This is an amazing opportunity for kids, who without this program, would never be exposed to this kind of work. It’s showing them there’s opportunities not only in our business, but in the world,” said committee member Dollenmayer, SVP on-air promotion at Fox Broadcasting. More details of the program will be announced in the summer. Q

PROMAXBDA ANNOUNCES SPORTS MEDIA MARKETING AWARDS Boasting record ratings for events ranging from the Super Bowl to the Winter Olympics, despite the ramifications of the sour economy, the sports industry continues to raise the bar in embracing new platforms and technology, engaging fans, increasing passion and driving revenue through marketing and promotion. Now, PromaxBDA has teamed up with some of the sports industry’s most influential executives from properties ranging from the NFL and NASCAR to ESPN and NBC to honor the innovative work being produced around the world in this category. The launch of the Sports Media Marketing Awards will break out the innovative work being created from teams, leagues, universities, networks, websites and video game publishers. The awards ceremony will be held in November 2010 in New York City. “The sports media community consistently creates innovative campaigns that entertain and engage the elusive younger male demographic,” said Sports Media Marketing advisory council member David Levy, president, Turner Sports. “We need a venue for sharing best practices and showcasing the best work in the field.” Joining Levy on the a-list advisory council will be: Peter Moore, president, EA Sports; Mark Waller, CMO, NFL; Brian Jennings, EVP, marketing, NHL; Steve Phelps, SVP and CMO, NASCAR; Sean Bratches, EVP, sales and marketing, ESPN; Ross Greenburg, president, HBO Sports; Mike McCarley, SVP marketing, promotion and communications, NBC Universal Sports and Olympics; Robert Gottlieb, SVP, creative director, on-air promotion, Fox Sports; Bill Bergofin, SVP, marketing and promotion, Versus; Mary Beck, SVP, marketing and promotion, MLB Network; Julie Souza, VP, strategic planning and business development, CBS College Sports Network; Niels Schuurmans, EVP marketing and executive creative director, Spike TV; Robyn Miller, SVP, marketing, Tennis Channel; Gil Haslam, creative director, Troika Design Group; and Jamie Barrett, partner, creative director, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners. “There’s no denying the critical role that marketing plays in driving ratings and building brands within sports television,” said Bratches. “This event will celebrate marketing’s contribution to the success of sports programming and will provide sports marketing and promotion professionals with the recognition their work deserves.” Q

COMING IN SUMMER 2010 Key Art, Typography and the Evolution of Print The devil’s in the details but the rewards are heavenly. We’ll look at the changing scope of this industry and why its importance has grown as print outlets evolve. The Next-Gen Marketing Exec: 13 Under 30 They may be young, but for this generation, digital media and outreach isn’t a luxury, it’s a way of life. Join us for a look at the rising stars of marketing and promotion as we explore their inﬂuence on the entertainment sector. The Man Behind the Rabbit The man behind one of the most recognizable logos in the world and a brand that’s impacted generations, Hugh Hefner, this year’s PromaxBDA Lifetime Achievement Award recipient, speaks with Brief about the rise and future of the Playboy moniker.

PROMAXBDA AND MI6 DATES AND DEADLINES APRIL 19-20, 2010 PromaxBDA Europe Lisbon MAY 16-20, 2010 PromaxBDA Arabia Dubai MAY 2010 PromaxBDA India Mumbai JUNE 22-23, 2010 PromaxBDA Boot Camp Los Angeles JUNE 2010 Sports Media Marketing Awards Open for Entries JUNE 22-24, 2010 PromaxBDA North America Los Angeles SEPTEMBER 17-18, 2010 PromaxBDA Australia New South Wales

OCTOBER 15, 2010 PromaxBDA Africa Johannesburg

For more information, visit: promaxbda.org

SPRING 2010

NOVEMBER, 2010 Sports Media Marketing Awards Ceremony New York

NEWS BRIEF

iPAD OPENS DOORS FOR CONSUMER EXPERIENCES Marketers and designers know better than to be complacent when it comes to creating content and messaging for gadgets. After all, when one device comes along to change the rules of the game, like the iPhone, another one arrives hot on its heels, like the iPad.

The sexy new device, whose usefulness is still being debated, is already changing the way marketers and designers think about branding for entertainment content. Ad agencies are developing their iPad and tablet strategies for clients, while entertainment marketers are ﬁguring out how to leverage the potential of these handheld computers.

UPFRONT

“The iPad is just one signifier that our future will be filled with as many screen sizes as the human experience can handle — that is, quite a lot,” said Adam Broitman, partner with Circ.us, a New York based creative communications firm. “The challenge is, how are marketers and content creators supposed to adapt to so many environments and remain profitable? Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet. Some marketers and content creators may just need to make choices and optimize those choices on the fly.”

But there are some guidelines to keep in mind, he said. For starters, create for the experience, not the device. “Content creators need to focus on when a particular device will be used and what the general mindframe of the end user will be. I would venture to guess that long-form content will be more common on an iPad than an iPhone,” he said. Another rule of thumb is to provide a unique experience when you do design in a device-centric way. “There are already 50 apps that can tell you the weather,” Broitman said. “Ask yourself, is there a way to leverage the form factor of the iPad to create a better weather-getting experience.” Finally, think about stories that play across tablets and other devices, he said. “You can create extremely engaging experiences by telling a story in a fragmented way, across various devices. The transmedia aspect of your story may actually add an interesting dynamic.” It’s also important to remember that iPads, and other tablets, represent an opportunity for the entertainment business, said Scott Lackey, co-founder and president of Jugular, a New York communications and social media agency. “It’s a device where multimedia content should, ultimately, shine,” he said. Until the next one comes along. Q —Daisy Whitney

NETWORKS TEE OFF OF WINTER SPORTS EVENTS If the Super Bowl is the three-hour apex of advertising, then for four weeks, networks saw their own version of a promotional Holy Grail in February, thanks to a run of high-proﬁle sports events including the Super Bowl on CBS, the NBA All-Star Game on TNT, the Daytona 500 on Fox and, of course, the Winter Olympics on NBC.

Olympian Lindsey Vonn

BRIEF 12

While all the sporting events were orchestrated to drive advertiser visibility, marketing executives utilized them in ways that created water cooler conversation for their own shows as well, and not just from the networks broadcasting the games.

From Neil Patrick Harris’s “How I Met Your Mother” character Barney holding up a sign with his phone number at the Super Bowl to David Letterman’s famed party with Oprah Winfrey and Jay Leno, the month started off with a bang for the NFL’s Super Bowl. Overall, CBS utilized about eight-and-a-half minutes of promos during the game not only for their own shows such as “CSI: Miami,” but also for parentcompany properties, such as CBS Films and TV.com. “Traditionally, networks ran episodic promos to drive tune-in during the Super Bowl,” said Steph Sebbag, president

BELGIAN AGENCIES STRIKE

MONITORING SOCIAL NETWORKS It used to be enough for networks to concentrate on having a strong, cohesive brand to present to their viewers, but now, with social media giving everyone with an Internet connection an instantaneous platform to share their opinions, it’s become vital for channels to also monitor how viewers perceive them. Digital media tracking companies such as Trendrr, RedCandle Research and Sysomos are giving channels an opportunity to keep tabs on that discussion and stay abreast on how it’s evolving. During the Jay Leno/Conan O’Brien/NBC late-night situation, Trendrr’s Twitter sentiment charts were widely cited as sources for calculating the amount of negative chatter for both NBC and Jay Leno. An extreme example of public backlash to be sure, but keeping an eye on what people are saying about your brand has a practical use for media outlets. Jennifer Kavanagh, VP, digital and new media for Oxygen Media said the network is keeping on top of their brand perception by bringing viewer conversations in-house with their OxygenLive.com social site, which is integrated with their Twitter and Facebook pages and also allows fans to live chat about the show and even join in on a live viewing party. “It’s a two way relationship that we take very seriously,” Kavanagh said. “Their tweets and Facebook posts guide and inform new ideas everyday. They tell us what they love and are very clear on what they don’t. In many ways they dictate to us what they are looking for and we are happy to give it to them. This real time water cooler destination is a driver for their conversations and a force behind our recent surge in the ratings.” Q

In February, visitors to the websites for some of Belgium’s top ad agencies got a surprise. As part of a virtual strike, more than 20 members of the Association of Communication Companies (ACC), including the Belgian divisions of TBWA, Ogilvy and Saatchi & Saatchi had replaced their home pages with an interconnecting letter that protested clients breaking the terms of the charter created by the ACC and the Union of Belgian Advertisers (UBA) 20 years ago.

agencies participated, with full creative and a ﬁnal shootout with four agencies,” said De Leersnyder. “Since then, other advertisers were tempted by this idea, and in no less than one month, two other advertisers followed the same system.”

The charter outlines a code of conduct for both agencies and clients when competing for jobs and is presented as a guideline for best practices in the management of the pitching process. A major point of contention for the ACC was that the charter stated no more than three agencies, plus the incumbent, should be invited to pitch on any project at one time.

“I explained that problems started not with the advertisers but with ourselves,” De Leersnyder said. “And that in order to be respected, we needed to be respectable. “

Luc De Leersnyder, CEO of the ACC said that since the economic crisis, the ACC has had problems convincing some agencies to stick to the rules of the charter. “The National Lottery organized a widely published pitch last summer in which 10 member

De Leersnyder said the agencies became nervous and decided it was time to come to action. First, the ACC wrote a personal letter to all members urging them to follow the charter.

The idea for the shared letter came from ACC member agency Famous, who felt it could be a solution to the organization’s goal of drawing attention to the problem while giving members a sense of belonging to the same group and of sharing the same principals. The results were quick. A major advertiser cancelled his “illegal” pitch and replaced it with a paid pitch from three contestants. Q —Shanna Green

—Shanna Green

and creative director of agency bpg, who developed some of the spots that ran on CBS that day. “But now, they have taken the opportunity to break through with highly conceptual and entertaining spots to attract new audiences.”

“Let’s face it, with the way that game played out, we struck gold,” said Bergoﬁn. “I’m sure we delivered at least a 50% higher

GRP than we bargained for. This was key for us now that we are bigger and more established; we want to ﬁnd unique opportunities to put great creative out there to help build us the brand. Look at the other people in the sports space like Nike and Gatorade. Why shouldn’t we be using the same platforms they are?” Q —Chris Pursell

SPRING 2010

Even outside networks are getting in on the action. truTV earned notice for its “NFL Full Contact” promo featuring Troy Polamalu as “Punxsutawney” Polamalu. Fox kept it in the family for the Daytona 500, running promos for the FX series “Justiﬁed,” as well as for SPEED and Fox Movie Channel along with those for its own shows.

For the Olympics, Versus bought time specifically during the hockey games in order to beef up awareness for its broadcasts of the NHL, airing spots on local cable on CNBC, MSNBC and NBC for the quarterfinal, semifinal, bronze medal and final matches. With record ratings in the overtime gold medal game featuring Canada and the US, Bill Bergofin, SVP of marketing and promotion for the channel, said he feels that Versus received rewards for its investment.

BRAND/REBRAND

+PZJV]LY` 5L[^VYRZ ;\YIV turbo.discovery.com

Creative: Concept and production by Discovery UK’s in-house design team. Campaign led by: Federico Gaggio, VP creative of Discovery Networks UK briefed the project and led overall creative direction; design led by graphic designer Kam Bhogal for Discovery Networks UK. Target audience: Men, 16-34

IN FOCUS

Objective: To give Discovery Turbo, a network dedicated to cars and the drivers who love them, an on-air refresh to bring it in line with its target audience, attract new viewers and move the channel from a 4:3 to a 16:9 aspect ratio.

Steps Taken: The refresh consisted of a new channel logo and graphics system that took its lead from the “Transport” typeface developed by Margeret Calvert and Jock Kinneir in the 50s for UK motorway signs. “It’s an excellent typeface and has spontaneous resonance with drivers, which made it an appropriate choice,” said Gaggio. The design team also created a series of station idents that visualized different vehicles by pairing their distinctive engine sounds with corresponding graphics that used the letterforms of the logos and the iconic colors of the featured autos, including a Ferrari F50, Lambretta scooter, Harley Davidson motorcycle, Spitﬁre plane, Jaguar, Bell Huey helicopter and a steam

train. “The sound idea was inspired by the observation that passionate gear heads take pride from their ability to distinguish the noise of their favorite engines without any visual clues,” Gaggio explained. Lessons Learned: “A good idea, well-executed, can reach heights that no amount of time, money and special effects can,” Gaggio said. “The team had a chance to measure their capabilities to deliver a channel identity from start to finish, taking great pleasure and pride in the process. The project also boosted their confidence, confirming their ability to compete on a level with established agencies.” Q

5H[ .LV >PSK natgeochannel.com | medialuna.tv viewpointcreative.com | cleancuts.com

Creative: Concept by National Geographic’s in-house team, with graphics package production by Medialuna, creative launch campaign production by Viewpoint Creative and music by Clean Cuts. Campaign led by: National Geographic Channel’s Dawn Rodney Tranchitella, SVP strategic marketing and creative; Kiera Hynninen, EVP of marketing; and Andy Baker, VP and creative director. Target audience: Adults, 25-54 Objective: To create awareness for the US launch of the popular international channel devoted to wild animals and their natural environment.

BRIEF 14

Steps Taken: “Nat Geo is absolutely known for our incredible images, so that was the focus,” said Rodney Tranchitella. “We were able to utilize and leverage the spectacular images we have on this network.” Supported with on-air promotion from sister network National Geographic Channel and off-air including print campaigns in trade publications, executives set out to create a distinctive personality for the network by staying true to the National Geographic brand standard. This was accomplished by keeping the branding focused on the core image of the channel, with the iconic yellow border playing into the logo while setting it on a graphics package that capitalizes on the color and vibrancy of the natural world and animals the channel represents. “It’s a hyper-reality look, which is interesting

from a graphics standpoint,” Rodney Tranchitella said. “It certainly transcends a lot of different cultures and borders and makes it a beautiful global package.” Lessons Learned: “Part of the lessons we’re learning is the incredible experience of managing a portfolio of networks,” said Rodney Tranchitella. “I think it challenges your thinking. It challenges the way you think about the strategies that you put against the network: the branding, the personality and the creative approaches you take because you have to make sure that the two networks you’re working on complement each other, yet are distinct from one another.” Q —Shanna Green

ONE NATION...OVERRUN.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

IN FOCUS

BRIEF

Indeed, even before the Academy Awards were aired, E! was already on a roll for 2010, scoring the channel’s best month ever in February in both adults and women 18-49, helped in no small part by the channel’s record ratings for the ﬁnale of “Keeping Up with the Kardashians,” and proving that the channel is now about more than just celebrity gossip. Joining Comcast in 2005 under Comcast Entertainment CEO and President Ted Harbert, Kolb was quickly immersed in driving that change and extending the brands of those channels. “When I arrived at E!, we were on a mission to broaden our brand, as it was viewed as purely red carpet splashed with Howard Stern, Anna Nicole Smith and Joan Rivers,” said Kolb. “Ted and I worked to showcase our relationship with pop culture in a different way, so we weren’t just a Hollywood brand. That allowed us to go in different ways, whether it was reporting pop culture, which is news, celebrating it, which is red carpet, laughing at it with ‘Chelsea’ and ‘The Soup’ or creating it with shows like ‘The Kardashians.’”

keting job at Grey Entertainment in New York, where she took on the ABC account, working with Harbert for the ﬁrst time. “I learned all the basics there, but I think what I valued the most was learning how the absence of hierarchy can yield high creative returns,” she said. Rising to VP and group management supervisor at the company, she points toward the campaign for ABC miniseries “The Stand” as one of her favorites. “[It was] the ﬁrst campaign I ever got to run point on, so it was very stressful and very rewarding at the same time,” Kolb said. “When I got the call from Stephen King telling me how much he liked it, it was pivotal for me.”

The result has seen E! shoot up the ranks to break the top 10 in network primetime in the key demographic of adults 18-34. “In the last year or two, all those building blocks came together, and it’s particularly satisfying to me, as a marketer, to get people invested in certain characters,” she said. “For example, what’s going on now with ‘The Kardashians’ has been incredibly rewarding because it’s their fourth season, and we’ve been able to make the show bigger every year it’s been on.” A graduate of Northwestern University and a D.C. native, Kolb landed her ﬁrst high-proﬁle mar-

From top: ABC’s “The Stand,” E!’s “Keeping Up with the Kardashians” and “The Girls Next Door”

SPRING 2010

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

In 1996, she joined infant network The WB as VP of print advertising, working under Bob Bibb and Lew Goldstein, who oversaw marketing for the fledgling channel. Soon, The WB redefined network branding by carving its own demographic thanks to the likes of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “Charmed,” “Smallville” and “Dawson’s Creek.” “There was no playbook there; it was figuring it out as you went along, such as showing up at the building to find there was no furniture,” she said. “There was something different and exciting about building something when you are curious if the lights are going to stay on. Bob and Lew used that to their advantage and created some truly iconic campaigns and taught me to always respect my audience and assume that they are intelligent people who want good programming.” Having thrived in creating pop culture as part of The WB, Harbert, now at Comcast, hired her to oversee the branding of the established E! as well as emerging network Style, which was struggling to find an identity.

IN FOCUS

“Style was always the baby sister of E! in that everything was shared with the bigger channel, and it didn’t have this clearly deﬁned brand yet,” said Kolb. “It also had this odd halo over it in that the channel seemed to be trying to stay gender-neutral, when ultimately it was a network that should have been targeting women – not that some men don’t watch it. So it was fun to push the two networks apart, even though they were still sharing resources.” The fascination with celebrities, their lifestyles and the entertainment that accompanies them has helped propel Kolb to extend those brands both in the digital stratosphere as well as around the world. As the Oscars approached, Kolb utilized resources not only from the terrestrial network but also online to drive viewership and tune-in of coverage leading up to as well as after the event. The channel recently innovated real-time tweaks to E’s Internet ad campaign that would change as the Oscar ceremonies played out, with the goal of making sure consumers searching for the subject on the Web would end up on E!’s galleries, blogs and commentary instead of elsewhere and making sure E! stays on top of Google search results. “E! Online was ahead of its time in being created as a destination rather than as a compliment to television,” said Kolb. “As we have been building it out and taking advantage of video, it remains one of the biggest areas where we see growth, and it provides limitless potential to strengthen our hold on being the channel for pop culture. This is the type of strategy that makes me love our business even more, and trying to get something into pop culture is so much fun. Frankly, if you don’t love getting in pop culture, you probably shouldn’t be in this business.” Q

YOUR IDEA OF TARGETING IS A BIT DIFFERENT FROM HIS. Our premium games & entertainment properties attract the largest concentration of 18-34 year old men online. Gamers, gentlemen and dudes alike — when your target isn’t preventing the destruction of the human race, he’s probably checking out IGN for news on the sequel. Let us help you engage him at 18-34yearoldmen.com

SPOT WATCH

Dominoes

MTV Top 10

zoicstudios.com

wearevincent.com

IN FOCUS

Like matchbox cars in a spiral of destruction, Zoic piles up NASCAR racers in this cinematic debacle that turns metalbending auto wrecks into art. Michael Bay would be proud. Client: ESPN; Agency: Weiden + Kennedy New York; Production and VFX: Zoic Studios; Director: Loni Peristere; Executive Creative Directors: Todd Waterbury and Kevin Proudfoot; Creative Director: Stuart Jennings; Executive Producers: Steve Schoﬁeld and Erik Press; Producer: Dan Blaney; Editor: Dmitri Gueer; Music: Metallica

Vanquish

logan.tv

In this visual Tilt-A-Whirl treat, Logan takes a departure from the traditional use of in-game footage, and instead pairs sharp CG characters with quick, grainy live action cuts for an effect that’s dizzy, jarring and so much fun. Client: Platinum Games; Production Company: Logan; Director: Logan; Animation: Logan; Editorial & Online: Mork & lVS

With eye-popping color orbs rising through the ﬂoorboards and ﬂoating up through a discotheque dreamscape, MTV captures the euphoria of ringing in a new year. These aren’t your kids’ party balloons. Client: MTV Networks International; Agency: MTV’s World Design Studio; Production Company: Vincent; Directors: John Hill and Rheea Aranha; Music: Denis Ducasse

BBC Sport Olympics

studioaka.co.uk

BBC Sport raised the Olympian stakes for their 2010 games animation by bringing the ofﬁcial Vancouver symbol, the inukshuk, to life in a chalky blizzard full of danger at every turn. If the pack of wild wolves doesn’t get him, the avalanche just might. He’s no longer playing for gold. He’s playing for his life. Client: BBC; Agency: Red Bee and RKCR/Y&R, London; Production Company: Studio AKA, London; Director: Marc Craste; Co-Designer: Jon Klassen —Shanna Green

BRIEF 20

MEDIA BRIEF

REALITYBITES AR Applications Recruiting Consumers

By Hillary Atkin

IN FOCUS Entertainment marketers are dipping their toes into the waters of an exciting new technology to promote their brands. Augmented reality, or AR, puts digital information into a real environment by launching 3D images, video or games when a digital “marker” is held up to a webcam or camera phone. For the television series “Dollhouse,” Fox developed an AR application which presented viewers with a video avatar of the main character Echo that moves around their computer screen and switches amongst different personas. The app also gave them access to full episodes of the show, cast and crew interviews, behind the scenes footage and photo galleries. ABC employed an augmented reality print ad to promote “FlashForward” to targeted young male audiences in publications including Wired, Popular Mechanics and gaming magazines. When a code in the ad was held in front of a webcam, the picture on their computer turned into a 3D ad containing photos of the show, which clicked through to video clips that lasted a total of about 10 minutes. Viewers could also download the ad at the website jointhemosaic.com. “The concept was if we gave them something engaging and high-tech, they would engage more deeply in the show in a cool way,” said Michael Benson, EVP marketing for ABC Entertainment, who added that he prefers the term “dimensional marketing” to augmented reality. “You are creating another level, allowing people to experience another dimension of video or animation.” BRIEF 22

Benson said the ad, which has been the network’s only foray into augmented real-

ity print ads, was just one small part of the marketing campaign for “FlashForward.” “It’s hard to know speciﬁcally what we got, but it did receive a lot of good buzz,” he said. “People saw it and didn’t know what it was. We produced a YouTube video to explain it. We had to go out and market the marketing. It takes the message away from promoting the show, but we had fun with it. We think it’s cool for niche audiences for other programs.” Even those immersed in creating AR campaigns on the agency side are wondering if it’s already becoming over-hyped or if it can live up to the buzz, even as they remain revved up about its potential. “One of the caveats about this technology is that it’s fairly new to the consumer market. Like any cutting edge technology, there are limitations,” said Doug Dimon, creative director of integrated interactive agency Deﬁnition 6. Dimon, who has worked with entertainment brands including MTV, Showtime, AMC, Food Network and USA, said augmented reality still offers a lot of room to help promote brands and entertainment. “One of the reasons is it’s a fun new marketing tool,” he said. “It’s all about stretching it and envisioning something. What you want to do is to go beyond the

ABC used AR to promote “FlashForward.”

limits of what’s currently being done from a creative or technology standpoint.” Mobile applications via cell phone offer some tantalizing marketing possibilities. They are largely location and GPS-based, and marketers could, for instance, offer tours of hot spots from hit programs as someone is traversing the streets of a city. Through the app, the viewer would be able to determine where the places are — think the New York locations where the casts of “Friends” or “Sex and the City” hung out — and could then be served up clips or other promotional material. “Now you’re walking around in the real world using a phone as a viewﬁnder,” said Dimon. “You can see how this could grow into amazing promotional tool.” Q

BRIEF ENCOUNTERS

ON THE

BBC Knowledge’s “Eat Up Brain”

IN FOCUS

GRANDCHILDREN BUILDS ITS LEGACY By Shanna Green Brief Encounters: Grandchildren Web: grandchildren.tv Location: Seattle Founded: 2008 Founded by: Sean Pecknold

BRIEF 24

Seattle has emerged in recent decades as a hub of technology and indie music, but it’s a city few people would associate with motion design. Sean Pecknold, founder of creative agency Grandchildren, is part of a small group of artists in the area who are changing that perception.

“I’m inspired by the work of my friends and family, my brother’s music, my sister’s short stories. I’m inspired by non-traditional artists and the ﬂuxus artists from the 60s.” With an impressive list of music videos for breakthrough artists, including Grizzly Bear, and a quirky, visually-driven spot for BBC Knowledge under his belt, Pecknold is quickly making a name for himself and his agency as a creative force in the industry.

Yuri Norstein, Blu, Mike Mills and Martin De Thurah are some of his favorite animators and sources of inspiration. Pecknold said he also spends a great deal of time poring through videos on archive.org and loves looking at photographs in the Library of Congress collection.

Coming from a family of artists – his brother is the front man for Fleetwood Foxes, and his father was a music video editor and designer – Pecknold entered the industry by editing blooper reels for the Seattle Mariners, which then led him to edit shows for The History Channel and other documentaries and shorts. After a few years of editing, Pecknold became more interested in graphic design and animation. He spent his free time teaching himself techniques and experimenting with cameras.

“I’m inspired by the rare conversation with a kid,” Pecknold said. “I’m inspired by the work of my friends and family, my brother’s music, my sister’s short stories. I’m inspired by nontraditional artists and the ﬂuxus artists from the 60s.”

“I started studying a lot of print designers from the 60s, the Swiss designers, Russian constructivists, and then just started experimenting,” Pecknold said. “I remember attending a collage workshop in the early 2000s with Pablo Ferro, the title designer, and then watching all of his work from the 60s till now really got me excited about motion graphics and animation.” Deciding this was his career path, he began creating shortform animations, which eventually led to music videos where his knack for visual storytelling could flourish. While Pecknold saw success collaborating with other local artists, he knew he wanted to direct on his own videos. Thus, Grandchildren was born, originally as an outlet for his personal projects and more experimental work. Though he’s independent now, for each project, Pecknold works with a group of creatives who often help on each other’s projects, and he shares his studio, talent and resources in Seattle with a few other filmmakers. Though he also designs for print, sculpture and art projects under the Grandchildren moniker, Pecknold is currently focused on animation and film work. Soon he will try his hand at feature filmmaking, while completing more short films and music videos on the side.

“They wanted to keep the tone dry with moments of humor throughout, but not over the top,” Pecknold said. “So we tried to keep the animation visually compelling but also let the voice over and the facts themselves carry a lot of the intrigue.” As Pecknold transitions into the mainstream, he does so with some trepidation. “Like any design field, it can be very trendy,” he said. “When certain things become popular, they tend to get played and played out very quickly, and because references and techniques are so easily accessible online, it spreads really fast, which is awesome, but can also become an oversaturation of a certain look or style. Timelines and budgets, when they exist, can be very hard to make fit with the type of idea you have for a project, so it really becomes a balancing act. It’s a challenging field, but that’s part of what makes it fun.” Q

SPRING 2010

Grizzly Bear’s “While You Wait for the Others”

In the Northwest, Pecknold may be on the fringe of the commercial design universe, but his work is front and center. Grandchildren’s music video work got them noticed by Sydney creative agency Three Drunk Monkeys, who approached them about doing a promo for BBC Knowledge. Their work took the channel in a new direction creatively, setting it apart from the traditional use of in-show footage by using stopmotion and table animation to detail a series of curious and extraordinary facts that support the channel’s new tagline “A Little Knowledge Goes a Long Way.”

DESIGN/DISSECT

CANAL+ SPORT Marries Art & Science In Rebrand With more than 10.5 million subscribers in France and the brand of CANAL+, CANAL+ SPORT, CANAL+ CINEMA, CANAL+ DECALE and CANAL+ FAMILY on the table, the stakes were high as the rebrand marked the ﬁrst entirely new look for the portfolio since the network launched 25 years ago.

IN FOCUS

To underline the innovative nature of the channel both in artistic and production terms, CANAL+ sought to create a completely new trend in television graphics by combining abstract and video art for their new on-air look. CANAL+ reached out to London-based creative agency devilﬁsh for a complete network rebrand, including their sport channel, CANAL+ SPORT. The artistic idents devilﬁsh created for CANAL+ SPORT in particular got creative tongues wagging, and executives involved with the campaign broke down the elements that went into the shoot for Brief. Richard Holman served as creative director for the shoot, with Lucy Hunt producing, Dan Eatock art directing and Grant Gilbert as design director.

BRIEF 26

A Slice in Time

Eighty is Enough

Literally tapping into time and space to get the job done, devilﬁsh utilized “motion time-slice” for a look that was completely unique to CANAL+ SPORT viewers.

To accomplish this, devilﬁsh placed athletes on the stage and surrounded them with 80 cameras on a single rig that curved around the scene to record their every movement. Working with Swiss-based Digital Air, the cameras were offset to snare two seconds of live action using Pentax lenses. Forty of them were set to shoot sharp images, while the other half absorbed longer exposures.

Motion time-slice is a new technique of abstracting kinetic energy in order to generate dramatic and beautiful movement trails from performers and athletes. The ﬂuid motion of a boxer landing the knockout punch, the leap of a sprinter clearing the hurdles and the whip of a jockey in the heat of the race were all turned from science to art using the technique. “There’s a great beauty in the movement of athletes,” said Richard Holman, founder of devilﬁsh. “Our aim was to do something different from conventional sports promotion by capturing this beauty in way people haven’t seen before.”

Athletes then performed as the curvature of the rig holding the lenses provided an around-the-body movement, which was taken into DS and treated with ﬂuid-motion software. Brightly colored lights bathed the performer and weaved in and out during the shoot in order to create streaks of colors in the ﬁnal product. “This is a great way for an end user to be able to replay a sports moment and really break down the physical movement and separate the time and space,” said Mike Drake, camera array operator for the shot.

Artistic Energy Once the footage was edited together, the result set the channel apart from the look of most sports networks. With the time-freezing shots and emphasis on the fluid beauty of each athlete’s movement, devilfish realized CANAL+’s goal of bringing artistic form to branding. “This branding stands out because of its simplicity. The emphasis is on form and construction and not on content,“ said Christian Gierycz, artistic director of CANAL+. “What is important is the mode of communication with the viewer,” he said. “The degree of abstraction of the image and the sound give the new CANAL+ branding even more emotion.” Q devilfish devilfishcreative.com

SPRING 2010

SPECIAL REPORTS

BRIEF

Clockwise from top; “LEGO Harry Potter,” FarmVille,” “FIFA World Cup,” “Dante’s Inferno,” “Badlands,” “Street Fighter IV;” “UFC 2010;“ “The Beatles; Rock Band,” “Alice in Wonderland,” “Dante’s Inferno”

VIDEO GAME MARKETING

PROPERTIES Video Game Sales Boosted By Long-Term Engagement

By Chris Pursell In a down market, publishers are all about the community. While a crippled economy stemmed the rising tide of video game sales in 2009, industry marketers and developers have shifted gears from long-held strategies that focus mainly on game launches and now see a future of immersion and the after-sales experience as signiﬁcant keys to growth.

ndeed, at the DICE Summit this year, Electronic Arts COO John Schappert suggested that the future of the industry was online and post-purchase, through the likes of subscriptions, virtual goods, premium content, microtransactions and in-game advertising. The company’s launch of Madden Shop and the acquisition of social gaming company Playﬁsh late last year only reafﬁrm their commitment to that strategy. With the proliferation of digital platforms and access ranging from the iPhone to Facebook, virtual goods are now projected to approach the $2 billion mark in 2010. This shift has caused marketers to respond by creating campaigns that not only drive interest in the launch, but also engage players before and after the game’s debut.

SPRING 2010

“We are looking at 360-degree engagement as consumers show they are more and more willing to take their entertainment property in multiple platforms and make it part of their lifestyle,” said Craig Relyea, SVP of global marketing at Disney Interactive Studios. “This means we have to deliver that entertainment in multiple ways, which makes marketing less about a singular product that launches on a singular date and more and more about continuing engagement with the consumer through a franchise that can deliver content over time.”

VIDEO GAME MARKETING

“Dante’s Inferno”

“The lines continue to blur between content and what is traditional marketing. Whether it’s developer diaries, viral videos, game extensions or premium content, all of these engage the consumer and add value to the strength of the franchise.” Relyea points toward campaigns for the launch of the “Alice in Wonderland” games as prime examples of this. In addition to the use of traditional media, theaters, online and retail advertising, the company added a signiﬁcantly greater emphasis on social media components, which included behind-the-scenes clips and viral videos as well as a fan-driven video challenge on YouTube.

SPECIAL REPORTS

“The lines continue to blur between content and what is traditional marketing,” he said. “Whether it’s developer diaries, viral videos, game extensions or premium content, all of these engage the consumer and add value to the strength of the franchise.” A recent study by the Blitz marketing firm echoes those sentiments, noting that marketing practices are coming up short for core gamers and stating that in order to boost marketing muscle, companies needed to get better at creating long-term engagement, whether through persistent social and mobile marketing or more relevant websites as well as incentives. “Its easy for a company to forget that just because you are on social media doesn’t mean that fans will find it interesting,” said Jeremy Miller, senior analyst at market research company DFC Intelligence. “Social media is incredibly cheap, has a minimal labor cost and provides incredible opportunity. A good example of someone nailing this would be Gearbox Studio’s ‘Badlands.’ The game wasn’t the talk of the show, but the guys at the studio did a tremendous job keeping potential players involved in the development of the game and engaging their interest, and they singlehandedly turned it into a hit. To do it right takes work and passion.” With an engaging build-up proven to be vital to the launch of a game, the creation of a community after the sale is now considered to be fundamental for word-of-mouth as well as the bottom line. “In 2010, Capcom’s strategy continues to focus on improving its community relations and speaking more directly with our consumers and fanbase,” said Mona Hamilton, VP of marketing at Capcom Entertainment. “We had great success in 2009 with community-focused events like our fight clubs promoting games such as ‘Street Fighter IV,’ and we expect a stronger focus on this area throughout the coming year.”

BRIEF 30

“Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles”

Capcom also recently introduced multiple lines of virtual goods and extensions for games such as “Ghosts n’ Goblins” for the iPhone as a method of extending the brand and pulling in more revenue. “Devices such as the iPhone have allowed us to bring our gaming content to consumers in a new way and to reach more casual gaming consumers who may not have been interested in playing games on a console or handheld platform,” said Hamilton. “We also now have the ability to directly market to mobile consumers with marketing activities such as iPhone apps.” Other brand extensions for the company have included avatar clothes and props from games such as “Resident Evil” and “Street Fighter.” Capcom is joined by a growing bevy of video game companies who effectively and proﬁtably turn a gamer into a walking billboard through these accessories such as LucasArts providing gamers with a Stormtrooper costume for their avatar. “Content has to be so compelling that other gamers will want to seek it out,” said Scott Steinberg, CEO and lead technology analyst for TechSavvy Global. “Community is the new marketing, and titles are going to have to do look at the success of FarmVille and echo that strategy through status differentiators and achievements for their players.”

“Devices such as the iPhone have allowed us to bring our gaming content to consumers in a new way and to reach more casual gaming consumers who may not have been interested in playing games on a console or handheld platform.” FarmVille, produced by Zynga, literally took the social world by storm in 2009, rising from virtually zero players to 15.5 million in the span of about three months. The social game recently got the attention of Microsoft, which offered virtual currency farm cash to players who became a fan of Bing. The result saw the Bing fan count grow from 100,000 to half a million in the span of a day.

SPRING 2010

“Games are no longer about static experiences, they are more like services, and if publishers want to ﬁnd a way to monetize their titles, they will have to ﬁnd a way to up-sell gamers on the backend and continue to pour marketing support into these titles so they don’t have a six- to eight-week shelf life,” said Steinberg. “The average consumer doesn’t have as much disposable income or time, so the ones that will take off are the ones that can continue to add to the overall experience and sense of community. That’s how you build a brand.” Q

VIDEO GAME MARKETING

BRAND NEW

GAMES

Networks Build Communities Through Social Gaming By Hillary Atkin Want to play the “Californication” game? No, it has nothing to do with sex, but everything to do with how cable and broadcast networks are entrenching their brands through the exploding popularity of social games online. In support of the new season of “Californication,” Showtime launched an interactive video game using the annotation feature on YouTube. The game, “Fill in the Hank,” gives viewers an opportunity to test their skills to ﬁnish a variety of classic quotes from David Duchovny’s character, Hank Moody. It followed the successful launch of similar games coinciding with the new season of “Dexter” on the pay cabler, like “Where’s Dexter?” in which fans search for star Michael C. Hall in various scenarios. “We’re trying to extend the experience of the show beyond the show using casual games as one approach,” said Rob Hayes, SVP and general manager of digital media at Showtime Networks. “We try to socialize a lot of games that can be embedded into Facebook feeds, and that’s been very successful for us. Ultimately, that all builds up to original series’ brands and the network brands for Showtime.”

SPECIAL REPORTS

These initiatives are just several examples of how social gaming has blown up in the past year. USA Network has developed a popular casual gaming portal encompassing dozens of social games under the umbrella of its overall brand ID, “Characters Welcome.” “It serves as a huge platform for us to spread our brand, word-of-mouth and viral marketing,” said Jesse Redniss, VP of digital for USA Networks. “It’s become a big community. We’ve had success in aggregating the best game providers through our brand lens and concentrating on characters and players in building a lot of functionality for fans to share.” The best-performing games are the ones that most speak to fans, like “Character Mahjong,” where players are known to spend hours each day. The game incorporates 20-30 characters from shows including “Burn Notice,” “Royal Pains,” “Psych” and “Monk,” and is being updated constantly through the season. Some of the more immersive USA online games successfully integrate other product brands into the gameplay. “White Collar: Chasing the Shadow,” based on the detective show “White Collar,” uses a Ford Taurus to propel users in solving crime capers alongside the drama’s principal characters. It features SMS messages from the vehicle and sweepstakes opportunities. “What we’re doing with these executions is trying to extend brand loyalty,” Redniss said. Q

BRIEF 32

USA’s “Chasing the Shadow” and Showtime’s “Dexter’s Change the Baby”

CELEBRATING EXCELLENCE, INNOVATION AND CREATIVITY IN SPORTS MEDIA MARKETING

COMING NOVEMBER 2010 www.sportsmediamarketingawards.com

ADVISORY COUNCIL Peter Moore President, EA Sports Electronic Arts Mike McCarley SVP, Marketing, Promotion & Communications NBC Universal Sports & Olympics David Levy President of Sales, Distribution & Sports Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. Sean Bratches EVP, Sales & Marketing ESPN, Inc. Robert Gottlieb SVP/Creative Director, On-Air Promotions Fox Sports Bill BergoďŹ n SVP, Marketing & Promotion Versus Mark Waller CMO NFL

Introducing the Inaugural Sports Media Marketing Awards 2010 PromaxBDA is proud to announce the inaugural Sports Media Marketing Awards. Bringing together the executives, creatives and personalities driving success in the sports media industry, The Sports Media Marketing Awards celebrates the best strategic and creative marketing from the international community.

CALL FOR ENTRIES BEGINS JUNE 2010

Mary Beck SVP, Marketing & Promotion Major League Baseball Network Julie Souza VP, Strategic Planning & Business Development CBS College Sports Network Brian Jennings EVP, Marketing NHL Gil Haslam Creative Director Troika Design Group Jamie Barrett Partner/Creative Director Goodby, Silverstein & Partners Niels Schuurmans EVP, Marketing & Executive Creative Director Spike TV Steve Phelps SVP & CMO NASCAR Robyn Miller SVP, Marketing Tennis Channel Sarah Lyons VP, Sports & Upgrade Marketing DIRECTV Ross Greenburg President HBO Sports For more information, visit www.sportsmediamarketingawards.com

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GamePro Media Network, reaching 20 million gamers a month online! - comScore U.S.

VIDEO GAME MARKETING

BEST IN SHOW Video game evangelist Geoff Keighley has covered the video game business for 14 years, hosting Spike TV’s “GTTV,” the top-rated video game show on television, as well as MTV GameTrailers.com’s “Bonus Round” talk show. He also serves as a contributing writer to Entertainment Weekly. Keighley recently took time to pinpoint his favorite video game promotional campaigns from 2009 for Brief and to explain why the promotional materials left such an impact on audiences.

SPECIAL REPORTS BATMAN: ARKHAM ASYLUM CAMPAIGN

BRIEF 36

The history of Batman video games isn’t pretty — or successful. That all changed with “Batman: Arkham Asylum.” This dark, gritty Batman game had one of the most consistent campaigns in recent memory — each element felt connected to a larger brand identity. The campaign seemed inspired by The Dark Knight but never came off like an attempt to cash in on Christopher Nolan’s universe. All year long, a steady stream of trailers and TV spots revealed new villains and characters from the Joker to Poison Ivy and resulted in a campaign that felt as well-executed as that of a blockbuster motion picture. Each spot was both richly compelling to watch and deeply textured with story and dialogue, drawing players into the universe and convincing gamers that this was a Batman game worthy of attention.

RED DEAD REDEMPTION TRAILERS

MODERN WARFARE 2 SPOT

Somewhere along the way, video game console manufacturers forgot the humorous tone they used when advertising products back in the days of PlayStation 1 and Genesis (“Genesis does what Nintendon’t! ”). The latest brand campaign from PlayStation and Deutsch, however, is entertaining, effective and downright funny. Starring the character Kevin Butler, a VP for PlayStation, the spots are ﬁlled with hilarious one-liners and memorable scenarios. Whether it’s a guy saying that his girlfriend is addicted to “Uncharted 2,” or a Best Buy clerk asking for a “Price check on aisle BOOM! ” for a holiday Blu-ray promotion, the ads are ﬁlled with memorable copy that’s quoted all over the Internet. The campaign is so popular that Kevin Butler even has his own Twitter account, @thekevinbutler.

Today, so many game commercials and TV spots are cut from the same cloth: lots of fast-paced action set to a high-energy rock track. But for its latest game, “Red Dead Redemption,” Rockstar Games masterfully evokes the Western genre with a series of highly effective debut trailers. Filled with memorable dialogue and beautiful vistas, we are drawn into the world of John Marsden, an outlaw in the Western US circa 1908. The easy path would have been to sell this game as GTA in the Wild West, but Alex Moulle-Berteaux and the marketing team at Rockstar created a unique style and tone for these spots. It’s never easy to make gamers stop and notice a new intellectual property amidst a sea of sequels, but “Red Dead Redemption’s” campaign shows that with the right tone a game can break through the clutter.

How do you market one of the most anticipated games of all time? Activision, Inﬁnity Ward and Ant Farm answered the call with a killer 90 second TV spot for “Modern Warfare 2.” Whereas many marketers continue to use high-end, pre-rendered CGI or live-action for TV spots, this commercial effectively leverages in-game assets. To add extra grittiness, the entire trailer is set to Eminem’s “Til I Collapse,” a coup for Activision since Em rarely allows his music to be used for marketing. The result is a high-impact commercial that sells the game’s high-action combat. It seemed to work pretty well: “Modern Warfare 2” has already grossed more than a billion dollars. SPRING 2010

DEAR PLAYSTATION TV CAMPAIGN

VIDEO GAME MARKETING

MARKETING MANHUNT 2K Games Deploys Guerilla Tactics For BioShock 2 By Shanna Green Following the massive success 2007’s “BioShock,” 2K Games felt that “Something” special was in order for the sequel. With anticipation already high, the publisher took a close look at its fan base, then broke down the marketing according to the three types of gamers they wanted to reach: “BioShock” fans, hardcore gamers and casual gamers or “mouth breathers,” as the team termed them. 2K then set out to create campaigns geared at each group with targeted on-air, digital and print messages, but for the “BioShock” fans and hardcore gamers, they needed something altogether different. “That audience doesn’t want to be marketed to; they’ll smell that from a mile away,” said Tom Bass, marketing director of 2K Games. “So you can’t just say, I’m going to put an ad somewhere where these guys are going to see it, and that’ll change their mind. Those ads don’t make sense when it comes to the hardcore gamers – it’s more about awareness.”

SPECIAL REPORTS

So to stir up game awareness and engagement, 2K jumped in on guerilla marketing the title with a mysterious campaign dubbed “Something in the Sea.” Inspired by Wired magazine’s recent feature project, “The Search for Evan Radcliffe,” in which a staff writer went “off the grid” and challenged readers to find him, 2K posed fans with a similar challenge to solve the mystery of character Mark Meltzer and his search for his kidnapped daughter Cindy, which leads him to investigate “Something in the Sea.” In order to solve the mystery, fans had to work online with players all over the world to hunt for clues, but the real detective work was the legwork. “We had people meet in parks and switch briefcases – it was like a real 1960s manhunt,” Bass said. For the finale of the campaign, apt followers were led to a stylized retro crime scene in a San Francisco alleyway with more than 100 fans attending. “I wouldn’t characterize it as marketing at all,” said Matt Gorman, VP marketing for 2K Games. “It was experiential engagement. One of the funny phrases we used with the whole experience was, ‘You get to experience the experience before you experience the experience.’ It just made for a very coherent, authentic piece of our campaign that wasn’t a push-pull marketing stint.” Launched in March 2009, the campaign had been designed to lead up to “BioShock 2’s” original release date last fall, but when the game was pushed back to February 2010, instead of abandoning the project, the team expanded on it. The fans went wild. 2K received letters from people all over the world who were following the trail. The campaign was so popular not just with the fans, but also with the developers that they rewrote the fiction of the game to incorporate the Mark character – originally supposed to be killed off before the launch.

BRIEF 38

“It was like a textbook case of how marketing and development can really work together to create something that not only becomes a marketing asset, but ends up being something that slightly changes the narrative of the game itself,” said Bass. Q

2K Games utilized guerilla marketing tactics with their “Something in the Sea” campaign.

tv spots • trailers • print • packaging www.theantfarm.net

PR, SOCIAL MEDIA AND OUTREACH SPECIAL REPORTS BRIEF 42

SECURITY Facebook, Twitter Uniting Marketing, PR By Wayne Friedman

ided by the popularity of social media networks, are the lines between public relations and traditional marketing melding?

Maybe not for every TV programmer, but more broadcast marketers are thinking along these lines, utilizing their PR teams as vital tools to branding strategies, especially due to the increased speed of information, as well as the diversity of platforms to place TV messaging. For The CW’s new show, “High Society,” the network got its on-air marketing, public relations and digital groups together in the same room to discuss how to approach the promotion. “Digital, which social media is a piece of, is a thing that really helps us strategize more, because there are dual entry points to get into blogs,” said Rick Haskins, EVP of marketing and brand strategy for The CW. “We don’t want to be ﬁghting ourselves.” The CW can typically have its publicity team send out teaser video content to as many as 150 different bloggers — all in the hopes of creating social marketing viral buzz. And to best capitalize on this buzz, on-air marketing, public relations and digital marketing all need to know what is going on at the same time. “There should be no difference between a marketing plan and a PR plan,” said Haskins. “It should be seamless to the consumer.” Television executives say PR and marketing functions still exist separately, but the speed at which social media operates allows them to work in tandem and much more quickly. This is especially true in the world of broadcast sports, where entertainment and news are perpetually intertwined.

Reuters

Kiefer Sutherland does press for Fox’s “24.”

SPRING 2010

PR, SOCIAL MEDIA AND OUTREACH

President Barack Obama and announcer Joe Buck at the 2009 MLB All-Star Game.

“It’s the immediacy,” says Christina Miller, SVP of marketing and programming for Turner Sports and Cartoon Network Enterprises. “In the sports world, we live in real time.” Miller said TNT can adjust its Facebook NBA and NASCAR pages in far less time than it takes to generate an on-air message by changing up content for its consumers. “Public relations has a tool available to it now that has an immediate feedback,” said Jeff Pomeroy, senior director of public relations at Turner Broadcasting. For executives at Fox Sports, the opportunity to maximize exposure for its programming, especially when it comes to late-breaking developments such as President Obama showing up in the broadcast booth for the MLB All-Star game. “Although we’ve been working together forever, there has been a greater comprehensive effort in recent years to work together from the beginning and make sure we cover every aspect of potential outreach, particularly when it comes to social networking and blogs as well as utilizing talent for promotion,” said Dan Bell, VP of communications for Fox Sports. “After all, our goals are the same: to increase awareness.” Even as Facebook and Twitter are now considered standard operating procedure for marketing and publicity executives, the keys to success lie in more than just having a page.

SPECIAL REPORTS

“Social media is a game changer,” said Michael Benson, EVP, marketing for ABC Entertainment. “But it hasn’t completely reinvented the game.” For example, to promote the final season of “Lost,” ABC gave away 815 bottles (tied to Oceanic flight 815) with a fail-safe Dharma-like key that contained a USB drive with the first two minutes of the season premiere. “We sent it to just those 815 people knowing they would help us to market and talk about it,” said Benson. “You can’t just put something on Facebook and expect it to work. You have to give them something of value.” Many other TV marketing executives say new digital platforms help what they do. But new marketing resources aren’t exactly merging functions across PR and marketing lines. “Do we strategize? Yes. But the roles the same,” said one network public relations executive. “We don’t think about the platform,” said Adam Stotsky, president of entertainment marketing for NBC. “The message comes first.”

BRIEF 44

A long held belief for many TV marketers is that on-air promotion is still one of the best resources to market new shows. While viewers can get a taste of what TV shows are about in other digital and social media areas, on-air TV promos continues – overall – to be the best form of marketing.

“Social media is another tool,” said George Schweitzer, president of CBS Marketing Group and CMO of CBS Corp. “Word of mouth is a key decision-making factor, but there is no single strategy [to launching a TV show.]”

“Social media is a game changer, but it hasn’t completely reinvented the game.” Typical social media content pushes viewers and fans to dialogue – hopefully positively – for TV shows. “The most effective ones are the ones that are truly organic,” said Schweitzer. In one example, he said CBS pulled back from launching its own Twitter platform for a specific CBS comedy (he wouldn’t reveal which one) because serious fans already had their own strong social media efforts up and going. While some publicity and marketing efforts are moving closer due to the immediacy of social media, negative social media still pushes marketers back on their heels. Even before the O’Brien/Leno incident, NBC had another potential fire, as there was some question last year about “Chuck” not returning to NBC for another season. This got fans up in arms and talking negatively about NBC and its owner General Electric. “We are in a consumer business, and it would be unrealistic for us to completely try to control that conversation,” said NBC’s Stotsky. “We have to observe, listen and respond accordingly.” In the end, a combination of publicity, marketing and social media helped turn around the “Chuck” situation. NBC started a “Mission: Chuck Me Out” social media campaign to launch the show this season where viewers could get points for tweeting or messaging about “Chuck.” Players could turn those points into prizes including one lucky viewer’s picture becoming a part of Chuck’s usual ‘flashes’ where he sees photographs, graphics and other information. TV marketers warn that while social media platforms like Facebook are important, the focus, currently, still needs to be about getting people to watch TV programs in the traditional method — in front of TV screens. “What I don’t want to get caught up in is marketing the marketing,” said ABC’s Benson. “Do you want to use your resources to promote and market something on Facebook? It may be more valuable to send them to the TV network.” Q

SPRING 2010

NBC’s “Chuck Me Out!”

BLUEPRINTS: NBC’S “PARENTHOOD” CAMPAIGN When it came to promoting the star-filled launch of NBC’s new series “Parenthood,” especially in front of an Olympic-sized audience, marketing and public relations executives coordinated extensively to create a campaign that drove awareness for the show and the NBC family of stars, but also promoted a good cause. To kickstart the campaign, NBC teamed with the Boys & Girls Clubs of America’s Family Strengthening Initiative and launched The Parenthood Project, a collective effort that asked stars and consumers alike to discuss what parenthood means to them. For the first 5,000 individuals who completed the sentence, “Parenthood is…,” on the site, NBC made a donation to the Family Strengthening Initiative. “This project epitomized the benefits of the marketing and publicity departments working closely together,” said Cathy Goldman, senior group director, brand strategy and promotions at NBC. “In the past, we have been trying to leverage each other’s responsibilities and pull in our groups to figure out how to take our campaigns and make them even more powerful for people. With ‘Parenthood,’ I think we nailed it.”

BRIEF 46

With a good cause on deck, the team then turned toward its own NBC family to shoot short clips of what parenthood meant to them. Talent participating in the project included: Ron Howard, Peter Krause, Lauren Graham, Craig T. Nelson and Mae Whitman (from “Parenthood”); Brian Williams and David Gregory (NBC News); Joel McHale (“Community”); and Amy Poehler and Rashida Jones (“Parks and Recreation”). Thanks to the PR department, many of the clips were taken during NBC’s day on TCA’s Press Tour in January and the campaign subsequently drew the attention of news outlets around the country. “We knew it would help us to bring in the talent if there was a cause involved and that they would be more likely to sit in that chair if there was a good reason to do so,” said Lesley Cerwin, director of primetime, digital and marketing publicity at NBC Entertainment. “By working together from the beginning, we can help marketing executives layer more to their work.” Q —Chris Pursell

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PR, SOCIAL MEDIA AND OUTREACH SPECIAL REPORTS BRIEF 48

Tweet and See

0U[LYHJ[P]L +LZPNU :[\KPV =PZ\HSPaLZ [OL :VJPHS 4LKPH *VU]LYZH[PVU )` :OHUUH .YLLU If you’re feeling a little lost in the social media mire, don’t worry, San Francisco interactive creative studio Stamen Design is one of the companies supplying a visionary approach that just might help you get your head around it, while turning seemingly banal thoughts into an artistic project at the same time. Stamen specializes in data visualization, or taking what’s being said on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter and linking it up with corresponding images, providing a snapshot of what those conversations actually look like, and it’s changing the way companies approach their social media strategies. “What we’ve learned is to use Twitter as it’s intended, not always broadcasting tune-in times but making the conversation two-way, re-tweeting and replying to people who ask questions,” said Michael Scogin, VP, wireless for MTV, who worked with Stamen on a tweet tracker for the 2009 MTV VMAs. “There’s a one-to-one connection between what’s happening on TV and what people are talking about on Twitter. It shows social media in a way that was interesting to people who didn’t care about it otherwise.” For the VMA project, Stamen collaborated with social monitoring company Radian6 to create a real-time tweet tracker visualization of the Twitter activity surrounding the awards show. Built to run during the live event over the course of a few hours, that tracker was indented to showcase “Who’s in the Spotlight,” and it ended up becoming a live, collective expression of the Twitterverse’s take on the Kanye West/Taylor Swift controversy. The images from Stamen’s Twitter tracker swiftly changed after Kayne took the microphone away from VMA winner Swift with some of the most tweeted keywords surrounding him becoming “love,” “award” and “asshole.” “Twitter is at a scale and a pace now where we can have this incredible parity between what’s happening on TV and what’s happening on Twitter, on screen, etc.,” explained Sha Hwang, design technologist for Stamen. “So you have this effect of all the multiple performances and celebrities jostling for attention over the course of a very short event, and you have events where the instant Kanye West jumps on stage he also blots out everyone else on the visualization.” Stamen also worked on a project for the Olympics, which unlike the VMAs was designed to last the entire duration of the event and provide a snapshot of the Olympics as a whole, rather than what people were saying during the span of a few minutes or hours. Hwang

2009 VMA and 2010 Olympics Twitter trackers

said this provided a chance to more deeply explore the data, therefore allowing them to put out detailed graphics of what #hockey looks like. (Hint: It contains a lot of maple leaves.) “For the Olympics project, we were able to really dive in and build our own Twitter monitoring back-end from scratch,” Hwang said. “We’re calling it Hose Drawer, ie. tapping into the ﬁrehose of the Twitter stream. This allowed us to work directly with Swarm interactive to build more robust moderation tools and really ﬁne tune the product to match the needs of the Twitter tracker and vice versa.” As the conversation continues to grow, Stamen intends to stay on top of it. Founder and creative director Eric Rodenbeck has stated that he expects that the data visualization space is “about to go completely bananas where ‘bananas’ means ‘taken for granted’ in the sense that no major cultural event will feel complete without a corresponding live data visualization.” Q Hillary Atkin contributed to this article.

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PR, SOCIAL MEDIA AND OUTREACH SPECIAL REPORTS BRIEF 50

A SOCIAL EVENT Utilizing Twitter to market entertainment brands is a growing phenomenon in which rules are being written and rewritten almost daily — in 140 characters, of course. Brief correspondent Hillary Atkin has pulled together thoughts from some of the best minds in the marketing business to quantify some strategies for success.

“It is instantaneous. You have to be committed to continuously feed something interesting or new. ”

USE AS NEWS

DON’T OVER-PROMOTE

One of the most effective ways of reaching your target audience in a timely fashion is through Twitter. They’ve already expressed great interest in your properties, so use it to give them breaking news and announcements about your shows and stars. After all, Paula Abdul did so when she announced her resignation from “American Idol” — to great fanfare. It’s an effective way to create online buzz and push followers to other platforms as well.

There is such a thing as too much, and in the Twitterverse as in the real world, that translates to annoyance, which can then turn off users to your brand and its partners. It’s an issue of concern to Jesse Redniss, VP of digital for USA Network, which has integrated partnership deals with brands including Ford and Hyundai.

“The power of Twitter is its real-time search engine,” said Rob Hayes, SVP and general manager of digital media at Showtime Networks. “It allows us to break news and information. Our PR group uses it very successfully. We have Twitter feeds for each of our shows. The night of the Golden Globes, “Dexter” was one of top trending terms on Twitter. That’s hard to do because of so much activity. It creates activity around the brand and our shows, and gives us promotional impressions to those who are not subscribers to Showtime.”

ACTIVELY UPDATE If you don’t use it, you lose it — your audience, that is. “It needs to be actively updated to be successful,” said Gina Hughes, AMC’s VP of marketing. “It is instantaneous. You have to be committed to continuously feed something interesting or new. It depends on what the property is. We try to be as authentic as possible with reference to production storylines and characters. It needs to feel organic and respectful to what the series is. We make sure we’re using it in a way that’s additive.”

“Everyone is trying to ﬁgure this out,” said Redniss. “The presence of advertising brands that are in your face too much with a message, that’s not what fans are coming for. There’s a good way to organically pull that into an overall message. Some are too aggressive, and that starts to annoy people. We try to be extremely careful with brand integration and create a nice balance and not blast fans with pure advertising messages.”

BE CREATIVE Many fans said “enough” to one popular television show’s repeated Twittering of the same message over a period of days leading up to its season premiere, which sang the same tune of “Watch the premiere Sunday at 9/8 Central.” Creative concepts that have worked include using show writers to constantly update what they’re working on, posting photos from the set and even leaking information about scenes being shot. A brand’s Twitter use can appear disingenuous and inhuman if it’s too structured or repetitive with its approach, to the point where the community may be turned off, according to Michael Brito, a social media strategist at Intel. Q

TOP TWITTER TRENDING TOPICS FOR 2009: TV SHOWS

Galactica

Glee

American Idol

LOST

American Idol Glee Teen Choice Awards SNL Dollhouse Grey’s Anatomy VMAs Battlestar Galactica BET Awards Lost

Saturday Night Live

Grey’s Anatomy

SPRING 2010

PR, SOCIAL MEDIA AND OUTREACH SPECIAL REPORTS BRIEF 52

PUBLIC SERVANTS

Clockwise from top: Chris Pursell, Jeremy Blacklow, Adam Rockmore, Lisa Gregorian and Joe Earley Photography by Kelsey Stefanson, bpg

In the age of social networking and multiple platforms, where maximizing exposure on tight budgets is the rule of the day, the role of publicity as a marketing tool has only become more vital to the success of a campaign. After all, Facebook fan pages need to be populated, talent blogs uploaded, viral videos planted and Twitter accounts updated, so cohesive efforts within the two departments are now often generated early in the process, a notable shift from previous decades. Brief Editor-in-Chief Chris Pursell sat down with some of the names in the industry driving that change and discussed the roles of publicity in the digital age, how marketing can tap their expertise and the new challenges of generating press. Participating in the discussion were: Joe Earley, EVP of marketing and communications at Fox Broadcasting Company; Lisa Gregorian, EVP of worldwide marketing at Warner Bros. Television Group; Adam Rockmore, SVP of marketing for ABC Daytime and SOAPnet; Jeremy Blacklow, managing editor of â&#x20AC;&#x153;Access Hollywood;â&#x20AC;? Steve Webster, president and CEO of agency CMPR; and Todd Beck, president of Beck Media and Marketing.

Left to right: Todd Beck and Steve Webster

How is PR being used as a marketing tool? Joe Earley: We’ve entered this day where the media value that publicity generates far exceeds what a media campaign can be. It didn’t necessarily used to be that way. We are making sure that both are coordinated every step of the way. Some of the ways we’re doing that – we just had a brand-new promo for “Glee” premiere during “American Idol” last night. The PR team took that to the outlets ﬁrst on Monday, and we had spots break Monday night and Tuesday night, so basically our promo ran on “ET,” “E!” and “Extra.” In the old regime that wouldn’t have happened; a promo would be made, it would be on air, and publicity would try to get a clip and send it out. But we deﬁnitely believe there’s tremendous value in crossover and creating stunts and certainly social networking.

Lisa, you said it was social media that started bringing that about? Gregorian: We were joking that publicity is sort of like the unsung hero in many cases, and people are always looking from a senior level, saying “Why do you need all those people working in publicity?” And we would say, “Because they’re non-paid media. Stop calling them publicity.” You can either spend a tremendous amount of money in media, or you can see the value that they bring, and I think one of the things we try to do is bring measurement tools into the process. We are constantly giving information on the value and going back and saying, “Look, this was about three million dollars worth of exposure and value,” to put it in a perspective of non-paid media so everyone else within the company understands the true value.

Earley: We do the exact same thing. And it started back when I was in publicity. We started valuing what was being

SPRING 2010

Lisa Gregorian: It’s similar with us. It’s from a producer point of view, but the example we were talking about earlier is a three-city-tour of “The Vampire Diaries” cast at Hot Topic. That’s something that originated with the marketing group, but really required a tremendous amount of collaboration between publicity and marketing. We had 4,000 kids attend, we had bands performing, we had the cast ﬂying in. You’re seeing it get closer and closer, and I think social networking started it.

Now marketing and publicity are so closely aligned because any time you touch the talent or you want something original, which is pretty much all the material we’re trying to create, you bring publicity into the mix.

PR, SOCIAL MEDIA AND OUTREACH

“The press release is probably the worst offender when it comes to tools used badly in PR because it has been around the longest, and pretty much anyone can cobble one together and email it to a million people.”

Left to right: “General Hospital’s” Karaoke Challenge on SOAPnet; The CW’s “Vampire Diaries”

done on local affiliates, to prove the value of the local affiliate, because at the network, a lot of people have “network-think.” They believe that the network is what we put on two hours a day. We’re trying to show that no, we’re 200 separate stations that make up the affiliates, and we value a spot on there, and what publicity generates. From a PR point of view, are you finding that what may have been at one point just press releases has evolved into something entirely different?

SPECIAL REPORTS

Todd Beck: Yeah, absolutely. I think a press release is a tool, the way Facebook is a tool and Twitter is a tool. The press release, I think, is misconstrued by some otherwise really smart people. They think that PR equals press release, and we are constantly re-educating people that PR does not equal press release. PR is a collection of tools that you use as well as you can to get the results you want. The press release is probably the worst offender when it comes to tools used badly in PR because it has been around the longest, and pretty much anyone can cobble one together and email it to a million people. You couldn’t be less effective than that. If you look beyond the press release, it’s about connecting the publicity campaign to real value. And the most rudimentary measure, I think, is the ad equivalency, but that doesn’t take into account that, if it’s in a credible media outlet, and someone other than the advertising department is saying it, then I would almost multiply it by three. And if you’ve got a celebrity in it, I’d multiply it by two, so your 30-second story on “Access Hollywood” is 10 times more valuable than a 30-second ad on “Access Hollywood.” Because sometimes the direct ad equivalency numbers, frankly, look underwhelming. Joe, you talk about an afﬁliate in market 150, the one-minute segment on the local news? The services that track these things will say, “Yeah, that was worth $147.13.” And you’d have to get hundreds of those to make it worth the $20,000 you spent on the satellite media tour, but once you get that multiplier effect in there, I think you really get some impact. Gregorian: But when you start analyzing it, and you look really deeply at the measurement, you also look at the demo-

BRIEF 54

graphics, and we would say that we could achieve more doing something with an online outlet for a CW show than we may be able to do with traditional media. Even though the value overall looks like it’s higher, it’s not. Earley: And to the point that you were making, the consumers have all these filters up, and so when we create an ad, buy an ad and serve it to them, they know it’s an ad. [When] a third party does a profile on a show and says how amazing it is, that gets by a filter. That’s someone else recommending it. Adam Rockmore: It depends what the goal is too. When you serve up the ad, you might just want to get the awareness out, but then you’re doing something else for deeper engagement, or just for quick tune-in. I think the funny thing is, way back when, word of mouth was literally word of mouth, and people would tell other people, they would just do it in their own little circle of friends. Now the circle of friends expands – through email and everything else – so word of mouth is a much bigger thing. At our place, our PR group is a different group, it’s a separate department, so we have this task force, so to speak, where we all coordinate everything. To me, it’s just a very wellchoreographed dance that you do with your colleague. What’s the entry point right now for bringing the PR team in on a campaign? Rockmore: With soaps, which don’t have any seasons, it’s the really big storylines that we promote, so as a marketer it’s important to get involved early with PR, Web, the show writers and everyone else as soon as those storylines are created. Steve Webster: Do you have crews come out to your marketing shoots or your end shots? Because for ESPN, we’ve been able to do the football shoots, basketball shoots, the NBA campaign, before it’s a month out from even being edited and ready to air. We’re able to capitalize on having the athletes there, because it’s not just some random actors that are in the spots. For ESPN’s NBA campaign, we got coverage from Adweek and from Ad Age, which was great for consumer marketing for ESPN.

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SPRING 2010

THE ADVENTURE BEGINS

PR, SOCIAL MEDIA AND OUTREACH SPECIAL REPORTS BRIEF 56

Rockmore: We’ll coordinate everything with the press folks, so if they need something, we’ll come back and say, “Hey, we’re going to want to shoot this as well.” Sometimes, we’ve been covering things for behind-the-scenes shots for the Web or promo, and then we’ll talk to the press department. We’re trying to make sure everyone’s coordinated because one, we don’t want to bother the shows that much, and two, you want to make sure that there’s a synchronized communication so that if press wants to give footage to someone first, we know that order of events so that we don’t burst the bubble for somebody else. We want to make sure if we’re going to shoot talent for a promo, that we know how the Web needs it, how press needs it, how everyone needs it because, as with everyone, we don’t have enough money to duplicate these things. And frankly, access isn’t such that you can do it all the time. Jeremy, obviously “Access Hollywood” is on the receiving end of all of these pitches, plus they’re trying to create plugs on their own. What works? What do you pay attention to? Jeremy Blacklow: Anything that feels like we discovered it on our own, like Todd was saying, that didn’t come from the traditional press release. The social media networks, Twitter and Facebook, which have been such game-changers from the media standpoint, are working both ways for us. They let us take the “Access Hollywood” brand out there when we have news to break, and they are great sources for finding stories. Celebrities have been tweeting like crazy. I would say a third of my stories all day long come from Twitter, from things that celebrities are saying or from things that we’re learning about that other media outlets post on Twitter. You know, I will see Zap2It post a story, or Mike Ausiello from Entertainment Weekly post a story, and two seconds later I’m on the phone, calling ABC publicity about the story because we all piggyback on each other. So I’m checking RSS feeds all day with my Google Reader, to see what every other site that I’m competitive with is doing. It’s really been fascinating. Who’s officially in charge of social media – is it marketing or PR? Gregorian: Right now, marketing runs the PR group, so it’s under new media, with our operation, and we’re having discussions about whether or not that should transfer under publicity.

Earley: Ours is under new media – it’s sort of the same. It just takes time – it’s separate, but they work hand-in-hand. Publicity is handing them things, it’s all very coordinated, because it’s a beast that must be fed, and so you’ve got to generate content, and you’ve got to push it out. And when something goes wrong, or when it turns against you, you have to get in there and manage it very quickly. We did Tweet-peats for both “Glee” and “Fringe.” And on “Glee,” the fans loved it, they could not get enough, ate it all up. The “Fringe” fans hated it. They went nuts, because it was the first time that episode had repeated – “Fringe” doesn’t repeat very often – and those who hadn’t seen it were watching for the first time and those who had seen it wanted to dissect the episode, and they didn’t need a little lower third bubble popping up with a chat going on, and so we learned a lesson from there. Rockmore: With us, it’s split in a lot of ways. Press is handling the traditional press, marketing handles Facebook, and digital handles Twitter. It’s really pretty easy, because we have a very passionate fanbase on the soap side of the business. And also we have “The View.” “The View” works really well with Twitter, because of the talent on that, and the soaps work really well with Facebook, and so we’re figuring out what’s working for each thing. In the case of “The View,” we work with the digital folks and the press folks to figure out [the best strategy]. For example, “Hot Topics” is one of our most popular segments, and it’s the first 10 to 20 to 30 minutes of the show. Because we don’t know the Hot Topic until that morning because it’s live, Twitter’s a great way to get it out, and then we feed that post into the website or Facebook. At the end of the day, everyone’s just got to get together early and figure out roles and responsibilities. Blacklow: I think it’s interesting, you just said that Twitter worked well for “The View” because of the individual personalities – we had the same experience. Another digital hat that I wear is promoting the digital identities of our on-air talent. When Shaun Robinson, one of our anchors who’s African American, did an editorial last week on Gabourey Sidibe not being on the cover of Vanity Fair, it led to huge pickup, because it came from Shaun’s voice. If I had just sent that out under the “Access Hollywood” banner, it wouldn’t have picked up as much interest. So we’ve had that same experience – Twitter’s really good for personalities, and Facebook is better when we’re just putting out a story.

Left to right: “Access Hollywood’s” Billy Bush speaks with Ashley Tisdale; TheWB.com’s “Children’s Hospital.”

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PR, SOCIAL MEDIA AND OUTREACH SPECIAL REPORTS BRIEF 58

“Engage the community. Don’t just go on Twitter and just keep tweeting out and pushing out your message and selling, but actually participate.” When it comes to social media for up-and-comers, what are some key points to remember? Blacklow: Don’t give away too much, leave a little bit of mystery. Gregorian: What we would say the number one rule is, and I think Ashton Kutcher, for one, is great at this, is be a part of the community. Engage the community. Don’t just go on Twitter and just keep tweeting out and pushing out your message and selling, but actually participate. You’re now a member of that community, and you shouldn’t be in there shilling all the time. And I think he is a member of the community, he’s a serious member of the community, and as much as he tweets too much, he really has embraced the others who are enthusiastic about that community. And in that way, he’s done a great job. Blacklow: I completely agree with you, actually. I don’t think he has gone too far. He’s found that balancing act of being so active – and when you have a million plus followers, you do have a lot of power as an individual. You really can get anything out there that you want. Gregorian: We had a show with Rob Corddry that we produced for TheWB.com called “Childrens’ Hospital,” and three or four weeks after we launched it on TheWB.com, Ashton tweeted that he loved this show. He sent the link, and people started watching it. It was really interesting because it wasn’t a property Ashton had anything to do with, and yet he found it and shared it, and will constantly share things that he’s finding within the Twitter community with others. And personally, I do think he tweets too much, but I do enjoy the fact that he is so engaged with the community. It’s the same as the actor who walks the floor at Comic-Con and talks to the fans, versus the actor who comes in with a security detail, does his scheduled appearance and then leaves. Webster: For example, with Twitter, I would say that one of the coolest things I’ve ever heard is what Lance Armstrong does. He’ll tweet about how he’s about to go take a ride through Griffith Park in two hours, and people can come and ride with him. Out of anything I’ve ever heard on Twitter, that’s the best thing I’ve ever heard. I just think that really just opens up the world – his world – to anybody who’s following him and wants to be a part of it. Earley: And you can see, “Glee” is just a perfect example for everything! Because these actors are young, they were already tweeting. It was a part of their life, and they do it for real. They’re a part of that world, and they interact with their fans. We have some older talent – and by older I don’t mean grandparents, just a few years older – but behind the Twitter curve, and when we say, “We’re setting up a profile for you and we want you to be active,” they just can’t get into that mindset. They think, “I don’t want to be telling people what I’m doing.” And then you see this whole cast of people on Twitter — it’s organic.

Glee’s Sue Sylvester on Twitter

Blacklow: One of the small joys of my life has become following Sue Sylvester on Facebook! They’re using characters’ tweeting for “Glee,” and I have come to develop this whole back story of her character through what the character’s revealing on her Facebook updates. It’s amazing! Todd, what have you found to be wary of, when it comes to social media? Beck: Well, I think one of the most interesting things about social media is that the rule in traditional TV PR used to be, if you didn’t have tune-in, you didn’t have anything. If a story shows up in print, but it doesn’t say when and where you can watch the show, our client could say, “That’s going to make zero people watch this show. How are they supposed to find it?” To drive tune-in, you had to create the awareness, the interest, and the intent to view it, and tell them when and where to watch. Now that time period info matters less, because the show is probably on DVR, Hulu, or some other website. Rockmore: But we prefer TV. Beck: So, social media is about what we sometimes call “the other 167.” There are 168 hours in every week – 7 times 24. Somebody can watch a one-hour show for one hour, if they don’t fast-forward through it, which we hope they don’t. So, they’ve got another 167 hours to do whatever else they want – play video games, go to the park, sleep, play with the kids, eat, work – how much of that 167 can you reclaim for your show? And the answer is, probably a lot, because it’s not just an hour of TV and some promos and some billboards that they see while they’re driving to work; it’s Facebook updates and Twitter comments, and “Did you see that thing last night?” It’s the water cooler, but the water cooler is everywhere. And that, I think, is really the power that social media gives us. When you add to that the multi-platform multiplier effect of, “I’m at work, but I’m also on my Blackberry or my iPhone, and I’ve got Twitterrific running and Facebook open in my browser, and my TV is on,” then you don’t have just 167 hours of mindshare, you’ve got 167 hours times four screens, five devices. So everybody’s attention is fragmented, but the amount of places and times that you can reach them is much bigger than in a linear, one-screen world. Q

CREATIVE DESIGN TOOLS

SPECIAL REPORTS

BRIEF

ECONOMIC INDICATORS Low Cost Tools Yielding High End Results By Daisy Whitney Have you heard? Low-cost is all the rage in the media business. The trend that started a few years ago as YouTube broke down the walls between consumers and, well, other consumers, is filtering into the broadcast design business too. Just as inexpensive cameras and easily accessible Web tools have made anyone a potential broadcaster, designers too are turning to more affordable tools. To be sure, the professional market will need the higher-end capabilities of visual effects workhorses like Autodesk and Maya for some time, but some designers are becoming equally facile using Mac computers and less expensive Adobe software suites for many of their projects. “It’s not so much because the tools have changed, but it’s the way we interact and work with other agencies,” said Peter King Robbins, chief creative officer at Bird, a 10-person branding agency in Los Angeles, which has worked on the PBS Kids Sprout rebrand as well as FearNet. “We are doing a lot of work collaboratively with other agencies to create tease spots and online stuff and we’re not so much driven by specialists anymore in any kind of technology,” he said. For Robbins purposes, tools like Webex and GotoMeeting.com that allow quick, highspeed sharing of files are just as important as design tools.

For the most part, those tools do the trick. They’re also becoming the new backbone of design because other agencies use them too, and that helps speed up the workload

SPRING 2010

“We have a nice Mac set up with Adobe After Effects and animation tools and several stations where we do comprehensive work in Photoshop,” he said.

CREATIVE DESIGN TOOLS

for the increasingly collaborative nature of many campaigns today, Robbins explained. Similarly, NBC’s promotions department is also leaning on lower-cost Macs and Adobe tools, said Kari St. Clair, director of production for the Magic Room, the promo department at NBC. That’s partly because NBC’s current look is a clean, simple logo that doesn’t require any fancy elements. “We have 14 designers and everybody, as of a few years ago, is on a Mac desktop,” she said. “We use Adobe After Effects and Maxon’s Cinema 4D, and everybody is set up with Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator.” But the Magic Room still uses Autodesk and Maya for some projects, she said. For the visual-effects-rich cross-promos that ran during the Olympics for Universal’s Clash of the Titans, NBC purchased additional plug-ins for Maya to create the needed look. Other work for the cross promo was completed in Autodesk and Cinema 4D. The latter is regarded as a less expensive option than Maya. Magic House leaned on many of those programs for the promos.

SPECIAL REPORTS

“We are marrying Olympics footage of athletes doing amazing things and transitioning that into moments from the movie,” St. Clair explained.

“We are speeding up with technology, so it often comes down the person doing the job and their expertise, training and skill set.” The concept emanated from a similar campaign NBC crafted for the 2008 Summer Olympics that merged footage of Olympic athletes with scenes from the movie The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor. At one point in that spot, the mummy turned into a track star. Those sorts of mash-ups became de rigueur throughout the spot. In the new promo, it’s very much the same. “Let’s say with Clash of the Titans, some guys are playing hockey on the ice, and they bring a stick up in the air toward the camera, and it turns shiny and reﬂective, and now it turns into a Clash of the Titans guy holding a sword,” St. Clair explained.

BRIEF 62

NBC leaned on Autodesk’s Flame and Inferno for some of the work in melding the scenes and also on Maya for additional 3D elements, she said. The campaign is a good example of why promo departments still need some of the highest-end software tools to get the job done.

Clash of the Titans

The trend to use more economical tools mirrors the transition seen a decade ago when designers moved away from the dedicated and proprietary machines that ran Quantel’s Paintbox, which is now largely a relic of the past, to create broadcast graphics, St. Clair said. “We are speeding up with technology, so it often comes down the person doing the job and their expertise, training and skill set,” she added. Even some 3D programs are becoming more affordable, said Rex Cook, CEO at Avatar Labs, a digital design studio. Cook has been using software from Unity Technologies called Unity that operates like a game engine to create 3D iPhone games and first-person shooter games for Web browsers. Avatar Labs used it to create an iPhone app for Disney’s film Bolt. The license is $2,500 per machine, a lot less expensive than other gaming engines, which can run closer to $50,000. “You used to have to have a million-dollar box, and then Autodesk came in and After Effects, and you can do the same thing for a fraction of the cost,” said Cook. With the push toward 3D, stalwarts like Autodesk are also amping up their 3D tools and adapting their solutions to the lower-cost mindset. Autodesk launched Smoke for the Mac platform in December, the first system product made available for the Mac, said Bruno Sargeant, senior television industry manager. It costs about $15,000. “It’s important to compete at a lower cost, but we’re not making a $9.99 product,” Sargeant said. “Smoke is a specific toolset and addresses specific problem, and it’s still used as a professional tool.” Q

THE RED ZONE When the Red One camera came out, filmmakers everywhere hailed it as a revolution in film technology. Now, it’s not the only player in town. With the introduction of DSLR cameras complete with video functionality, such as the Canon 5D Mark II, shooting film has become even more portable – and less expensive – than ever before. Now, co-workers are debating which brings more to the table. In this YouTube-happy age of fresh-faced filmmakers cobbling together fantastic, visually dynamic shorts on shoestring budgets, this technology seems to have exploded into existence at precisely the right time. For some, it’s not just the price point that sells the 5D SLR over the costlier Red. “It’s just the quality of the footage, the look of the footage,” said Robert Gottlieb, SVP and head creative director for Fox Sports. “To my eye, the 5D looks a lot more filmic than the Red. The Red still has some sort of video feel to it – maybe it’s a sharper, harder image – as compared to the 5D.” Along with the cinematic feel of DSLR footage, there’s the comparably smaller size of the camera. The 5D’s still-camera portability means it can go where most 35mm traditional film cameras, or even a Red, cannot.

Combined with its ability to shoot in lowlight or natural-light conditions, the DSLR opens up a multitude of new opportunities for an aspiring ﬁlmmaker who doesn’t have the budget for expensive locations or lighting equipment. “It’s a lot more accessible,” commented Gottlieb. “For those that are smart enough and creative enough to take advantage of it, it could be really revolutionary.” Despite the amazing breakthroughs pioneered by the 5D SLR, there are still a few areas where the Red has its competition beat.

“I think that the Scarlet camera that Red is coming out with is going to be kind of like the perfect in-between of the 5D and the Red One,” Lecuona said. “You’re going to have the raw format, and all the professional features of a high-end camera, on the size of a 5D. The Red was a game-changer, then the 5D changed the game again, and now Red will change it again with the Scarlet.” At any rate, the inﬂuence of lower-cost, more versatile cameras has certainly breathed new life into an industry that has been bogged down by rising VFX costs and shrinking budgets. Q —Rebecca Job

“The biggest benefit to the Red is obviously that it shoots in raw format,” said Guillermo Lecuona, a freelance director and designer at Fox Sports/Fox Networks Group. “The files that it generates contain a lot more information than the 5D, which shoots and records to a compressed format. So, the files coming out of the Red you can actually adjust in post-production quite a bit more than even a 35 mm film sometimes.” And according to Lecuona, Red Digital’s new Scarlet camera may just combine the best of both the Red and the DSLR.

SPRING 2010

CREATIVE DESIGN TOOLS

.9(7/0* 3(5.<(., Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s hard to believe itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s been 20 years since Adobe ďŹ rst launched Photoshop, an instrument thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s now second nature to an entire generation of designers, both in the ofďŹ ce and at home. Brief takes its own photographic look at the evolution of this tool. september 1996

PHOTOSHOP 4.0 codename: big electric cat Introduces actions and adjustment layers.

1987 Thomas Knoll writes a program to display grayscale images on his Macintosh Plus and calls it Display.

september 1994

PHOTOSHOP 3.0 codename: tiger mountain Ah, layers: The world would never be the same again.

1988 Knoll and his brother, John, collaborate to change it to a full-ďŹ&#x201A;edged editing program, now renamed ImagePro.

may 1998

PHOTOSHOP 5.0 codename: strange cargo With the magnetic lasso and editable type.

march 1988

PHOTOSHOP 0.87 It is licensed to Adobe.

february 1990

PHOTOSHOP 1.0

october 2000

(EXCLUSIVE TO MAC) Releases with color correction, curves, and the clone tool.

PHOTOSHOP 6.0 june 1991

PHOTOSHOP 2.0 FOR MAC

codename: fast eddy Now with paths, CMYK color, and the pen tool.

Jgfejfi\[ Yp G9J $ )('' :ipjkXc ;i`m\# 8ic`e^kfe# M8 )))')% Mf`[ n_\i\ gif_`Y`k\[% Ef gliZ_Xj\ e\Z\jjXip% <ekip [\X[c`e\ +&(/&('% Fg\e kf c\^Xc L%J% i\j`[\ekj (/ Xe[ fc[\i% G9J \dgcfp\\j efk \c`^`Yc\ ]fi gi`q\j% KfkXc gi`q\j mXcl\ Xggifo% +#),'% :fdgc\k\ ilc\j Xk m`[\fZfek\jk%gYj%fi^%

codename: venus in furs Vector shapes, liquefy ďŹ lter, layer styles are all added.

april 2002

PHOTOSHOP 7.0 codename: liquid sky Enter the healing brush and fully vector text.

april 2007

PHOTOSHOP CS3 codename: red pill With the quick selection tool and the reďŹ ne edge tool.

october 2008

PHOTOSHOP CS4

october 2003

codename: stonehedge The masks panel and ďŹ&#x201A;uid canvas rotation are added.

PHOTOSHOP CS codename: dark matter The program is bundled in Adobe Creative Suite, alongside Illustrator and InDesign. Match color, real-time histogram, hierarchical layer groups and shadow/highlight are added.

april 2005

PHOTOSHOP CS2 codename: space monkey With Adobe Bridge 1.0, the spot healing brush is added on the toolbar.

2009

PHOTOSHOP MOBILE Adobe launches Photoshop app for the iPhone that includes basic editing and color adjustment tools.

SPRING 2010

CREATIVE DESIGN TOOLS

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It’s that time of year again. With NAB around the corner and even more platforms to prepare for, here’s a look at some of the recent and upcoming products that are capturing the attention of the industry.

SPECIAL REPORTS

COMPANY: ADOBE PRODUCT: ADOBE AIR

COMPANY: VIZRT PRODUCT: VIZ TRIO ONE-BOX

COMPANY: APPLE PRODUCT: FINAL CUT STUDIO 2010

COMPANY: AUTODESK PRODUCT: MAYA 2011

With support for the Android platform expected to grow in 2010, Adobe AIR allows developers to create a featurerich environment for delivering applications outside the mobile browser and across multiple operating systems via mobile marketplaces and app stores.

With a mission to “pack more power into smaller boxes,” Vizrt is set to showcase the Viz Trio One-Box at NAB. The latest version of its Viz Trio realtime 3D graphics and animation system runs on a single PC with two graphics cards onboard. This means that there is no negative impact on graphics quality or rendering speed. With Trio One-Box, both the VGA preview and ﬁnal program signals can be viewed on one PC.

Last July, Apple introduced the new version of Final Cut Studio, the company’s high-end video production suite, which includes Final Cut Pro 7, Motion 4, Soundtrack Pro 3, Color 1.5, Compressor 3.5 and DVD Studio Pro 4.

Autodesk will be unveiling Maya 2011 in April, featuring a redesigned user-interface based on Nokia Qt, with simpler customization and dockable elements. The graphics core has been revamped to improve performance with complex scenes, while also enhancing the viewport feedback. Meanwhile, a new camera sequencer will provide multi-camera editing capabilities for pre-visualization and moviemaking production using a Maya timeline.

The tool extends the functionality supported in Adobe AIR to mobile devices and allows developers to create contextual applications characterized by their ability to adapt presentation and performance to different application contexts while reusing code for each device or platform. Application contexts include different display screens, devicespeciﬁc interaction techniques and functionality speciﬁc to the mobile platform, as well as differences in network access and bandwidth.

BRIEF 66

“With the new Viz Trio OneBox, the work of two PCs is now being done on one,” explained Gerhard Lang, chief engineering ofﬁcer, Vizrt. “By consolidating two PCs down to one, we’re saving our customers space. This solves a critical concern for OB [Outside Broadcast] mobile environments and studios where desk and rack space is at a premium.”

In Final Cut Pro 7, editors are able to edit faster with the help of three new ProRes versions including ProRes 422 (Proxy) for offline editing; ProRes 422 (LT) for projects that require reduced file sizes at broadcast quality; and ProRes 4444 for compositing and digital workflows that require the highestpossible quality. Final Cut also includes support for iChat Theater, which provides editors with the ability to collaborate with clients in real-time and output video to clients.

Version 2011 brings a dual quaternion option for smooth skinning, along with interactive volume binding, an enhanced Paint Skin Weights tool, deformer weight mirroring, and a surface falloff mode for the Wrap deformer. Paint and rotoscoping capabilities have also been improved with a new Vector Paint feature.

SPRING 2010

CREATIVE DESIGN TOOLS

Autodesk’s tools are practically staples for designers in the broadcast promotion business. Because its products are geared for the professional market, Brief correspondent Daisy Whitney talked to Bruno Sargeant, the software maker’s senior television industry manager, and asked him about the latest developments in design on TV. In a word – 3D. Expect Autodesk standbys like Smoke and Flame to include broader 3D capabilities. With the push by consumer electronics makers to roll out 3D sets and the consumer interest in 3D buoyed by ﬁlms like Avatar, the TV business is on the cusp of a big new change.

AUTODESK SEEKS TO BE FIRST IN THE THIRD DIMENSION

SPECIAL REPORTS

What are you focusing on in 2010 for the television promotion and broadcast design market? Sargent: Our core focus is 3D from a technology perspective, and you’ll see that across all our products, like Smoke and Flame. You will see a much tighter integration with products like Maya where you can take more of the 3D assets from applications and integrate them into scenes which you are creating in Flame and Smoke. Why the focus on 3D? Sargent: 3D is becoming more accessible. As the performance of workstations gets faster and the expectations of viewers get incredibly higher because they are exposed to more CG on a daily basis, there is a new threshold. What does 3D in broadcast design work look like for the average user? Sargent: There is a lot of technology that crosses over. CG is computer graphics, and 3D is three-dimensional computer graphics. Then there is 3D like how some TV and movie content is delivered, and that’s a delivery mechanism. With Avatar, it’s 3D and computer-generated, and that 3D is maintained throughout the production pipeline and for the ﬁnal delivery on the screen, but 3D also means high quality and visually rich. Are there TV networks and studios using your 3D tools right now? Sargent: I can’t say because they are still testing, but there are broadcasters in Europe, Asia and the US and even YouTube has started supporting 3D content. Sports will drive 3D too. You can draw a lot of analogies between this transition to 3D and the one we are coming to an end

BRIEF 68

with: hi-def. You can look back to where all the hype started with hi-def, how it rolled out, how many shows started to transition, how networks transitioned and how the market transitioned to a fully hi-def industry. I would say it’ll be a similar experience with 3D. Plus, we’re seeing games companies push it, and there is the potential for TV content to share the distribution pipeline with games and networks, so we might be watching our TV content via a computer or console, and because of this convergence, 3D will get another push. Let’s go back to the specifics of how you’ll be incorporating 3D tools. Sargent: We are adding 3D functionality in better pipelines between Smoke and Flame and Maya to build better combinations of applications. For example, a Smoke artist is fundamentally an editorial finishing artist and Flame is more visual effects-oriented and then there are artists that specialize in Maya, so our challenge is to build a bridge with new extensions for 3D that we have introduced recently. What does all this mean for the broadcast world? Sargent: In terms of broadcast design, you can have 3D bumpers and promos and commercials. That will become even more important as the content is delivered to the home in 3D. A simple example is a common graphic element, like a lower-third. Looking ahead, you’re going to be able to insert 3D elements and lift the banner out and have it float in front of the screen for people viewing in 3D. As 3D gets adopted, it’ll be a catalyst for content creation and graphics. Q

PICTURE TUBE

LAST LOOK

BRIEF

Opposite page, pictured left to right: (Row one) Domenico Bartolo, director and co-founder of 21-19 speaks at the 2009 PromaxBDA Asia Conference in Singapore; MI6 Video Game Marketing Awards judges Shelley Kent, Director, Video Games for Ignition Print; and Brian Setzer, co-director for Trailer Park Video Games review competition entries. (Row two) MI6 judges Kent, Amy Bennett, senior account executive for BLT & Associates and Setzer mull their decisions. (Row three) MI6 judge Oogie Lee, design director, Ignited USA examines a submission; PromaxBDA Asia Conference Co-Chair Jonny Potter, creative director of Turner Entertainment Networks Asia addresses the crowd; Pete Bishop, director of The Shop shares his thoughts in Singapore. This page, pictured left to right: (Row one) PromaxBDA Asia speakers Matt Scarff, head of creative for UKTV; PromaxBDA Asia Conference Co-Chair Keith Lui, head of media and games sales markets, Nokia; and Bruce Dunlop, group director for BDA, address the crowd. (Row two) â&#x20AC;&#x153;Media Makeovers: Adventures in Channel Brandingâ&#x20AC;? panelists Frank Tanki, SVP partnership marketing and operations, Nickelodeon, Anne Mullen, SVP, Nickelodeon On-Air Creative Strategy, Russell Hicks, EVP and executive creative director, Nickelodeon join moderator Jonathan Block-Verk, president and CEO of PromaxBDA on stage at the KidScreen Summit. (Row three) PromaxBDA Asia participants Graeme Newell, president and founder of 602 Communications; and Kevin Aratari, managing director of mOcean.

SPRING 2010

SHUFFLE LAST LOOK Karla DeMichele

Michael Engleman

Todd Long

Wendy Bigbie

Kelly Dials

Terry Mcfarlane to creative services director, KTVX/KUCW, from KTVT Dallas/ Ft. Worth.

Regina Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Brien promoted to SVP of marketing and brand management for The Golf Channel.

Stephanie Slagle promoted to creative services director, WWHO, from new media sales director.

DESIGN AND PRODUCTION

Kevin Goryl to creative services director, WXIX, from writer/producer/editor, WUSA.

Rob Venusti to director of marketing and creative services, Fox Sports Florida/Sun Sports, from director of creative services and brand marketing at KWGN-TV.

Karla DeMichele to account executive for bpg from project design manager, Spike TV, New York.

Candace Hirleman to news promotion manager, KABC, from creative services director, KGMB.

NETWORK AND STUDIO

AFFILIATE Kurt Bartolich to creative services director, KCTV, from VP of marketing at JW Broadcasting, Inc. Deidre Conley to creative services director, KXAN, from WWHO.

Robin Hoffman to director of creative services, KMGH, from business process lead, broadcast division, The McGraw-Hill Companies. Bryan Johnson to creative services director, KEZI and Chambers Communications, from KOHD. Steve Johnson to creative services director, WKOW, from senior writer/ producer, KOLD. Larry Kellogg to creative services director, KCRA, from KOAT. Kyle Kleinecke to promotions director, KFDX. Amanda Leaseburg to marketing director, WMPF, from promotions director, WBOY. Todd Long to director of marketing, WAFF, from KAVU. BRIEF 72

Robin Hoffman

Gayle Allen to creative director, QVC, from SVP of program development and integration, Auction Network. Richard Barry promoted to VP/on-air creative director, Nickelodeon International. Wendy Bigbie promoted to art director from print designer, The Weather Channel. Blake Callaway promoted to SVP of marketing, brand and strategic, Syfy. Phil Olshanski to writer/producer creative services, The Weather Channel from Fox Sports South. Dave Dore promoted to SVP, creative director, NBC Entertainment Marketing, NBC Agency West Coast from VP special projects. Michael Engleman promoted to SVP of marketing, global brand strategy and creative Syfy.

Jeremy Baumann to editor at Click 3X.

Kelly Dials and Heidi Frederick Erney both promoted to executive producers, BIGSMACKtv. Manuel Miranda, Jeffrey Phillips and Scott Whitham have also joined the company as directors. Mothership, a creative studio in Los Angeles led by executive producer Ed Ulbrich, executive creative director Alejandro Lopez and executive producer Tanya Cohen has launched. Bob Nelson to eyeball as president from director of broadcast production at DDB. Corky Quakenbush and Joel Trussell have joined the directing roster of commercial production company ka-chew! As an experienced creative director, producer and writer, Kate Bacon serves as owner of Well Dunne! Talent and is also the author of the only blog on entertainment marketing at http://welldunne.blogspot.com.

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5L[^VYR :SVNHUZ 7YV]PKL *YLH[P]L *VUZPZ[LUJ` )` 3LL /\U[

LAST LOOK

A few weeks ago, I read an article about the relevance of taglines in interactive media. The authors talked about how Avis’s famous “We try harder” line doesn’t work in an interactive space. It only speaks to a one-way communication. It’s the company describing itself. Whereas Nike’s call to action, “Just Do It,” creates a relationship with the consumer. It’s the company motivating the buyer.

That got me to thinking about TV taglines. As our television brands move to more interactive platforms, how relevant are our taglines? Most broadcast networks don’t have institutional taglines, but rather campaign lines that tend to change from season to season, so we’ll put them aside for now. Cable networks, however, often use institutional taglines to define or differentiate themselves, or explain their relevancy to a target audience. Let’s start with the two top-rated cable networks, USA and TNT. TNT’s “We Know Drama” was the first attempt by a general entertainment network to own a niche. It was a brilliant — and more importantly, successful — strategy because they didn’t proclaim, “We are drama.” Instead, TNT told its viewers they had a perspective. They can find the drama in all sorts of programming. The line has served TNT well for nearly a decade. And if you’ve watched the channel over the years, you’ve probably noticed a creative consistency that has allowed the channel to grow and evolve, yet always maintain a consistent brand personality. That’s no small feat and requires tremendous creative discipline. Interestingly, “We Know Drama” follows the same patterns as Avis. It’s basically a one-way communication. According to the advertising pundits, that means it is not an interactive line. However, in the last year, TNT expanded the tag to “We Know Drama…Captivates, Inspires, Excites, Attracts, Surprises, Thrills, etc…” That small tweak creates tremendous opportunities. It allows TNT to explore the multiple facets of drama. It defines the benefit of drama (what you, the viewer, will get out of watching the channel). And it creates a dialogue with viewers/users with the implied “you.” “We Know Drama Inspires (You).” Once again, TNT got it right.

BRIEF 74

Since its introduction nearly ﬁve years ago, USA’s “Characters Welcome,” has always been a two-way tag. They welcome the unique characters who make up their programming: obsessive/compulsive detectives, fake psychics and burnt spies, as well as pro-tennis stars, championship dogs and wrestlers. At the same time,

they’ve welcomed and celebrated the characters on the other side of the screen — their viewers. Lawn mower racers, Raw Nation fans, even El Vez, the Mexican Elvis. They have a traveling exhibit and coffee table book that profiles their most interesting viewers. Plus, USA was the first television network to set up its own social networking site. And according to USA’s research, the line scores exceptionally well in both aided and unaided awareness. But does having an interactive tagline guarantee success? For 15 years, Discovery Channel tagged “Explore Your World” onto every promo, ad and ID. And while the channel always scored at the top for brand recognition and respect, the line had almost zero recall. Why do we have taglines, anyway? On a crowded television dial, they help define channels whose names are not immediately obvious — “Nick is Kids” differentiate parity services — “The Worldwide Leader in News” or give relevancy to a service — “History Made Everyday.” We tend to focus on the response of our key constituency, viewers, but research suggests they are the least aware of tags. In focus groups I’ve attended for networks over the last few years (some testing lines directly, others probing indirectly), there is almost no unaided recall of taglines (for clients or their competitors.) Does that mean they are ineffective? Not necessarily. My theory is that most taglines don’t rise to the surface of the consumer’s consciousness because they support and reinforce what the viewer already believes. The message is “in sync.” A good tagline is like air conditioning that’s set at the right temperature. You don’t notice it until it’s “off.” Q Lee Hunt is considered one of the industry’s leading experts in television advertising and promotion. Today, he works as a consultant developing brand strategy for new and established networks, continues to pioneer a new marketing discipline — break architecture and C3 retention strategies — and conducts training workshops for television networks across the globe.

USA’s Character Project

VIEWPOINT

6- ;(.

After dedicating my life to the service of my country, I’d seen the agency I gave myself to turn around and throw me to the dogs. I’d lost my daughter. I’d shot my best friend. Betrayal made me question everything, so I started looking for answers. Now, I will stop at nothing to learn the truth.

Blood Drug Reference Intense Violence Sexual Themes Strong Language

4.13.10