Spot Runner Survey Reveals Small and Medium Businesses Rank TV Advertising Over Radio, Newspapers, Magazines, and Internet Keywords

on Direct Marketing Association

March 29, 2006 – According to the results of a new survey released by Internet-based advertising agency Spot Runner, businesses that use TV advertising said they allocate almost one-third of their budget to it – three times more than any other type of advertising. Furthermore, more than 60 percent who use TV advertising have increased their spending on it over the last two years.

For those who have not employed TV advertising, perceived cost remains the dominant barrier. Two-thirds of small businesses are interested in advertising on TV, but in the past year, less than 15 percent of those polled had done so, because it was assumed to be out of their price range. In addition, 77 percent said it is “too expensive to buy the time on air” or “too expensive to develop advertisements” themselves. However, the research findings show that, all things being equal, small businesses would prefer to advertise on TV over radio, newspapers, magazines and Internet keywords.

Print and Yellow Pages are the first programs they would decrease in favor of new advertising methods. “Clearly, local businesses are increasingly looking for ways to drive more value from their marketing dollars. They are becoming more innovative with their advertising programs and shifting their budget away from methods they’ve traditionally used, such as print and Yellow Pages,” said Nick Grouf, chairman and CEO of Spot Runner. “This creates a tremendous opportunity for local television, especially now that Spot Runner has given them an easy and affordable way to access it. Local TV is an extremely efficient way for businesses to reach their audience because it offers the ability to micro-target by geography, as well as demographics and psychographics.”

The survey also yielded the following results about small and medium business advertising behavior, spending and preferences:

• Where SMBs Advertise Today: More than 60 percent of small and medium businesses advertise locally in the Yellow Pages and on their company websites, while 40 percent use direct mail.


• Yellow Pages Advertising: While the average small and medium business spends nearly one quarter of their advertising budget on Yellow Pages, it is one of the first advertising vehicles they decrease to try new mediums.


• TV Ad Budgets: If they were to purchase TV advertising, almost 30percent would allocate new advertising dollars while the rest would pull from existing advertising mediums in the following order: daily newspapers, Yellow Pages and weekly newspapers. According to data from the Kelsey Group and TNS Media Intelligence, the market for local advertising totals close to $100 billion.


• Internet Advertising: While many small businesses believe online advertising is “effective,” 69 percent recognize there are customers they simply “cannot effectively reach through the Internet.”


• Using the Internet to Conduct Business Operations: Small and medium businesses are increasingly comfortable using the Internet to conduct business. Of those surveyed, 78 percent make business purchases online, 72 percent track packages, 64 percent book travel and 52 percent email customers. Nearly half take customer orders and pay bills online.

“The survey findings clearly illustrate two important trends happening within the small and medium business market. The first is there is strong pent-up demand for affordable local TV advertising. The second is they are using the Internet to improve the way they operate, save money and streamline business tasks,” said Seth Cohen, vice president of research at Spot Runner. “By leveraging the power of the Internet to make TV advertising available to local businesses, Spot Runner is leading the convergence of these two trends and creating a whole new category of advertiser.”

Small and medium businesses with revenues ranging from $500,000 to $15 million participated in the survey. The survey covered a variety of industries, such as construction, retail, professional and technical services, real estate and leasing, finance and insurance, and healthcare and social assistance. More details on the survey results are available to media upon request.

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TV ad sales find plenty of new outlets

on USA TODAY
by Laura Petrecca, March, 9th 2006

NEW YORK — The days when a TV show could be just a TV show may be history.

For the upcoming fall season, NBC Universal TV head Jeff Zucker has mandated that all new programs have an element to involve fans — through cellphones, computers or iPods.

The edict is sure to be felt by producers, but it also will have a major impact on TV's annual ad sales market — the so-called upfront period when networks sell ad time in advance for the fall season.

This year's broadcast network upfront period kicks off next week. With the bulked-up digital offerings from NBC and other networks, what was once a time of simply buying and selling 30-second commercials is morphing into a multimedia market involving everything from Web games to video downloads.

"There are more ingredients and components than ever before," says Brad Adgate, research director at ad-buying firm Horizon Media. "If I had to pick one word to sum up what this upfront is going to be, it's 'confusion.' "

There is one thing about which there is no confusion, however: No broadcaster wants to leave on the table their share of the extra revenue — $270 million this year as estimated by the trade magazine Television Week— that will come from ads on non-traditional platforms packaged into upfront deals.

To hedge their bets — and meet marketers' demands — networks will push an array of digital options. "There's a bit of a tipping point in the sense that advertisers want to experiment," says Randy Falco, NBC Universal Television Group president. "They want to reach consumers on as many platforms as possible."

The non-traditional add-ons will add just a sliver to the $9 billion networks are expected to reap in upfront TV ad sales, but they are the growth area in a market in which revenue increases from 30-second ads alone are not expected to be strong.

For the 2006-07 TV season, networks are seeking commercial price increases of 3% to 5% over last year. Yet Merrill Lynch analyst Lauren Rich Fine predicts that upfront sales will be "relatively tepid as dollars shift to online."

CBS will offer spots on its new ad-supported Internet TV site, Innertube, which will rerun TV shows as well as original content, as part of the network's upfront deals. "The idea here is to grow our revenue streams," says Jo Ann Ross, president of network TV sales.

While Disney CEO Bob Iger didn't give specifics of ABC's digital selling strategy, he said on a Tuesday earnings conference call that "there will be more deals cut in the upfront than in past years that do factor in new platforms."

ABC is now testing Internet streaming of four prime-time shows. Those shows, including Lost and Desperate Housewives, are ad-supported and free to viewers. The test is to wrap up at the end of June, yet Iger said, "it's safe to assume" that a similar model will continue.

Fox will offer TV ads bundled with ads on its Web assets, such as social site MySpace.com.

"This is a watershed year in that the major networks are approaching the upfront with a full portfolio of their assets," says Mike Rosen, chief investment officer at GM Planworks, the media planner and buyer for General Motors.

Rosen expects the new options will slow this year's dealing. "It'll take more time and a greater amount of analysis and creativity," he says.

Adgate predicts that the haggling, which sometimes has taken only a couple weeks, "won't be done by Memorial Day." Half joking, he adds that ad and network executives might even want to postpone vacation plans until fall.

Categories

• TV
• Portable
• Advertising

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TiVo to Offer Video From the Internet In Brightcove Deal

on The Wall Street Journal
Nick Wingfield, May 10, 2006

TiVo Inc., in a push to add features that could help its digital video recorder stand out from rivals, reached an agreement with Brightcove Inc. that will let TiVo users download and watch video from the Internet on television sets.

Closely held Brightcove of Cambridge, Mass., will allow companies that use itssystem for distributing video over the Internet to make their shows available to TiVo users. Brightcove plans to start offering video from six to 12 programmers to TiVo users in June, though it didn't identify the programmers. The companies using Brightcove to publish video over the Internet include New York Times Co., Oxygen Network and SmartMoney, a finance magazine published by Hearst Corp. and Dow Jones & Co., publisher of The Wall Street Journal.

Financial terms weren't disclosed.

While most people watch video distributed by Brightcove on their computers, Jeremy Allaire, founder and chief executive of the company, said, "increasingly they want to be able to have the same programming...on set-top devices and portable devices." Mr. Allaire said the companies plan to eventually expand the number of content providers who can offer video to TiVo users.

For TiVo, the deal is part of an increasing effort to let its customers access content on the Internet, including digital photos and videos. TiVo's primary function remains as a digital video recorder, or DVR, a device that allows users to record cable or satellite-TV signals onto hard disks. DVRs have become popular because they let users pause live television and skip commercials.

Cable and satellite companies have begun gaining ground against TiVo with their own DVRs, forcing TiVo to come up with innovations. "I think TiVo is in a position where it has to make the TiVo box more attractive in some way than generic DVRs from your cable operator," says Josh Bernoff, an analyst at Forrester Research.

TiVo declined to say whether it is seeking similar deals with other providers of Internet video, though a spokesman said the relationship with Brightcove isn't exclusive.

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• TV

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Who's Marketing Your Brand?

on iMediaConnection
by Mark Drosos, May 09, 2006

New, more engaging forms of media let audiences work as part of your marketing team. nFusion's biz dev VP tells you how your entertainment campaign can become a part of their world.

Who's marketing your brand? Your consumers, that's who. Today's consumers have more control over when and where and how they will be marketed to. With the recent surge in user-generated media, consumers now participate in what the message looks like, as well as influencing who receives it. So what should entertainment companies like yours do in order to engage these consumers and take advantage of this new marketing tool?

In this first article of the series, we will focus on driving users to your campaign.

In the not-so-old days, taking your message to your audience was simple: entertainment companies created entertaining content, advertising agencies helped market that content and users consumed it. But along comes user-generated media, a hybrid marketing tool that reverses the old, familiar method.

Some companies have embraced this reversal. Warner Home Video, Universal Pictures, Warner Music Group and Comedy Central have all realized the power user-generated media can provide their brands, and have molded their campaigns to take advantage of consumers' new-found ability to participate. There's a veritable traffic jam of other like-minded companies trying to figure out how best to incorporate user-generated media into their marketing strategies, entertaining users while getting those same users to help market their products.

If you want to take advantage of this eager-to-be-tapped new source of advertising energy as part of your marketing strategy, you'll need to provide opportunities for consumer participation, and that means designing plans to drive consumers to a user-generated media campaign. You could do this by integrating the message into your usual campaign media, which can be effective; but savvy marketers are honing in on a few other avenues to create buzz and reach audiences.

Take advantage of branded media partnerships
Creating partnerships with companies like iFilm, Revver and YouTube or with the multi-branded promotion like the one run by Zippo Hot Tours has started to emerge as an effective new way to reach the user-generated media target audience. For example, our company, nFusion, recently developed a user-generated media concept for WHV’s “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” DVD release called the "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang Casting Call." WHV partnered with Revver to support and promote the campaign on their website starting this May.

With statistics like 30 million video streams a day at YouTube, it is clear that inter-media networking can give immediate lift to the audience you seek-- and the added media support is a great way to extend your media budget. If you have a product with a limited release and non-blockbuster-scale media budget, this type of partnership could prove a great way to reach millions of enthusiastic users while engaging them with your product.

Seeding a campaign
This is essentially an online PR campaign on steroids, and needs to be a part of every marketer's efforts. The simplest step is to create feeds of video content to VODcasting sites like iTunes, PodShow and Podcast.net. Developing brand pages on social network sites like MySpace has become standard. Finally, your user-generated media campaign is all about, of course, users generating the content, so provide them with the tools (video, photos, add to MySpace links, etc.) to create their own brand pages. "Slither" and "Corpse Bride" both did good jobs of incorporating seeding into their marketing strategies through social networks and podcasting sites.

Promotions, promotions, promotions
A successful user-generated media promotion is like American Idolizing your brand, and it's a natural for the entertainment industry. Fans clamor to collect memorabilia, win visits to studios and get the opportunity to meet the stars-- or even be discovered themselves. Use this to your advantage in promoting your product. By adding a voting mechanism to a promotion, marketers drastically improve participation. Comedy Central's Test Pilots contest offers users the chance to win a development deal to develop a show for Comedy Central's "Motherload," while Warner Music Group and AOL went a step further and partnered up to develop the online reality show and contest, "The Biz."

It is easy to focus narrowly on video-based user-generated media campaigns, but don't forget that user-generated media can encompass a range of other disciplines and forms such as creative writing, drawings and animation, photos or music. And, as always, encouraging users to customize provided content creates a valuable intersection where you and consumers can connect. "Corpse Bride" used a poem as part of its user-generated media to good effect.

Marketing control has shifted into consumers' hands, and there is no better way to take advantage of this shift than with user-generated media. The outlets to distribute control can create a "brand network" for your entertainment company, energizing new generations of brand advocates while leading to a deeper engagement with your consumer audience. Embracing user-generated media as part of your marketing strategy provides a unique opportunity you can't get with TV, print or online media -- or even on your own website.

Next week, in part 2 of "Who's Marketing Your Brand," we will focus on two ways you can create these audience-grabbing opportunities and how you should answer the call of your consumers.

Categories

• Marketing
• Advertising

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YouTube offers mobile upload service

on CNET New.com

As it tries to expand the ways people can post videos online, YouTube launched on Wednesday a service that allows users to upload homemade clips via their mobile phones or PDAs.

A growing number of handheld devices are capable of recording video. YouTube wants to disconnect users from their Web cams and computers, said Steve Chen, one of the company's founders and its chief technology officer.

Most user-created clips are taken with Web and digital video cameras, Chen said. The new service will likely produce greater numbers of spontaneous and candid clips.

"The good thing about it is that you don't have to go home to YouTube anymore," Chen said. "People may not carry their digital cameras with them when they go out. But everybody carries their cell phone...I'm interested in seeing what kind of content this will produce."
In other news:

* Microsoft updates its office of the future
* Despite controversy, 'booth babes' still prowl E3
* Google keeps an eye on Vista search
* News.com Extra: Ring tone sparks shutdown of Iraqi legistlature
* Video: Microsoft unpacks a few E3 surprises

Privately held YouTube is one of the fastest-growing Web sites and among dozens of companies that have begun offering Internet video over the past year. Based in San Mateo, Calif., YouTube says it sees 12 million unique visitors and averages about 1.2 billion viewings per month. While this new mobile service is free, analysts are waiting to see how the company will cash in on all that traffic.

In the meantime, the company continues to expand services.

The new mobile offering works this way: YouTube members can create a mobile profile on the site and YouTube will create a unique e-mail address where they can send videos.

Members can shoot clips with their cell phone and e-mail them to YouTube, where the clips are automatically posted under the users' profile.

Categories

• Portable
• YouTube

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List of News on ViTrue - Sharkle

• Marketers Tap Into User-Generated Ads, Plan To Take Them Offline
  on MediaPost Publications


• Consumers Replace Ego-Infested Whack Jobs
  on Adrants
  


• ViTrue or False
  on Jaffe Juice


• ViTrue Invites User-Created Video Ads
  on Adweek


• Former President of Tandberg Television, Reggie Bradford, Together with General Catalyst Partners, Launches ViTrue, Inc.: World's First User Created Advertising Platform
  on Business Wire


• ViTrue Gets Funding Buys Sharkle, Gets Poorly Trafficked Porno
  on alarm:clock


• ViTrue Reggie Bradford Founds Company Devoted to User-Generated Advertising
  on [itvt] News Blog


• Social Media Burying Marketers
  on WebProNews


• ViTrue Lets Consumers Create Online, Traditional Advertising
  on Media Buyer Planner

Categories

• ViTrue
• Advertising
• Sharkle

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Consumers Replace Ego-Infested Whack Jobs

from Adrants

Leveraging consumer generated content, or whatever silly buzzword you want to throw at the notion of people creating stuff - as if that were something new, ViTrue Inc., following its acquisition of video sharing site Sharkle, is formalizing the process of random people created ads for specific brands. ViTrue, which has been playing in the people-powered ad space for some time, will introduce a process where marketers and their agencies can post a creative brief, solicit work, review and approve the work which will then appear on Sharkle and, perhaps on television.

On one hand, one could say it's just dumb to outside the industry to find new creative because no one outside the industry could possibly understand what makes a great ad. On the other hand, one could say our industry is an insular, ego-infested closet full of whack jobs who have been following the same lame formulas and creating the same boring ads for so long simply to win awards rather than sell product, anything would be an improvement. We're kinda thinking the other hand has the right idea here.

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• ViTrue
• Advertising

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Marketers Tap Into User-Generated Ads, Plan To Take Them Offline

from MediaPost Publications
by Joe Mandese, May 8, 2006

THE RAPID RISE IN USER-GENERATED content has created a new way for marketers to reach consumers, ironically via media created by consumers themselves. Now it is spawning a new way for advertisers to generate the kind of content they use to communicate with consumers: advertising. In an announcement scheduled to be made later today, a new player will unveil an ambitious plan to tap consumers to create ads for both online and traditional media outlets, displacing the role of traditional advertising agencies. While a grass roots movement toward consumer-generated ads has emerged over the past couple of years via individual consumers and marketers, the effort seeks to provide some structure for the process, giving marketers a place to interact with consumers, provide them with specs for creating their own ads, and sophisticated tools for reviewing, editing, approving and activating consumer-generated ad campaigns.

"We're just taking advantage of a couple of trends that are already underway: The explosive growth of video on the Internet; the growth in social networks; and the growth of consumers wanting to participate with brands," says Reggie Bradford, CEO of ViTrue Inc., which has acquired online video sharing community Sharkle.com, which will become the base of the new consumer ad creation system. "What we want to do is enable consumers to do what they are already doing - creating advertising - but to do it in a credible way and with some scale that is meaningful for marketers."

In fact, ViTrue has quietly already been doing that behind the scenes for several big marketers, including Sony Pictures, which created a consumer-generated ad campaign for its popular movie, "The Benchwarmers."

The campaign, dubbed "The Nerd Leagued," can be viewed at www.nerdleague.net, and features content Sony created to promote the film by interacting with fans of the film. ViTrue's push is part of a new progression of interacting with consumers in the creation of advertising messages, and brings a new formal structure to what some consumers and marketers have already been doing. He cites the www.conversegallery.com, a site created by athletic shoe marketer Converse to generate ads.

What makes ViTrue's platform different, he says, is that it provides marketers with standardized tools for doing that on a larger scale.

At the core of that system are "review and approve" modules that allow marketers to post specifications for ad campaigns and to enable the marketer, or its agency to quickly review ads and post them on-the-fly.

Initially, ViTrue will make those ads available via Sharkle.com, on a marketer's or a brand's own site, or through viral distribution online. But Bradford says the company already is working on taking those ads offline and embedding them in traditional media, including TV.

One of those efforts involves a summer-long campaign that will be announced by a major packaged goods marketer in the next two weeks, which will involve ads created by consumers online, which will "bounce back to the traditional media," says Bradford.

"Right now, we're talking mainly about TV and radio, but we see the potential to take this into other media too," he adds, saying the company already envisions using the Internet to create ad slicks for magazines and newspapers.

But the bulk of ViTrue's efforts will focus on video, he says, because of the rapid growth of the online video sharing community, which he says could transform billion dollar ad categories, especially consumer electronics and youth-oriented products.

ViTrue is not alone. Other user-generated ad sites have emerged such as AdCandy.com, but they have generally been grassroots efforts by enthusiasts themselves, while ViTrue is designed as a tool for marketers.

Bradford concedes that initial conversations with agencies have been rocky, but that the "more forward-looking" shops understand the value of consumer-generated advertising, and are trying to understand the role companies like ViTrue can play in that process.

"The genie is out of the bottle," he says. "Consumer-generated video is here to state. We're just trying to give marketers and agencies a way of taking advantage of it."

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• Advertising
• ViTrue

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Got a Second? G.E. Has a Quick Message

from The New York Times
By STUART ELLIOTT
Published: May 5, 2006

DECADES ago, General Electric and its agency, BBDO Worldwide, joined to create a half-hour weekly television series, "General Electric Theater." Now, in a move that underlines how giant marketers are seeking new ways to reach consumers, G.E., BBDO and two other agencies are introducing an elaborate campaign centered on a version of the series that is 1,799 seconds shorter than the original.


"G.E. One Second Theater," as the campaign is being called, presents a humorous peek behind the scenes at recent General Electric commercials produced by BBDO. The campaign is intended specifically for new media like digital video recorders, which can be used to watch expanded versions of the spots, and the MySpace social networking service (myspace.com), where visitors can read a mock profile of Elli, the elephant star of one of the commercials. The spots will also be accessible on MP3 players, through podcasts presented as if they were recorded by Elli and other characters from the spots, and on a microsite (onesecondtheater.com) , which offers an online version of the campaign.

The multimillion-dollar campaign, scheduled to begin today, is the most recent effort by G.E. to explore media beyond conventional commercials and print advertisements.

Previous initiatives include a campaign about a virtual sprouting seed, which computer users could tend and send to friends by e-mail, and banner ads offering a way to doodle online.

"We're harkening back to an old idea, in combination with new technology," said David Lubars, chairman and chief creative officer for the North American operations of BBDO, part of the Omnicom Group. "General Electric Theater" appeared on CBS from February 1953 to September 1962 and the host for all but the first year was an actor named Ronald Reagan.

Whatever became of him?

The General Electric Company is among marketers devoting a growing part of ad budgets to new media. Hewlett-Packard, for instance, announced yesterday that it would team up with the mtvU cable network owned by Viacom for a worldwide campaign aimed at college students, carrying the theme "Meet or Delete," which will be found on television, online and on cellphones.

Also, the Adidas unit of Adidas-Salomon has started releasing a series of short films by directors like Roman Coppola, which can be watched on hand-held devices or on Web sites like ifilm.com, video.google.com and youtube.com, and can be downloaded from the Apple Computer iTunes store (itunes.com). And Wendy's International created a MySpace profile for an animated character based on its square hamburger, which also had its own Web site.

"It's a challenge whenever you try to do something new, but it's energizing," said Judy L. Hu, global executive director for advertising and branding at General Electric in Fairfield, Conn. She and BBDO executives offered a preview of the One-Second Theater campaign in an interview at the agency's Midtown Manhattan office.

"Clearly, we're taking a risk," Ms. Hu said, "but that's what you need to do to break through."

"Everything we do that's inventive and innovative helps drive the idea of 'Imagination at work,' " she added, which has been the theme of General Electric campaigns created by BBDO since 2003.

Here is how the extended versions of the commercials work. BBDO has re-edited several spots to embed in each one additional material, which can be glimpsed only for a second if the spots are being watched live on TV. But for viewers using TiVo or other digital video recorders, the commercials can be paused and the new material becomes accessible to watch frame by frame.

The material includes mock biographies of Elli, a dancing elephant, and the other animal characters from a G.E. commercial promoting its environmental efforts under the "ecomagination" theme, along with fake "lost casting tapes" in which creatures like a shark, a cow and an armadillo flunk their auditions for the spot.

"It was hard to imagine Elli ever recovering from the teenage exploitation film 'Don't Touch That Trunk' and the well-publicized 'peanut' scandal," one make-believe biography begins. "As for the future, look for her in the summer blockbuster studio romance 'Love of the Mastodon.' "

In the "Elli's interests" section of the elephant's MySpace profile, her favorite music is listed as "Tusk" by Fleetwood Mac and her movies are "Animal House" and "Dumbo." As of yesterday afternoon, Elli already had five friends on her MySpace page (myspace.com/ellifont).

In another imaginary biography, a toucan that appears in Elli's commercial is described as the star of "the musical 'I Am Toucan' and its sequel, 'I Am Still Toucan.' " And two flamingos from the commercial are described as "self-taught method actors" that appeared in carnival sideshows "as 'The Amazing Two-Headed Flamingo' until their act was exposed on the cable special 'Fake Two-Headed Animal Acts Exposed.' "

Plans call for the additional material to be replaced on a regular basis, said Don Schneider, executive vice president and executive creative director at BBDO New York, "so viewers will always be expecting there could be something new embedded" each time they see a G.E. commercial.

The re-edited commercials will appear on networks that are part of the NBC Universal division of General Electric, including Bravo, CBNC, MSNBC, NBC, Sci Fi and USA.
They will also run on networks not owned by G.E., Ms. Hu said, including A&E, Comedy Central, Discovery, E!, ESPN, the Food Network, the History Channel, the National Geographic Channel, TBS, TLC and the Travel Channel.

To help generate awareness for the One-Second Theater campaign, Ms. Hu said, it will be promoted in announcements during TV series sponsored by General Electric and in comic "teaser" banner ads on Web sites like gawker.com as well as the sites of print publications like The Hollywood Reporter and Variety.

The agencies working on the campaign in addition to BBDO are Blitz, an interactive agency in Beverly Hills, Calif., and OMD, a media planning and buying agency that is also part of Omnicom.

Categories

• Advertising

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