The King of the World is dead, long live the King of the World.

You have to hand it to James Cameron: at $1.88billion in takings to date, his 3D epic Avatar is officially the biggest box office ticket of all time. And having taken only six weeks to eclipse the record set by Titanic, JC’s last feature film, this is likely to be just the tip of the iceberg.

Yes, the world and his wife (and their three children, plus extended circle of friends) have queued up at cinemas to see Avatar: whilst it’s not perhaps a film for everybody, it has nonetheless garnered some strong reviews, and, 3D effects aside, features some of the best CGI ever used in medium. The spectacle in 3D, however, elevates Avatar beyond movie to experience, drawing the audience into Cameron’s alien world of Pandora without simply resorting to the customary “oh, that was the 3D bit” camera pans. Not all 3D films can claim to do the same.

Avatar is a 3D success because the extra something this technology brings makes us believe it more, enriching the immersion and further suspending disbelief. The question is, how to monetise this on a more regular basis, as opposed to only once every 15 years, when Mr Cameron decides to take us one step beyond?

Naturally, the answer came in the form of the ever-inventive Sky, with Sky Sports’ first foray into 3D programming the live coverage of Arsenal vs Manchester United last weekend. For those lucky enough to be in one of the nine bars across the UK to feature 3D screens - well, if you’d call ‘lucky’ being reciprocally filmed by Sky Sports looking like the rejects from a Buddy Holly casting session - the experience was mixed. The customary Sky Sports graphics, player line-ups (where a sense of depth and perspective is inherent to the camera view) and wide angle shots from behind goal were suitably impressive; however, the third dimension was not the totally eye-popping revolution many were imagining.

To be fair, Sky does spoil the viewer: with up to 20 cameras tracking the game in regular Ds and lovely High Definition crispness for those willing to pay an extra tenner a month - it’s hard to say whether the final spectacle of 3D could ever match up to our expectations. It’s no massive surprise that this was basically a glorified experiment by the broadcaster - football may not be the ultimate sport to benefit from an extra dimension, versus, say boxing, rugby, or even golf - but the fanfare of such a world’s first certainly captured the public’s imagination, leaving viewers hungry, or at least peckish, for more.

Whatever the future holds for in-home 3D, it’s clear that from a sporting perspective, as James Cameron understands, the extra dimension needs to add something to our experience, to give something back, with Sunday’s experiment representing a small step in furthering Sky’s opinion on exactly how it plans to achieve this.

By Jonathan Izzard on February 2nd, 2010

Tags: Barclays Premier League, Branded content, Broadcast sponsorship, Experiential marketing, Football, Football Sponsorship, Manchester United, Media, Sport, Television, Television audiences

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OMG! This coming Wednesday, the wildly successful CW export, Gossip Girl, returns to the UK on ITV2 for its second season. Aside from my ridiculous excitement surrounding GG’s return to our screens, the show is also an excellent example of youth marketing at its best.

For those unfamiliar with the show, Gossip Girl is a kind of Cruel-Intentions-meets-SATC for 16-24 year olds. And, for that specific and increasingly hard to reach demographic, it delivers hourly portions of marketing heaven every week for all the brands involved.

Firstly, wrapped around each 15 minute slice of the action sits the show’s sponsorship deal. The pairing of Guerlain’s Insolence fragrance with GG was well-conceived, by both the show’s producers and the brand’s marketeers. Insolence is a brand that defines its identity as ‘free, daring, unpredicatable, radiant’ and whose target female consumer embodies the ‘Insolent woman: audacious, makes her own choices and dances to a different tune…truly herself and utterly irresistable’. Values which, in turn, embed the fragrance with the sultry, aspirational qualities that fans see in the show’s female stars, and which they will no doubt seek to emulate.

As an enthused loyal fan of the first season I was a strong case study for the Guerlain sponsorship, with pretty successful results. I went from relative stranger to the brand, to sampling the product when it next caught my eye, right through to purchase. And all irrefutably due to Gossip Girl’s powers of pursuasion.

Secondly, within the show itself, each scene becomes a catwalk opportunity for every major fashion label wanting to capture the GG market. The show’s producers, savvy from the beginning to their fans’ copy-cat desires, flood the blogosphere and website forums with insider information on the designers and outlets for each of the characters’ ensembles in key scenes. Thus, GG has done for designers like Abigail Lorick (the real life fashionista behind Eleanor Waldorf’s designs in the show) what The O.C. did for a raft of indie bands from 2003 onwards: through realistic contextual integration into the narrative fabric of the show, these guys get unparalleled exposure to a whole new audience.

Thirdly, evidence of the wider cultural influence of the show seems fairly wide reaching. Knowing that probably 95% of GG’s weekly audience could only dream of browsing Henri Bendel for the back-to-school gear and party dresses sported by their counterparts on the show, UK high street brands have started to capitalize on the show’s stars’ distinctive styles. Miss Selfridge’s marked upturn in stocking preppy, WASP-ish styles (think ruffles, pearls, blazers) - that could have all been taken straight out of Blair Waldorf’s walk-in closet - is a case in point. And if their visual merchandisers are on the ball, you can bet that their Oxford Street window display will be reflecting this for the next couple of weeks.

(And if you’re still not sold, check out the NY Times story from last summer outlining the demonstrative impact of the show on retail sales in the US).

Leighton Meester as Blair Waldorf in a design by Abigail Lorick / Navy blazer with white trim from Miss Selfridge’s current collection

And finally, there is the cast - a select group of impossibly beautiful, precociously talented, walking, talking brand ambassadors for the show . The line between their real lives and the characters that they play is so imperceptible to the show’s legion of followers (even the show’s main romantic union has made the transition off screen), that all awards show appearances, publicity interviews and paparazzi shots become potential outings for the brands in the show. And you can bet your bottom dollar that the designers and brands who stock the wardrobes and dress the set allow, encourage, even pay their starlet darlings to take home their wares and showcase them off camera too.

So, if youngsters of the Z generation are all programmed to be (in the recent words of Lily Allen) ‘weapons of massive consumption’, Gossip Girl and shows like it provide all the ammunition required for brands to hit their targets dead on.

XOXO.

By Lucie Bartlett on January 19th, 2009

Tags: Brand marketing, Broadcast sponsorship, Product placement, Television

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Barack Obama may have decided against signing corporate sponsors to help fund the estimated $40m costs of official events around his inauguration, but brands are deploying an array of marketing techniques to attempt to gatecrash the moment.  Here’s a selection.

IKEA has led on experiential, via a mock motorcade touring Washington DC and an IKEA-furnished virtual Oval Office in Washington’s Grand Union station. The latter is replicated online at embracechange09.com, where consumers can add virtual IKEA furniture to the Oval Office and send their suggestions to both their friends and the White House.

Dunkin’ Donuts are selling red-white-and-blue-sprinkled ‘Stars & Stripes’ doughnuts in the chain’s stores nationwide from for 89 cents during inauguration week, and the brand’s blogger, Dunkin’ Dave, is pushing the initiative on Twitter.

Honest Tea, who struck marketing gold when Obama was seen drinking its Black Forest Berry tea on the campaign trail, has launched a limited-edition range renamed “Barack Forest Berry”, and will be sampling around DC all week.

And Audi of America is going seriously big with a raft of broadcast, online and print sponsorship initiatives, including an unprecedented broadcast sponsorship of the ABC, CBS and NBC evening news bulletins on inauguration evening, all to launch a year-long ‘Celebration of Progress’.

By Tim Crow on January 19th, 2009

Tags: Ambush campaign, Brand marketing, Branded content, Broadcast sponsorship, Default, Experiential marketing, Media, New Product Development, Product placement, Sales promotion, Sponsorship, Television

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As the British Comedy Awards once again (dis)graced the small screen with its infamous ceremony last Saturday evening, there was an embarrassing degree of mirth at the sponsor’s expense.

Highland Spring’s association with the Comedy awards stems from a hat-trick deal with ITV in 2006 that saw them take the sponsorship of the British Soap Awards and the National Television Awards as part of the same package.

Ironically, despite being both title sponsor and broadcast sponsor of the event and after show party, the increasingly raucous antics of the guests and nominees displayed little evidence that much, if any, water was being taken at the tables on Saturday night.

No fools ITV, ensuring that the later stages of the ceremony were taken off ITV1 and reserved for the smaller, more open-minded audience of ITV2 - as the behaviour of a resentful bottle-throwing Kevin Bishop proved testament to:

Bottles, undoubtedly, of the Highland Spring water that proudly adorned every table and remained largely unopened for most of the evening.

Admittedly, the creative was strong. The idents that wrapped each section of the broadcast were cute and wonderfully conceived. Simple but effective, positioning a bottle of Highland Spring as an award-winning celebrity itself, under the tag line, ‘If you’re this good, you must be rewarded’.

And that is where the brand presence should have ended. Instead, Sally Stanley (the brand’s courageous but arguably ill-advised Marketing Director) braved the toughest crowd in the business and took to the stage alongside Frank Skinner to present the highly coveted Best Comedy award as the pinnacle of the evening.

Error.

Angus Deayton [introducing Stanley]: ‘And of course a big thanks to Highland Spring - without whom tonight would certainly not have been as…cheap.’

And it only got worse. Granted, with the amount of subsequent mentions that Deayton and Skinner managed to notch up between them, the brand probably regained its rights fee in media value alone. But they also succeeded in presenting the brand as an intrusive, resented necessity, over-playing the contractual exposure that was guaranteed for them, and generally making Ms. Stanley look like a bit of a joke.

With marketeers across the country already cringing with embarrassment on her behalf, she then attempted to squeeze in a suitably ‘on-message’ introduction which was predictably ignored and cut short by her co-presenters and the less than captivated crowd:

Stanley: ‘[the sponsorship] is a perfect partnership as we strive all year round to make people feel better…’

(Err…what?)

Skinner [doubtless echoing the thoughts of the entire room]: ‘Well, it certainly makes me feel better - as a recovering alcoholic. Not quite as good as an actual drink, but you can’t have everything.’

Words alone cannot do the whole episode justice - watch for yourself: 

A prime example of when a sponsor should be seen and not heard - always engage, but never intrude. 

However, whether or not you believe that a television awards sponsor has a rightful active role in their presentation, one must ask how the brand association with this particular ceremonial joke can be seen as beneficial in the long run? The announcement of the 2006 deal suggested that Highland Spring did know what it was getting into, but as the calibre of this most ‘notoriously unpredictable’ awards night continues to decline, how much longer can the brand deem the association a desirable one? Can the value of numerous shameful on-air plugs really outweigh an association with an awards show that is increasingly becoming the laughing stock of the industry? And how does a high-profile water brand sit alongside an event renowned for the drunken, outlandish behaviour of its celebrity guests?

One last thing: take a look at the sponsorship section of Highland Spring’s website. In the brand’s list of ‘high profile Awards and Dinners’ with which they are proudly associated, the British Comedy Awards is not listed.

Go figure.

By Lucie Bartlett on December 11th, 2008

Tags: Brand marketing, Broadcast sponsorship, Media, Sponsorship, Television

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So ITV is trialling technology that fills empty spaces with brand logos. After a thoroughly unscientific poll of those I met today the general response is “Ugh!” but I think it’s unjustified - and missing the point.

When I first skim-read the article I thought ITV was proposing an on-screen advertising overlay a la YouTube, which would have been truly horrible. But no, this is a smart techno way of getting brands involved in the editorial at a time when no one wants to see them interrupt the story.

It’s a silly supposition that ITV will allow advertising brands to unsophisticatedly plaster the walls of The Rovers Return with their posters, or for Microsoft to spray its logo in the sky while Morse solves another provincial conundrum. The creative force that gets these shows on air is just too strong to let the channel screw it up so badly.

No, what strikes me is this is just product placement ‘in post’. Whether a brand pays for a neon sign to be digitally superimposed on the Woolpack door, or whether it was there during shooting - if the brand paid for it, then it’s product placement. Pure and simple. And forgive me if I missed a meeting, but doesn’t Andy Burnham have a dim view of such nefarious practices?

By Morgan Holt on October 6th, 2008

Tags: Branded content, Broadcast sponsorship, DCMS, Digital marketing, Media, New Product Development, Product placement, Television, YouTube

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Farewell then, to Robinsons’ sponsorship of the BBC Sports Personality of the Year show, following this week’s decision by the BBC Trust to end the Corporations’s short-lived foray into broadcast sponsorship.

BBC signed a two-year agreement with Britvic, reputedly worth £200,000, for Robinsons to brand Sports Personality from 2007. But the deal was doomed from the moment that ITV and the RadioCentre both mounted high-profile post-show attacks on it, highlighting its breaches of BBC policy and - somewhat less convincingly given the modest size of the deal - alleging that such agreements would distort the market for broadcast sponsorship.

As a result Sports Personality 2008 will not be Robinsons-branded unless the deal can be renegotiated to make the show editorially compliant, and the opportunity will be withdrawn from 2009 along with a number of similar, smaller projects.

An unhappy episode and an inevitable result, but overall a good thing. Bottom line, this was an ill-conceived and (as anyone who watched the 2007 show would agree) poorly executed deal which took the BBC into no-win territory both commercially and editorially.

Which is not to say that sponsorship doesn’t have a role to play going forward for the BBC – quite the reverse.

The Corporation’s search for alternative revenue sources beyond the licence fee will quite rightly continue. But the big wins are in digital services, international markets and the BBC archive – and as those models develop, so will sponsorship opportunities.

But on-air in the UK, sponsors should only be seen on the BBC where they’ve quite naturally and prominently been seen for years - as sponsors of events which the BBC covers.

By Tim Crow on July 23rd, 2008

Tags: BBC, Broadcast sponsorship, Television

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