The CNN Diner started as a hospitality tent for CNN’s advertisers and affiliates. It ended up being the hot spot of the Republican National Convention — and CNN’s broadcast studio for Crossfire and Larry King Live.
CNN hired Civic Entertainment Group to make over a diner near Madison Square Garden to give the cable news network a gathering place for the convention, to serve burgers and shakes to movers and shakers. Then the cameras started rolling, and the Diner doubled as CNN’s set. Diners became Crossfire’s studio audience, shouting opinions between bites. “It was a promotion that became an inspiration for the programming,” says Civic CEO Stuart Ruderfer.
Pollination between promotion and programming — while it’s usually more calculated than CNN’s short-order play — has drawn networks and brands together. “Branded entertainment,” the hottest trend in TV since the remote, has opened new avenues for promotions.
Campaigns follow two routes. The simple path lets marketers add an on-air punch line to a traditional promotion: Witness Pepsi’s Play for $1 Billion broadcast on ABC, or Sports Illustrated’s Fresh Face Swimsuit Model Search, running prime-time on NBC.
The second route will be a bigger trend as marketers and TV networks jointly develop brand-centric shows with promotion extensions off-air. Networks and their partners ventured out with shows this summer and fall; promotional overlays will follow as programming proves out. Promotions will bring branded programming off the screen and into stores with retail displays, talent appearances and events. The evolution will eventually put promo agencies in collaboration with media buyers and TV production firms — or pit them against each other (see “Agency Plays”).
“It’s not just about showcasing your brand in a cool environment, but about triggering transactions. Marketers are looking for bottom-line results,” says Aaron Walton, CEO of Aaron Walton Entertainment.
“Marketers are shifting money into brand programming and experiential marketing to reach consumers both face-to-face and through mass media,” says Steve Groth, CEO of event marketing network Radiate Group. “Promotions will be at the heart of the trinity. Thirty-second spots won’t go away, but advertisers understand the money needs to be rebalanced.”
Branded entertainment grabbed headlines in late 2003 and grew rapidly this year as networks hungry for programming (and hurting for ads) figured out how to share the spotlight — and production costs — with brands eager to dodge TiVo and get better results from their dollars.
Why now? Because it’s harder than ever to get viewers to watch TV spots, and easier than ever to get programming on the air. With hundreds of cable channels and even the networks shopping for content, “You actually have a place to put a show,” says Groth. “Channels are looking for good content in a big way.”
“Production companies are realizing that having a promotional partner is a great way to keep costs down, and get shows on the air,” Walton adds.
Product placement plus
Of course, sponsored programming is as old as a 1950s soap opera. (Right now, Procter & Gamble is letting The Apprentice contenders create a marketing campaign for Crest toothpaste, and collaborating with the Discovery Health Channel on National Body Challenge’s 12-week weight-loss challenge.) But product placement is deeper and more sophisticated these days, and networks get off-air real estate as well as incremental ad revenue.
Cable network Spike TV plans to run The Ultimate Fighter this fall with a handful of promotional partners who get product placement and a sweepstakes awarding trips to the show’s boxing finale. Omnicom Group’s branded entertainment division was negotiating promo deals at press time.
Kmart provided wardrobe for five shows on The WB Television Network this fall as part of its $30 million back-to-school campaign (July PROMO). Twenty WB stars wear Kmart’s private-label clothes in two episodes of each show; an in-store contest let shoppers submit photos of themselves in the same clothes as stars to win a walk-on role. A similar tie-in with E! Entertainment Television’s daily E! News Live launches Kmart’s Attention work apparel this fall. Show talent wears Attention clothes on-air and in Kmart print ads. E! gets tune-in messages in-store and in Kmart’s print ads via Grey Advertising, New York City.
Campbell Soup Co. backs a parallel essay contest with NBC’s American Dreams (August PROMO). An American Dreams character competes on-air, while Campbell hosts a real-world essay contest for high schoolers. Grand prize includes a walk-on role, and Campbell’s 10 finalists will be announced in the Feb. 6 episode: Their names make up the list of finalists in the show’s fictional contest. Marden-Kane, Manhasset, NY, handles the contest; Campbell’s media-buying agency, MediaEdge:cia, cut the deal.
Home Depot brought the stars of TLC’s Trading Spaces to host Do-It-Herself Workshops in Atlanta, Boston and Sacramento stores in July. (Home Depot sponsors Trading Spaces through a deal with TLC parent Discovery Communications.) Nearly 27,000 women came to workshops; more are planned for 2005.
Home Depot first collaborated with Discovery in 2002, placing products in TLC’s While You Were Out. “Then we tried to get into their stores, but it was very challenging” until John Costello became Home Depot’s exec VP-merchandising and marketing, says Amy Baker, Discovery’s VP-solutions sales. Since then, Trading Spaces stars have appeared at Home Depot grand openings and clinics, and last year TLC held consumer auditions for its Trading Spaces: Home Free special at a Home Depot store. Tie-ins with new shows are planned. “It would be a shame if we didn’t use every spoke of the wheel to leverage our partnership,” says Baker, who leads Discovery’s three-year-old Solutions Group. Three solutions sales managers work with ad sales staff to sell partner packages; 15 marketing staffers execute the deals (three handle just Home Depot work). “It’s a challenge to make sure you deliver everything you promised,” Baker says. Deals always include advertising: “It’s the baseline,” says Baker, who keeps the list of partners small and has walked away from deals where brands didn’t mesh.
Procter & Gamble is Discovery’s biggest partner, matching specific brands to individual shows and swapping on-air visibility for retail reach: P&G promoted TLC’s What Not to Wear in its 55 million-circulation brandSaver FSI this fall.
P&G’s Swiffer follows Trading Spaces designer Genevieve Gorder to her own show, Town Haul, premiering this winter. Gorder and team will make over small-town downtowns; P&G will use its sponsorship to launch Swiffer Sweep+Vac and support the full Swiffer line.
P&G met Gorder on Trading Spaces, then hired her as Swiffer’s spokesperson — then followed her to Town Haul. Gorder appears in TV spots for Sweep+Vac via Kaplan Thaler, New York City.
Cast members can forge strong ties to brands. A Trading Spaces team renovated a Ronald McDonald House in Grand Rapids, MI, last month to kick off Discovery’s yearlong deal with McDonald’s Corp. Trading Spaces: Family chronicles the makeover through eight vignettes airing this month. Designer and cast member Doug Wilson suggested the makeover after his nephew, diagnosed with cancer, lived in a Ronald McDonald House during treatment. Discovery and McDonald’s are mulling additional tie-ins.
Discovery works the other side of the sponsorship table, too: it becomes title sponsor next year of the Pro Cycling Team led by Lance Armstrong, replacing the U.S. Postal Service. Armstrong — who’ll ride for his sixth Tour de France victory in a Discovery Channel Pro Cycling Team jersey — becomes global spokesman for Discovery and will appear in programming on five networks, including The Travel Channel, The Science Channel and FitTV. “I can’t wait to tap into that for our key partners,” Baker laughs.
Some deals bring un-advertised brands on-screen. In July, Procter & Gamble Productions’ Guiding Light and As the World Turns ran a national watch-and-win sweeps asking viewers to spot local brands — a can of Phillips Foods crabmeat, say, or a Mall of America mug. For two weeks, viewers answered a daily question about the show to vie for a trip to New York City and private studio tour. Two of the 10 questions were city-specific: Writers wove local icons from Baltimore, Dallas, Denver, Minneapolis and Pittsburgh (all strong markets for the shows) into the scripts.
The shows also wrote local celebs from each city (like the weatherman) into the script, and regular cast members made appearances in each market.
ABC tested the three tactics to boost local ratings; P&G wanted to see if such targeted marketing is more effective than national ad buys. P&G is expected to do a watch-and-win sweeps for one of its own products on the two soaps later this year. Televest, New York City, handles marketing tied to the shows.
Taking winners on-air
Some brands write their own script, as part of a traditional promotion. Pepsi brought its Play for a Billion sweeps to ABC for its second year, piggybacking the network’s “Summer of a Billion Laughs” theme for the 15-week promotion that culminated with a one-hour broadcast on Sept. 12, leading into ABC’s season premieres. ABC stars Damon Wayans and Tom Bergeron hosted; Destiny’s Child sang. And seven consumers competed for cash.
Under-the-cap codes awarded 200 winners a trip to the show taping in Los Angeles; those finalists formed the studio audience. Each picked five six-digit numbers; a chimpanzee, Mr. Moneybags, chose a random six-digit number, and the seven finalists closest to that figure came on-stage to vie for the long-shot $1 billion prize. (The winner took home $1 million.)
Last year, Play for a Billion’s show ran two hours on The WB. “We learned to tighten up the show and make it more exciting, with fewer contestants and more chances to win,” says Robin Kaminsky, Pepsi VP-national initiatives and customer marketing. Pepsi talked to several networks for 2004 and liked the fit with CBS best.
Negotiations are “very different from an ad buy,” Kaminsky says. “We went to ABC with [production company] Diplomatic, and talked to ad sales and programming staff. We discussed our 2003 ratings, how Pepsi drives awareness, and what the network would bring to the party.”
TracyLocke Dallas, handled the sweeps for Pepsi’s national promotion group. Diplomatic, Los Angeles, produced the show, working primarily with the Pepsi brand team. “We worked together on creative briefs and vision development,” says Al Dejewski, Pepsi’s senior marketing manager. “We worked with TracyLocke for consistency on the imagery for all touch-points, so we were saying the same thing to the right consumers.”
Pepsi owns the show, which it uses for internal audiences, but won’t rebroadcast or re-use. A separate summer series, Pepsi Smash, aired live concerts on The WB and serves as a platform for grassroots promotions. A May-July online sweeps let fans vote for their five fave bands; votes that matched any band on host Nick Zano’s list earned a sweeps entry. Grand prize was a trip for two to a September concert in Park City, UT; lesser prizes included Pepsi-branded iPods and a CD collection of Pepsi Smash performers. LA-based Tenth Planet Productions produces Pepsi Smash for Pepsi and The WB; Pepsi also uses its Pepsi Smash trademark for live concerts and radio programming.
Sports Illustrated ratchets up its Fresh Faces swimsuit model search with a prime-time show on NBC. SI conducted its first amateur-model search last year, auditioning finalists at AVP volleyball tourneys (broadcast on NBC) and announcing the winner during NBC’s Primetime.
Last year teen retailer Limited Too — which doesn’t advertise on TV — extended its annual What’s Your Wish contest with a one-hour TV special hosted by singer Beyoncé Knowles, which aired four times on cable network ABC Family.
Limited Too’s one million-circulation catalogs carried entry forms; girls wrote an essay about their wish, then submitted it in-store. One million girls entered; fifteen won prizes ranging from a Limited Too shopping spree with Beyoncé and Solange Knowles or lunch and bowling with Aaron Carter to a family cruise or week at Space Camp. (Grand prize was a Solange & Play concert at school.)
Fans got stickers and game pieces in-store, then watched the show to answer a question on game pieces, which they redeemed in-store for a gift and to enter a sweeps to appear in an ABC Family show. The show boosted ratings 207% for the time period over the previous week, and was “clearly a vehicle for the brand,” says Marcus Peterzell, president-sales and marketing for Aaron Walton Entertainment, which handled the campaign with sister shop Alcone Marketing, Los Angeles. Dogmatic, Inc., New York City, produced the show.
“Years ago, we’d start with a thematic fit [between a brand and entertainment property]. Now marketers start with a promotion and see if there’s a TV show to build around it,” Walton says. “And they want to measure the results of their involvement in a show.”
The yardstick is familiar: Marketers measure sales, networks measure ratings. But they’ll also survey consumer awareness and attitude towards the brand and the tie-in.
Since most production money is diverted from ad budgets, it’s tempting to measure only ad reach, not sales, says Joseph Bongiovi, president of Monarch Entertainment Group, Los Angeles. But it’s better to tie on-air performance to brand sales.
Remote control
Growing pains will hit in three ways as the old programming/advertising model morphs into branded content with promotion. First, networks could lose ad revenue unless ad buys are part of promotional contracts. Second, shows have different timetables and production details than ads and promotions. Third, promo shops could compete with studios, and with media-buying firms that have burrowed into programming production. For now, the disciplines are distinct, with promo agencies executing campaigns and production houses behind the camera. But watch out as territory blurs and agencies vie for whole projects.
Meanwhile, networks must balance ad sales with programming. “The worst thing for media buying companies is to have branded entertainment become mainstream. There are no ad sales or commission then,” Bongiovi says. Some nets build ad sales into each contract; others share production costs and handle ad sales separately.
A TV show built from scratch around a brand’s strategy takes at least six months to develop (nine to 12 months for a scripted show) and costs from $200,000 per episode for reality shows to $1 million per episode for scripted shows, per Bongiovi.
Then there’s the question of control. Will the marketer or the network own the show (and its risk)? Who decides how a brand is incorporated?
Southwest Airlines ceded all control when it gave A&E full access for the documentary series Airline. Civic Entertainment Group studied a handful of airlines for its client A&E, then approached Southwest’s director of publicity — who promptly threw the pitch into the trash. Civic convinced her to reconsider, and the day after Airline’s premiere, job applications at Southwest tripled. “They accepted [a documentary] because they were confident in themselves,” says Civic’s Ruderfer. “Southwest spends a lot of money advertising its brand. This is a half-hour promotion that keeps their brand top of mind at minimal cost.”
A&E owns Airline; Southwest did not commit to advertising as part of the deal. Documentary deals are uncommon, but can spur promotions: Southwest’s partner Dollar Rent a Car hypes the show with tune-in information at rental counters.
A&E is working with eBay on a design show that will feature eBay as a central element to the weekly series. Last spring, San Jose, CA-based eBay filmed its Point, Click, Design promo that had eight interior designers each re-do a room in a Manhattan town-house, buying everything they needed through eBay. The documentary aired on A&E in June. “It was a tutorial on using eBay,” says Ruderfer, whose agency handled the project.
Marketers will keep pushing the evolution of the small screen, eventually bringing their brands — and networks’ — back to store shelves. And even to the counter of the local diner.
AGENCY PLAYS
Media-buying firms have formed entertainment divisions and partnered with TV networks to follow the money that marketers are shifting out of ad budgets and into programming.
WPP Group’s Mindshare North America cut a deal with ABC in January; this summer, WPP clients Sears and Unilever participated in six episodes of The Days, jointly produced by MindShare and Tollin/Robbins Productions for ABC.
Sears provided some funding for production and got three 30-second spots per episode (but no product placement). “This lets us keep down the cost of ad buys,” says Sears spokesperson Corinne Gudovic. Sears had no input on scripts, and did none of its own promotion touting the show. “Because it was a success, we might do [promotional support] down the road,” Gudovic says. Ratings were better than expected; ABC may renew The Days as a mid-season replacement.
Omnicom Group hired reality TV pro Robert Riesenberg (who produced NBC’s The Restaurant) to run its new branded entertainment group in January. First work is The Ultimate Fighter, a reality show that pits boxers against each other, slated to run this fall on Spike TV. Omnicom offered promotional partners product placement and a sweepstakes awarding trips to the show’s boxing finale. Riesenberg jumped to Omnicom from Interpublic Group of Cos., where he led the 2002 formation of Magna Global Entertainment as a unit of IPG’s media-buying arm Magna Global USA. He was replaced in January by Principal-Strategy and Business Affairs Frances Page, who had been Magna Global Entertainment’s VP-sales and client service. Meanwhile, Havas’s media-buying arm MPG formed MPG Entertainment in August, tapping trade mag Advertising Age editors Richard Linnett and Hank Kim to run it — an unusual move, as other agencies have preferred execs with entertainment or media-buying experience.
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