Toons are back, Steelers | Advantage Brands

An old Green Bay Packers jacket on exhibit at ...

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“I have a confession to make, Wabbit! said I. to which the rabbit did not reply, But I have not spent that much time on the great XLV this time around as a lot of the injuries and the “wok” in other markets kept me away( a lot of that was lack of work – hint) It seemingly does not matter to anyone as it is Marvin the Martian taking on Nike Jordan amidst all the cars ( Check the Advantage Brands home at brands.advantages.us) and that drunk creäture bobbing ( if you take all the 5 Bud ads, the creäture would be the Bud can, which they can still animate if they want) its head in pride place.

The Superbowl seems to have sobered up with Go Daddy seeming inconsequential and not just Marvin the Martian but Marvel Comics itself bringing America’s family heroes to the couch in between all the 1st downs and turnovers which let Aaron Rodgers think if he has anyone left in the team to use his talent ( hint Packers vs Steelers) Of course the game might be tough with the Green Bay Packers working on their defense but the advertising has definitely got more heart in it. Avoid the viral stuff, is our last recommendation for this piece. Thanks Capt America fans for coming to the Superbowl.

Go Steelers!

American football with clock to represent a

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The Coca Cola Tour of the World!

As of March 31, the FIFA World Cup Football Trophy has reached Belgrade in Serbia on its way to Jo’burg for the princely open

In the mean time, IPL continues to draw audiences of 240 million till date in the 3 week tournament. You know what to spend on when you pend on Tv. F1 seems to be stabilizing with the new rules too. Bahrain is going to be very well attended from the comfort of one’s own homes.. Imagine an audience of 200 million together with access to social media…

Six Nations Rugby, competes with Cricket in the Commonwealth

Well, I guess someone knows how to play, but as CMO I want to understand what my brand will get from this game..Are there any stars I should know?

The Ad Menagerie | Superbowl Sunday

Apart from the Oprah plus Jay Leno plus Letterman ad for CBS, the advertisements that got fun ratings at the Brand Bowl and the USA today rating championships were more or less the dull and boring repetitive themes from yester years. Doritos’ crunching a few bones and a casket this time, The Betty White Snickers Football game and some of the Bud and the Coke magic.

Hyundai was a good consolation prize and Audi and Motorola more marks for freshness than anything else. It seems to be swinging Pepsi’s way, their social millions designed to deliver much less noise and much stronger bonds with the growing audience.

And then there is that apparition 40 million of you will be getting used to in the next few days with Comcast reinventing itself. TV watching has become too tedious. Reinventing the Game is up next for the NFL guys as we ready for the Draft rush. Come by tomorrow..and do not miss the big story of the new IPL in India up at http://brands.advantages.us. The game just reinvented itself. And Saints have their only Superbowl of date.  All the campaigns you want to see are already here and at Advantage Brands site on advantages.us.

Gator takes you down that road… | The Brand Bowl

There is Coke, but no Pepsi

Meanwhile, the others we didn’t let you know and The Big Kahuna who has it all on a chart Look out for the fangle dangle on the right listing all the fan sites for the ads..( A few Facebook pages too)

MCDONALDS: The Ads again a Basketball biggie, with Dwight Howard and LeBron James

Get in the game

McDonald’s has signed LeBron James of the Cleveland Cavaliers to a multi-year deal that includes promotional and fundraising efforts.

BOOST MOBILE: The 1985 Chicago Bears reunite to perform a new version of the Super Bowl Shuffle, this time pitching the prepaid wireless carrier.

Coke, Mr Burns? No Pepsi arnd this time, but there's Gator, duh

Coke, Mr Burns?

COCA-COLA: Mr. Burns, the richest man on “The Simpsons,” loses his fortune but finds happiness. In another, a man goes sleepwalking through an African safari.

DENNY’S: The restaurant chain is giving out free Grand Slams again and shows what the announcement will mean for chickens. (And if you don’t know about the DEnny’s Grand Slam breakfast, write to us & we’ll fill you in)

DOCKERS: Men march across a hillside, singing happily about not wearing pants.

KIA: Children’s toys joyride in the Sorrento SUV. They go bowling, get a tattoo, and party in Las Vegas, set to rock tune “How do you like me now?” by British band The Heavy.

HOMEAWAY.COM: Chevy Chase and Beverly D’Angelo as the quirky, traveling Griswold family, sends viewers to a 15-minute film on the company’s Web site.

SNICKERS: Actress Betty White plays football actor Abe Vigoda also appears.

VOLKSWAGEN: The car brand reinvents the game of “Punch Dub” to acquaint Americans with its lineup. Comedian Tracy Morgan appears. The ‘Ouch Dub’ is a hard punch on the face, Don’t drive if you get one.

TACO BELL:Charles Barkley rhymes about the NBA 5 Buck Box. Two Tacos, a Burrito, Cinna Twists and a Drink. Barkley is a well known commentator who played for the ‘Pho’ suns

Yup, i’m hungry..for the game.

Some Live streaming Options off the hook | Advantage Social

It’s here. Our primary reason for inventing Bell’s grand device, or this hellish broadband competition where everyone’s changing providers every three months just a 100 years later (more) The eponymous podcast has gone live.

A lot of the work of the world gets done using Cisco and Nortel’s Video Conferencing Systems and all that infrastructure. For the consumer, they all are beyond the wallet..A lot more of the brands are getting a whiff of it with digital media revenues picking up speed in the last few months. This boom is riding what essentially started with downloading songs, and the iTunes store was one of the first in the legally validated ones with a great repertoire of mostly audio, not even 7-8 years back.


In these last two-three years however, these developments have just raised the bar to where people expect more uninterrupted direct telecasts / webcasts on the web for work, for play and with twitter and Facebook among others, just plain instant fun. The business model is definitely unproven. It is the fancy or a vector of the amount of fancy taken by each new user, that has pushed money behind most of these ventures almost instantly. The latest one is ustream.tv. After a $11.1 milion financing in April 2008 from Asia Centric Doll Capital Management(DCM). Please get all the linked links at Mashable and FT, for all the stories that led to this one.

DCM has backed Intuit’s Paycycle, Cisco’s Arroyo and quite a few NASDAQ listed network companies.  After the early round Ustream.TV got a $75 million dollop from a group led by Softbank( these guys manage to get a group every time) Ustream gets 50 million unique views a month and 10 m users but depends on advertising for revenue. Kerrplunk!

There are others in the video live streaming business with flawless reproduction. The infamous You Tube is getting on the job with the latest hot button game from India. The $2 billion IPL franchise has given exclusive rights to You Tube to get its matches telecast live to millions across the globe. the #1 in Sports, NFL has been pretty up to it with Videos on the web as well. Through the available audio streaming for live games, it has done well commercially with the products. The time delayed Video snips and the entire repertoire available online has been able to let them make a boast about their online business and the NFL Network. The game videos are a big success on the Itunes store afterwards, but lastng arrangements have not been made. The live score trackers would be an amazing model to recreate for IPL and others in the Soccer world that want to compete for the game

I love my 12seconds.tv  I find a lot of young urban followers getting on it in my tweetdeck beta since last year. Livestream.tv was a screaming success with MSA and Zhu Min natting in Davos about our new Economy with Larry Summers and Dominique Strauss Kahn from the IMF. in.com is among some others who got tired of even thinking of making a commercial case and have put all the Viacom business channels on the web free in live streaming.

I am still a little sensitive about Online advertising though. Except on a few select sites like Hula.com and NFL, it is mostly of a denigrating quality and does not seem like a lasting basis for revenue. Catch the latest video viewership numbers? These could simply be live streaming numbers in a couple of years?

Online video viewing is more ubiquitous than ever. According to comScore, in the month of December 178 million people watched 33.2 billion videos, with the average viewer watching 187 videos per month in the U.S.

MASHABLE

The NFL Web: Videos, Audio streaming and Franchise

After spending every Sunday at the site for the last three years during the season, I can definitely say the American game is a visual rich phenomenon

The #1 in Sports, NFL has been pretty up to it with Videos on the web as well. Though the audio streaming is what is made available for live games, it has done well commercially with the prodyucts and the quality of time delayed Video snips available has been able to let them make a boast about their online business and their network. The live score trackers would be an amazing model to replicate for IPL and others in the Soccer world that want to compete for the game.

The range of videos on the home page cover previews, controversies and coach points of view on the game among others. No riff raff.
The Game Center tracks all the 16 games in a season weekend live, with the game interface allowing you to trace all game drives and getting you special live treats in the red zone ( when the ball is in for a score) The F1 web is a sight too. But NFL is good.

The PEPSI sponsored fantasy tidbits and the full fledged fantasy game for example definitely should be beating the bezezes out of CBS and ESPN. Why it hasn’t translated to the NFL network making a grander statement on TV is another matter

The infamous You Tube is getting on the bandwagon with the latest hot button games from India. The $2 billion IPL franchise has given exclusive rights to You Tube to get its matches telecast live to millions across the globe.

The first official Twitter of the Superbowl

The Mona Lisa Superbowl

The Superbowl Twitter / Flickr Mash


This year the NFL wants you to Tag the Super Bowl #SB44 so that it can collect and aggregate tweets and Flickr photos from fans around the world.The NFL is highlighting the user-tagged Super Bowl content on its new Tag the Super Bowl site, which offers a visually stimulating and unfiltered interactive view of tweets and images that football fans are sharing on Twitter and Flickr with the #SB44 hashtag.

(Mashable, of course)

The Brand Reputation Management Crisis | Advantage Social

Angus MacKenzie and Scott Evans over at MotorTrend.com have a great, well thought out and factual discovery of the crisis for Toyota and US Car Drivers..The hurt to Toyota is just beginning to tell, but they are not the only ones this year:

Mead Johnson, Infant Formula..

Pampers (MarketingPilgrim.com:Andy BEAL) ..

Diamond Foods Cat foods (2009)..

Jordan (sneakermestupid.com) – Japan’s national pride was hurt on the insole TWO 3 spelt Jordan’s shirt on the tongue..the stories are as wierd as today’s collaborative web!

Kellogg’s Eggo 2009

Melamine in Milk ( China 2007)

While we all continue to work out what it means for the consumers and pay the costs , I recommend the great insightful work by MotorTrend.com

Do let us know if any of you work on the above recalls.

Note on Reputation Management The social web is a great enabler for Big Brands and even Nations to defend their vision, values and spread the social ly responsible word about them. It helps when you have a few friends and Facebook, but more often, Twitter is providing the marketing biggies an opportunity to correct the ship’s course and monitor it every minute of the day. It could even save a few lives. Of couse there will be in the end a coalesced corporation or two that will do just this for the brands and for the consumers a couple of years down the line, but till that happens, everyone needs to lend a hand

The 2010 ‘Marathon’ Calendar | Advantage sports

A Colts vs Vikings Superbowl

It’s a Colts vs Saints Superbowl. Both teams had a near perfect record in the league stage. However Saints in their first Superbowl have a Brilliant Drew Brees to start and one of two teams in the Championship with more than 400 Yards. He is also 1 TD and more and 5 Interceptions less than Peyton Manning

At $2.6 million per 30s spot, all available slots except 2-3 in the final quarter have been sold out. CBS is presenting the bowl, while Intel is hosting the post game show with a new campaign similar to the “Sponsors of Tomorrow” meme.

Roughly more than a 100 million people watch the Superbowl, and it is a marketing event to loof forward to. Pepsi withdrew from it citing a different way forward than the “punch in your face” Superbowl ads required to make an impression

IPL waiting in the wings

Mumbai Indian Shaun Pollock at a little golf

IPL of course has Coke and Vodafone taking the lead in marketers. The Vodafone Zoozoo campaign has taken most of the Top 10 spots in the current Livemint Synovate AdIndex analysis in Brand Recall and Reach. I am hoping the Bachchans with their Lux creme campaign will be there too..

A mini series between india and South Africa

With Dhoni and Sehwag shining in spots and Dravid and Tendulkar resting after a very long innings it is a good time for test marketing a couple of new campaigns.

and an Australian Open final without Nadal

At the Rod Laver Arena in Melbourne

Australian Open did lose Qantas after 23 years, but KIA Motors has affirmed sponsorship till 2013. Their live radio feed is pretty useful too. Australian Stars go for as little as a $100K Dollars ( 1A$ ~ 1USD ), the highest being $450K for swimmer Graham Thorpe. The Aussie open gets 500K spectators and the KFC big bash less than 200K.



More than 200 million viewers watch F1 across 200 countries while the Cricket games in India easily reach 20-25 million. IPL is expected to reach a domestic audience of 45 million again with an equal number internationally. The F1 tour starts in March.

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