Sling Media has signed their Slingbox brand as the title sponsor for ACIS (American Collegiate Intramural Sports) football, or rather 2008 Slingbox ACIS Football. As part of the sponsorship, Sling is backing a sweepstakes to send a student to the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans, as well as 300 Sling Student Ambassadors to demonstrate Sling products on campuses. Sling is joined by two other new sponsors, Sara Lee’s Ball Park Franks and Twinlabs. In addition, five other brands renewed their sponsorships: Philips Norelco, Microsoft’s Xbox 360, Gold Bond, Jelly Belly’s Sport Beans, and Nike.

The full ACIS press release:
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With the growth in DVR usage and commercial skipping, marketers and advertisers have increasingly turned to alternatives to the 30-second spot, with product placement being a common option. Now Nielsen is reporting that product placement dropped a cumulative 15% in the first half of the year while showing a distinct shift - broadcast network placements were up 12%, but cable placements were down 20%.

I found the report interesting reading just from the data on the numbers of actual product placements. I was surprised by just how many placements there are. For example, in the first half of 2008 American Idol alone had 4,636 product placements, followed by Biggest Loser with 4,364. Coca-Cola was the top brand, with 2,990 placements. The market was bombarded with 204,919 product placements in just the first half of 2008. So if you thought there were a lot of products slipped into your shows, you’re right.

Not surprisingly, reality programing has the most product placements as its easier to work products in than it is in a scripted show. But with the deluge of reality shows clogging up the airwaves, there may be too many programs to go around. Audiences can only take so much, and with more shows on the air advertisers may not get as much of a concentration of viewers.

Personally I abhor most reality shows and do everything I can not to watch them. I guess I few shows I watch, like Iron Chef America, technically fall into the category though. But even avoiding the big reality shows, I’ve noticed a growing amount of product placement. One of the shows I enjoyed last season, The Big Bang Theory, had a lot of product placement worked into the program. Characters made very obvious use of Dell laptops, and one character works at The Cheesecake Factory, as is mentioned repeatedly. This season of Eureka is partly sponsored by Degree antiperspirant, which includes fairly intrusive, annoying product placement in the program itself. It is so clumsily handled that it’d be better if the characters just stopped and pitched the product for 30 seconds. It is annoying enough to make me want to never use the product.

I wonder if the increasing ‘in your face’ aspect of product placements is a symptom of the same saturation effect. It reminds me very much of web-based advertising, and how ads became increasingly aggressive with pop-ups, pop-unders, sound, animation, etc. Desperately trying to attract consumers, while in reality it was increasingly driving them away. Unfortunately I don’t expect an ad-blocker for product placements any time soon.

Spotted through Silicon Valley Insider.

In what they’re calling an “Unprecedented Partnership” (wasn’t it preceded by a very similar deal with the Chicago Tribune? I don’t think unprecedented means what you think it means), as I posted earlier today, TiVo is teaming up with Entertainment Weekly.

Fromm their press release:

Entertainment Weekly’s ‘What to Watch’ TV recommendations will now be even easier to access, as the TiVo® service will automatically record the suggested programs. As a result, broadband enabled TiVo subscribers are guaranteed to always have the best programs available to watch whenever they turn on the TV set. The service is expected to launch this fall.

In addition, TiVo subscribers will be able to download Entertainment Weekly video content on the TiVo service, allowing viewers to enjoy EW.com’s original programs such as “Just a Minute,” “Ausiello TV,” “Idolatry,” and behind the scenes video from photo shoots.

It sounds pretty much exactly like the Chicago Tribune deal, a combination of an Entertainment Weekly Guru Guide and TiVoCast(s). This deal will probably result in more exposure for TiVo as EW’s audience is a lot more focused than the Tribune’s.

Though I think they might be laying it on a wee bit thick:

This unprecedented partnership allows two powerful properties to work together to create a more seamless television viewing experience for their respective audiences. TiVo chose Entertainment Weekly to be their trusted voice, and together, they are bridging the gap between Entertainment Weekly readers and all television viewers using the TiVo service. This truly holistic solution maximizes the service EW offers its audience with the innovation and ease of the TiVo service.

An ‘unprecedented partnership’ and a ‘truly holistic solution’? Really? TiVo, I love you pal, but I think that’s a little much for a marketing arrangement with some Guru Guides and TiVoCasts. I’d be happy to be surprised by there being more to it, but that’s what it sounds like. A good deal, but not warranting such effusiveness.

TiVo put out a press release Wednesday with the headline TiVo Launches Power||Watch™ Ratings Service, Teams With Starcom to Release Initial Findings, which struck me as odd since they already announced the launch of Power||Watch last November with a release entitled TiVo Launches Power||Watch™ Consumer Panel with Starcom Partnership.

From the release it just sounds like they’re releasing the first results from the Power||Watch service, which they started putting together last November. Power||Watch consists of a panel of 20,000 TiVo users who have opted in to having personal information gathered. This allows TiVo to associate the viewing data from the TiVo with the known demographic data from the household to provide more valuable data than the anonymous information provided by their Stop||Watch service.

May 2008 Power||Watch(TM) Ratings Service Highlights

– The Power||Watch(TM) ratings service research indicated that, contrary to popular perception, subscribers who have used the TiVo(R) service for more than three years, the “early adopters,” are no more likely to avoid commercials than those who have only been TiVo subscribers for one to three years. Essentially, there is no meaningful difference in the amount of Timeshifted viewing or fast-forwarding between these subscriber groups.

– All demographic segments Timeshift and fast-forward commercials at a high rate, although the specific commercials viewers choose to skip varies. For example, there are significant variances in the amount of time households with children under 12 spent watching commercials for certain product categories during Timeshifted viewing compared to households with adults over 50.

The full press release has more data and more of a breakdown of the initial Power||Watch results.

Lately you have have been seeing promo spots for a new TV series Scarlet, which looked like some kind of spy thriller with a female lead, similar to Alias. I’d been catching the spots mainly as a promo inserted into some TiVoCast content such as The Onion. The spots looked fairly high budget with explosions, etc. I was actually thinking of checking out the show just to see what it was like. It has a website and even an entry in IMDB. Here’s one of the versions of the teaser:

Well, there is no such series. It was all an elaborate hoax that is part of a marketing effort for a new line of HDTVs from LG Electronics called, of course, Scarlet. See, it is a ‘TV Series’ as in ‘a series of TVs’. Clever, but at the same time I feel kind of disappointed that I was misled. It feels dishonest to me, and leaves me with a bad feeling about LG. Certainly not what they were going for, I’m sure.

How do you feel about such deceptive viral marketing tactics? Did you get taken by Scarlet?

Adweek has an interesting article on the high-stakes war of words being waged between the Blu-ray and HD DVD camps. Both sides are stepping up their marketing efforts, and increasing their marketing spend, to win more converts to their formats.

“It’s now a real format war,” said Steve Martin, president of WPP Group’s SicolaMartin, Austin, Texas, the agency that handled the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) trade group—backed by Hitachi, LG Electronics, Matsushita Electric (Panasonic), Pioneer, Philips, Samsung, Sharp, Sony and Thomson—until last summer when the BDA jumped to movie-advertising specialty shop Trailer Park, Hollywood, Calif., signaling the marketing emphasis to come. “My feeling is that the power of the studios is so strong in the Blu-ray camp … it may be the decisive factor,” Martin said. “In any case, I would expect a significant increase in marketing. [HD-DVD promoter] Toshiba won’t go down without a fight. Once you’re all-in, you have to go all the way.”

According to DMNews, TiVo has signed up marketing company Direct Impact for an interactive marketing campaign:

TiVo chose the agency for its experience in interactive branding. Direct Impact will deploy an interactive campaign for TiVo in early 2008.

“We developed expertise on interactive games to drive and deepen relationships with existing customers and also to drive acquisition,” [Tracey Brown, COO of Direct Impact] pointed out. “TiVo read and heard about that and contacted us to see if we had any ideas of unique, fun, interactive games that we could develop for them.”

She continued, “What’s nice about them is they do have a good existing subscriber base, but of course are constantly trying to acquire new customers. We had tons of ideas of how to use interactivity with a game to meet two goals: to strengthen relationships with their existing customer base and make them more loyal, and to use a cool game to drive acquisition.”

The interactive game is a new strategy for driving customer loyalty, Brown said, but TiVo has used interactive promotions, such as sweepstakes, for acquisition in the past.

Direct Impact’s work with TiVo will revolve entirely around interactive media.

It will be interesting to see what they come up with. I really have no idea what kind of game they’d use as a marketing promotion.