In this context, I am urging marketers and TV executives to adopt The TiVo Imperative. For marketers, commit a small percentage of your TV advertising budgets, and for TV programmers, commit a small percentage of your promotional budgets with TiVo to engage DVR-users and educate them to want to click their remote to watch advertising and to test-view new TV series. The multiple options and research capabilities that have been developed and implemented by TiVo make it the most viable option available for marketers and networks to begin addressing the imminent crisis facing the industry.

And for TiVo owners there was an interesting piece quoting TiVo CEO Tom Rogers:

Rogers believes “there are many ways to catch the viewer’s eye to entice them to click into an ad. There are many ways to engage the fast forwarding viewer: with tags, with full screen billboards, with entry off the user interface, with insertions when a viewer is asked if he wants to delete a show when he is finished watching… any of which can lead to incredibly effective advertising. There are many more forms of inventory to come, including making product placement immediately actionable right off the remote control.”

I’m especially interested in that last sentence:There are many more forms of inventory to come, including making product placement immediately actionable right off the remote control. That sounds like what I’ve been saying TiVo should do for a long time, most recently when they announced the ‘Product Purchase’ feature with Amazon. I think it should be something the user can enable and disable at will, but I think it would be interesting to be able to get more information on products that appear in a program and purchase them if wanted. The example usually cited is to be able to buy outfits worn by the characters – but I’m a typical geek. I own several nigh-identical pair of black Timberland hiking boots, several pair of nigh-identical black denim pants, and an assortment of T-shits and polo shirts. A GQ model I’m not.

Personally I’d be more interested in the music I hear in shows. I love music, and I often hear songs in shows and ads and wish it was easier to track down the artist and check out more. Even when shows include the “Music in this episode by” tag at the end I admit I rarely manage to jot down the info and then track it down later. But I’m a sucker for impulse buying, they’d definitely get me with a link to iTunes or maybe the Amazon music store to download. (CD’s are just an inefficient transport mechanism to get the music into iTunes for me.)

If you’re interested in this kind of thing, read the entire article.

The full ACIS press release:

Sep 22, 2008 10:46 ET

ACIS Takes Slingbox to School as the Title Sponsor for 2008 Slingbox ACIS Football

Three New Sponsors Join Country’s Largest College Sports Marketing Program With More Than 250,000 Players and 100,000 Games on 200 Campuses

NEW YORK, Sept. 22 /PRNewswire/ — American Collegiate Intramural Sports (ACIS), the nation’s largest college sports property has secured Slingbox as the new title sponsor of the 2008 Slingbox ACIS Football. The program, which will allow Slingbox to reach more than 2.6 million college students on 200 college campuses culminates with the 30th annual Slingbox ACIS Football National Championship tournament from December 28-31 in New Orleans.

ACIS has also secured two other new sponsors, Sara Lee’s Ball Park Franks and Twinlabs. In addition, five other brands renewed — Philips Norelco, Microsoft’s Xbox 360, Gold Bond, Jelly Belly’s Sport Beans and Nike.

The program enables brands to bring their marketing dollars closer to the customer with turnkey activation on campus, by delivering product demonstrations, sampling, sweepstakes, signage and other benefits to sponsors. Sponsors receive a semester’s worth of continual activation and visibility on campuses followed by four regional tournaments and a visible national championship tournament. ACIS programs continue in the winter with ACIS Basketball and ACIS Fitness providing similar sponsor benefits.

“These sponsors understand that it takes more than a one day promotion to impact this difficult-to-reach demographic and that by becoming a part of the college lifestyle they can make their product relevant to students,” said Ian Leopold, President of ACIS.

Sponsor activation elements include: Slingbox – sweepstakes to send a student to the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans plus 300 Sling Student Ambassadors to demonstrate the product on campuses; Philips Norelco – awarding more than 2,000 Norelco 7000 Series shavers to students; Xbox 360 hosting the Xbox 360 Lounge and a weekly Game Night Party; Ball Park – the Ball Park Punt, Pass & Kick Team Challenge and sampling 30,000 franks at Ball Park Party/Feasts; Jelly Belly’s Sports Beans – distributing 250,000 samples; Chattem Inc.’s Gold Bond – sampling 250,000 units of Ultimate Healing Lotion; Twinlabs sampling 50,000 units of 100% Whey Protein Fuel and Ripped Fuel 5X. Nike – Official Athletic Gear.

About ACIS

American Collegiate Intramural Sports (ACIS) is the nation’s largest college sports property. For more information, visit www.ACIScollege.com.

Contact: Doug Drotman (doug@drotmanpr.com or 631-462-1198)

Source: American Collegiate Intramural Sports

CONTACT: Doug Drotman, doug@drotmanpr.com, +1-631-462-1198

Web Site: http://www.aciscollege.com/

Disclaimer: I work for Sling Media. But I found out about this from the ACIS press release.

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.

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.

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.

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?

“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.”

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.

TiVo Inc.(NASDAQ: TIVO), the creator of and a leader in advertising solutions and television services for digital video recorders (DVRs), today announced that it has signed Carat to a comprehensive audience research agreement. Carat, one of the largest media buying shops and among the fastest growing marketing communications groups worldwide, will utilize TiVo’s unique research services to help its clients better understand the most urgent issue facing advertisers today – the impact of DVRs on viewing behavior and especially fast-forwarding of commercials. In addition to access to DVR viewing behavior, TiVo and Carat will also work together to educate Carat clients on ways to reach the fast forwarding viewer, leveraging TiVo ad solutions.

You can tell TiVo’s financial call is this afternoon – they’ve made new announcements yesterday and today. The subscription gives Carat access to both Stop||Watch and Power||Watch programs. DVR utilization is going nowhere but up and advertisers are getting serious about addressing that market. They have to evolve or die, and that’s good news for TiVo as they’re a leader in this space.

Media planning and buying company Starcom USA and TiVo Inc. (Nasdaq: TIVO), the creator of and a leader in advertising solutions and television services for DVRs, today announced Starcom is the first media agency to partner with the firm on Power||Watch™ Consumer Panel — a new offering from TiVo which provides advertisers access to demographic and viewing behavior data for 20,000 households who volunteer to take part in a consumer panel.

“With 20,000 households, the Power||Watch Consumer Panel will provide a new level of detail on DVR viewing behavior among any given brand’s target segments that will significantly enhance the approach advertisers take in creating and buying advertising on television,” said Todd Juenger, Vice President & General Manager, Audience Research & Measurement, TiVo.

There is more in the full press release.