Archive for the ‘Television’ Category

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What time is it? ADVENTURE TIME!

Friday, March 26th, 2010

If there’s any justice left in this world, this’ll be the cartoon all your kids are talking about. Adventure Time with Finn and Jake.

Simply put, it’s a show about the adventures of a boy (Finn) and his dog (Jake).They just happen to exist in anything but a simple world. There are Ice Kings who steal ladies, Bubblegum Princesses with magical Rainicorns and based on the concept art that’s been posted on the show’s tumblr (fan art is mixed in there too)—an unending menagerie of other creatures.

While Adventure Time breaks some rules that drives commenters on animation blogs mad, I find its boundless creativity inspiring. I love things like this. Too often people forget that cartoons aren’t just for kids, especially when they’re made by hilarious and imaginative adults (like Craig McCracken who created The Powerpuff Girls and (my personal favorite) Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends). Like McCracken, Adventure Time mastermind, Pendelton Ward, creates a vibrant world for his hero and canine companion with apparent ease. Nothing is explained for how it’s possible or why it works, the world just is… capitalizing on a general ease of acceptance regarding the fantastic in children that many of us lose as adults.

As creatives, I think it’s important for us to reconnect with that part of our former, smaller selves. Fun can be fun, silly and wondrous fun… simply for fun’s sake. And a giant Abraham Lincoln can give us inspiring advice on Mars.

Don’t question it. Just take a peek at the 2006 Nickelodeon short that grew up into the upcoming show: Adventure Time With Finn and Jake.

The series will premiere on April 5th. Algebraic!

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Posted in Art, Inspiration, Pop Culture, Television | No Comments »

When advertisers evolve, it’s a beautiful thing

Thursday, March 25th, 2010

Sometimes one of the best things that a company can do is make fun of itself or the advertising standards the industry has followed and show consumers that they really do “get it,” and so should you.

This recent Kotex commercial is a prime example.

In it, the actress details all the stereotypical tampon-ad-related activities she “loves” engaging in—holding cuddly things, skipping on the beach, twirling in slo-mo, wearing white Spandex—while footage from Kotex’s own ad vault illustrates the irony.

“It’s very funny because the whole spot is about censorship,” a director of the ad company who created the spot told the New York Times. “The whole category has been very euphemistic, or paternalistic even, and we’re saying, enough with the euphemisms, and get over it…”

So true. Thanks U by Kotex!

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Posted in Advertising, Marketing to Women, Television | 3 Comments »

Vancouver 2010 – A Gold Medal Research Opportunity

Thursday, February 25th, 2010

The 2010 Winter Olympics are in full swing and what a truly great event the Olympics are. Top athletes from around the world are giving everything they have competing for medals, but more importantly the pride of their home country and some international bragging rights.

If I could, I’d be in Vancouver dressed as Uncle Sam, chanting “U-S-A” the whole time, but I have lacrosse practice and a few classes so I’ll have to settle for a 42” flat screen. Either way I’ll be rooting for our men and women as they hopefully dominate the rest of the world’s athletes.

Now there are a lot of things that Americans are good at but the two that I’m thinking of are sports and…research. Yep, research. This year it is unlikely that NBC will make any money from its broadcast of the Winter Olympics but what they will get is valuable research from the event’s massive audience that might generate additional ad revenue in the time shortly after the last of the medals are handed out.

NBC’s goal is to see how the same person uses both TV and the internet during the Olympics as well as what kinds of video they watch online. This research is building off of a similar project they started during the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. In one study during that project, NBC gave 41 Olympics enthusiasts a mobile-phone-based monitoring system that allowed them to track how each person was exposed to the Olympics and for how long. During the winter Olympics, NBC plans to examine how each person uses the internet and TV and what kinds of videos they are watching online. They even plan to track if the video is something being viewed for the first time or if it was a repeat view of an event already seen on TV. NBC hopes to be able to use this information to persuade advertisers to spend more money.

The Olympics provides NBC with millions of potential subjects to analyze because it attracts such a huge and diverse audience. The 2010 Winter Olympics could bring in as many as 200 million viewers, an increase from the 2006 Winter Olympics which recorded 184 million viewers. According to Alan Wurtzel, President of Research at NBC Universal, “Big events such as the Olympics often get viewers to test out new viewing behaviors, simply because the event has such a high water-cooler quotient.” The tricky part will be figuring out why people are watching what they are watching and why they are viewing it on TV, a PC or a mobile device.

NBC will also work with Google and TiVo to track additional data. So while we are all enjoying the greatness of the events that comprise the Winter Olympics, NBC will be hard at work trying to track and turn audience behavior into advertising Dollars. Let’s not lose sight of what’s really important though, and that is American gold medals! So let’s grab a beer and cheer on our fellow Americans, eh?

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About Author: Dave O’Neill is a senior at St. John Fisher College and a Research Intern at Dixon Schwabl. “I love hockey, lacrosse (it’s my senior season at SJFC), hunting and fishing. I can’t imagine there is a better place to work than Dixon Schwabl and I absolutely love being a part of such a great company.”

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Posted in Research, Sports, Television | 1 Comment »

I want my MTV

Wednesday, February 24th, 2010

Music Television, that is. Not the unpalatable programming that’s taken over the once-revolutionary video channel like a cancer and rendered it virtually unrecognizable to Generation X. But I guess it’s a pipe dream of mine now that the network has officially dropped “Music Television” from the logo.

the new MTV logo and the original 1981 design

Seriously, people. “Jersey Shore” is more riveting than watching artists’ visual interpretations of songs, good and bad? Sure, there’s You Tube for all that now, but it lacks the personalization that Martha Quinn and the other veejays possessed. Yes, I may be living in the past, but it rocked the Casbah.

So what exactly does the “M” represent now? Mystery meat, school cafeteria style. Hand me a barf bag, like totally.

Read about the MTV logo story here. And let’s keep hope alive that maybe someday music videos will find their way back into pop culture.

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Posted in Art, Brand Experience, Logos, Music, Pop Culture, Pop Culture Throw-Back, Television | 4 Comments »

Did you watch the Super Bowl? More importantly, did you watch the commercials?

Wednesday, February 17th, 2010

It’s official. This year’s Super Bowl was the most-watched television event in history. More than 106 million people tuned in on February 7 to watch the New Orleans Saints defeat the Indianapolis Colts. I’m not a football fan but I was one of those 106 million people tuned in to CBS Sunday night. So why do I watch the Super Bowl if I don’t like football? I watch it because I love the commercials.

My favorite Super Bowl commercial from this year was from Google. This was composed entirely of a man searching for things on Google. Sounds boring, right? So what makes it so great to make me stop mid-conversation to watch it? It is so fascinating because his searches tell a story. A love story.

It starts with the man searching for study abroad in Paris, and it continues with searches including how to “impress a French girl” and “long distance relationship advice.” The viewer is taken on a journey as this man woos his French love. My favorite search of his? “Churches in Paris.” I’m sure that most women got the message that he was planning to marry his French love and said “aw” when the bells started playing in the background.

So what makes this commercial so amazing for me other than the fact that I love to hear a great love story? Google was able to make the impersonal search engine something personal. Google gave itself an identity, a search engine to help with your personal (and practical) needs. This branding technique helps to distance Google from its “top dog,” Fortune 500 status and make the audience feel like Google is its own personal help guide.

Another great commercial was Audi’s “green police.” If you didn’t see it, the commercial shows all sorts of people being arrested by the “green police” for making choices that are bad for the environment. (My favorite- the man who did not replace his incandescent light bulb!). The commercial ends with the Audi A3 TDI, newly crowned as Green Car Journal’s 2010 Green Car of the Year, driving off after passing a “green inspection.”

This commercial does a great job of playing off America’s new “green” trend. Audi’s idea for the “green police” stuck well with audiences and I found myself laughing pretty hard at their advertisement. Does it make me want to go out and buy an Audi A3 TDI? Not so much, but it did catch my attention!

Here are a couple other of my noteworthy commercials from the Super Bowl:

Dodge’s “Mans last stand”

Doritos’ “Keep your hands off my mama and my Doritos”

Doritos’ “funeral”

What was your favorite?

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About Author: Kelley Longyear is a Spring 2010 Front Desk Intern at Dixon Schwabl. “I am currently a junior at St. John Fisher College. I’m majoring in communication/journalism and my minor is history. I smile all the time and laugh at even the worst jokes. For the future, I hope to work at Dixon Schwabl and travel the world!”

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Posted in Advertising, Sports, Television | No Comments »

This is your brain on my TV

Wednesday, January 6th, 2010

Can an ad be too effective? And is repulsively bad taste acceptable when it’s in service of a greater good?

There’s a new (to us) series of anti-smoking spots running this season that I’m sure will get a lot of smokers to reconsider their habit. They’ll also get a lot of non-smokers to reconsider what they want to see on their TVs. If you’ve seen them you know what I mean, if not, here’s an example.


These spots are from Australia (re-dubbed with Midwest voiceovers for the American market) and maybe they’re a heartier bunch down under but I find these spots a tad much, especially since they seem to air mostly when I’m eating while watching TV. How they know this I’m not sure, but they have an impressive track record or ruining my meal. I could stop eating in front of the TV, but should I have to change my (slovenly) habits so they can get their message out?

This is a tough one. We’ve all lost people we loved to diseases caused by cigarettes—my mom comes to mind—and, unless we’re paid by big tobacco or have a nasty misanthropic streak, we want to encourage people to quit smoking, if only because the rest of us don’t like going to funerals. At the same time, this ad crosses a line for me and, given the choice, I’d rather not see it again. But I don’t have a choice and that’s what bugs me. It’s unnecessarily gross and deliberately disturbing, and if I did smoke I’d quit.

And that’s the point, isn’t it?

So not only do I have to endure cigarette smokers second-hand smoke, the mounds of butts they toss out of car windows at stoplights and increased health costs, I have to endure the disgusting ads designed to make them realize why they should quit. And they complain about having to smoke outside?

Back to the questions at hand: Can an ad be too effective? And is repulsively bad taste acceptable when it’s in service of a greater good?

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Posted in Advertising, Current Events, Television | 2 Comments »

True Blood Money (for a great cause).

Thursday, December 3rd, 2009

Okay, World, I’m going to interrupt all the Edward v. Jacob madness for a second to call some attention to the Twitter ingenuity of another kind of vampire (and no, they don’t sparkle).

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Vampire Bill Compton and waitress Sookie Stackhouse from HBO's hit series, True Blood.

About a year ago, fans of HBO’s True Blood created a Twitterverse of the show’s fictional setting of Bon Temps, LA. Twitter accounts for the characters of the show (and books), such as @SookieBonTemps, started popping up and interacting with each other. Instead of a cease and desist —HBO has embraced these tweeting fan-made homages to its characters and now HBO is putting its money where its fanged mouth is.

Recently, the Twitterverse True Blood characters announced an awareness drive, Bites for Blood; asking followers to donate drops of virtual blood to a vial in hopes of raising awareness for the Red Cross. In exchange for donating virtual blood, followers will be tweeted back with a virtual bite or kiss from the character of their choice. It’s like an online kissing/biting booth. No monetary donation is required, it’s simply an awareness campaign that hopes to reach a goal of 500k drops of “blood” from Dec 3-5.

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For Trubies, it's all about Eric versus Bill.

But, this virtual fundraiser has the potential to be an actual one —HBO has offered to donate $10,000 to the American Red Cross if Bites for Blood reaches it’s 500k goal. HBO is not only supporting a good cause, but the dedicated fans of its show that initiated this Twitter event.

Bites for Blood starts TODAY! So if you’re of the tweeting sort —donate a “drop” for a “bite” and help the True Blood gang reach their goal and support the Red Cross.

And Twilight fans, don’t be afraid to help out. I know we may have had our differences in the past, but a good cause is a good cause. Get “bit” by a Trubie vampire… I promise, I won’t tell Edward.

Bites for Blood starts on Thursday, December 3 at 9pm CDT and ends on Sunday, December 5 at 9pm CDT. Get more information here.

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Posted in Pop Culture, Social Media, Television | 2 Comments »

“Did You Ever Wonder?”

Friday, November 27th, 2009

One of my favorite journalists/TV columnists is Andy Rooney of CBS News.

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I love his commentary, his witty delivery and his sense of humor over the things that on a daily basis, we just don’t think about. His patented “did you ever wonder” is just refreshing line to hear every Sunday night. I had the opportunity to meet Andy Rooney once. I worked with Andy’s son Brian, who is now the Los Angeles correspondent for ABC’s World News Tonight. Brian introduced me to his dad, and I quickly realized how genuine and funny he is on television is the same way he is in “real life.”

In tribute to Andy, I thought that I would take a run at a few things that I wonder about, ala Andy Rooney style. So please imagine that squeaky, sarcastic voice of Andy in your ears when you read on, and of course preface ALL statements with “did you ever wonder?”

Why some hospitals in Florida are called “health parks?” Do we picnic there, do we walk our dog there, and do we bring our kids there for an outing?

Why do we call a highway a highway when it’s not high, and a freeway a freeway, especially when it is a thruway and we have to pay? And what’s up with turnpike? What is a turnpike?

Why do car manufacturers use the phrases like “all wheel drive?” Or “front wheel drive?” Not sure how you feel, but I want my car driving on all four wheels.

Why is a yard in a football game smaller than a yard that is in the back of your house? I am sure the New England Patriots would have liked to have a bigger yard when they went for it on 4th down against the Colts.

Why is a female lion called a lioness, or a female prince called a princess, but if you have a female pilot flying your plane she is not a “pilotess?”

Why does your boss always want you to produce, and your mother always told you to eat more produce?

And while we are issues like that—why is it wrong to copy in school and college, but always go to a machine and copy and its ok?

Why do baseball coaches tell you to take a round ball, a round bat and then hit it squarely? Did you ever wonder?

Well, I am sure you all have many of your own Andy Rooney-ism’s and I would love to hear them. So send them my way and maybe I will include them in my next blog. Did you ever wonder why it’s called a blog?

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Posted in Inspiration, Media, Television | No Comments »

Enter we, yet again

Wednesday, November 25th, 2009

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http://www.flickr.com/photos/bob-mary/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

into the holiday “a-thon” schedule. Thanksgiving ends up as a special blend because of it’s unique position as the threshold for Christmas buying mania. This means special holiday programming for you and festivity-centric commercials for your marketers. Pay attention to this years Gap ads, they’re the talk of the town.

Although I’m traveling to meet family in Boston, I thought I’d share with you the choices on my list for this Thanksgiving weekend’s television specials. I may or may not be watching. It all depends on whether or not my family will give up the remote and allow something other than the ubiquitous A Christmas Story marathon to be playing.

If we were in town, I’m sure we’d all be down at Geva watching the live theater version that is playing this weekend. Well, that and The Nutcracker, which the Rochester City Ballet and Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra are also performing this weekend.

But for those of you who are fans of the remote – here are the options I recommend:

November 26th
NBC (9AM-2PM): 83rd Annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade; The National Dog Show Presented by Purina
USA (7AM-7PM): House Marathon
TV Land (6-9PM): Little House on the Prairie Marathon
SOAPnet (7PM-Midnight): Home for the Holidates Marathon
Fine Living (9PM): Martha Stewart’s Christmas Special
TV Land (9PM-Midnight): Roseanne “We Gather Together”; Roseanne “Thanksgiving 1991″; Roseanne “Thanksgiving ‘93″; Roseanne “Thanksgiving 1994″; Roseanne “The Last Thursday in November”

November 27th
E! (9AM-4PM): Kardashiathon (Keeping Up with the Kardashians; Kourtney & Khloe Take Miami; The Wedding Special)
TBS (11:30AM-4PM): Seinfeld Marathon
SOAPnet (1-9PM): Chillin’ with Dylan, Beverly Hills, 90210 Marathon
A&E (All Day Starting @ 8AM): Criminal Minds Marathon
Hallmark (Noon-Midnight): The Night They Saved Christmas; Ernest Saves Christmas; Mr. St. Nick; Meet the Santas; I’ll Be Home for Christmas; Moonlight and Mistletoe

November 28th (or “the day I appease my other-half’s TV choices”)
Discovery Channel (All Day Starting @ 10AM): Dirty Jobs Marathon
History (8AM-8PM): Ice Road Truckers Marathon
Science (7AM-9PM): Build It Bigger Marathon
Spike Movie Marathon (1PM-4AM): Lethal Weapon; Lethal Weapon 2; Lethal Weapon 3; Forrest Gump; Road House; Road House 2

November 29th
Exercise on Demand (9AM-5PM): As much Yoga and Kickboxing as you need to detox your turkey-gut

And for those of you JUST WAITING for the holidayapalooza of programming to begin December 1st, you can get a jump-start by clicking here.

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Posted in Holiday, Television | 2 Comments »

Forget Mr. Peanut. Enter Mr. Wonderful.

Thursday, November 19th, 2009

In the “blogosphere”, the “Get Crackin’” spots by Wonderful Pistachios® have put their nuts front and center by highlighting certain peoples “mishaps.” But let’s keep our heads on straight – they’re not trying to sell a moral or political statement. They’re selling delicious, lightly salted nuts that pack a crunch. Plain and simple – its working and we love it.

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We know that you can’t help but feel triumphant after you’ve pried open a pistachio, left the shell for the birds, and retrieved the delicious legume. (It’s a time-honored tradition in some places.) And, being the self-proclaimed pistachio connoisseurs that we are, we can’t help but to plug the “Get Crackin” campaign by Wonderful Pistachios®.

The pistachio industry has been hit with a 20% dip in sales after a disastrous product recall because of salmonella last march (A 2 million lb product recall…that’s a lot of nuts!) and hasn’t made much of recovery yet.

Now, how does an industry bounce back?  Well, after weathering the storm, Wonderful Pistachios, part of the $800 million domestic pistachio industry, is doing something never done before – broadcasting ads nationally. They’re throwing down $15 million, hiring a bombardment of celebrities, and putting them alongside witty phrases to seize your attention. A simple message for a simple goal – “Get Crackin’” to get money.

Vincent Pastore from The Sopranos shows us how mobsters Get Crackin’

In our minds, the barrages of “Get Crackin’” commercials achieve a memorable and righteous quality that is impossible to overlook. The 30-second ads try to paint over the PR crisis that pounded the California Pistachio industry.

“We want to get some sizzle out there,” says Dominic Engels, vice president of global marketing for Paramount Farms, the largest grower, processor, and marketer of pistachios in the world. “By providing chatter on the Internet, this starts to multiply your base. That’s when you get exponential impact.”

…

The mouth-watering, lightly salted snack that will always crack a smile – pistachios – WONDERFUL PISTACHIOS®.

“When there are pistachios around, something wonderful happens: everyone gets crackin’. That’s because they’re packed with a powerful, flavorful crunch. And, they fill you up naturally – without bringing your body down.  Roasted to perfection with just a touch of salt, they’re great for everyday snacking and entertaining.”  (The Wonderful Pistachios® phrase.)

The established favorite commercial between us is the Levi Johnson (If you’re unaware of him please look to Google®) shows us how he “does it” commercial. (Levi Johnson Video)

Wah-la. Problem solved? We’re not sure, but as your pistachio experts, we will keep you informed. Stay tuned for breaking (we couldn’t help ourselves) news.

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jakeandreAbout Authors: Jake Weidert and Andre Linares are Account Services and Copywriting interns (respectively) at Dixon Schwabl for the fall of 2009.

I always keep a pen in my holster to shoot down bad ideas and generate solutions. I feel that innovation and creativity will be the catalyst for my success. I am a Dixon Schwabl Intern. – Jake

Encompassing the ideals of a gentleman along with comic relief and a blank piece of paper, I believe my success is only a few sentences away. I am a Dixon Schwabl Intern. – Andre

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Posted in Advertising, Food & Beverage, Television | 1 Comment »

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