Lincoln Bjorkman, EVP, Executive Creative Director, Digitas.

John McCarus is the VP, Brand Content at Digitas. He was nice enough to ask our head of media sales, George Stewart, to come by his DTOX creative conference, put on for the creative staff at this leading interactive agency. I spoke on a distinguished panel that included singer/songwriter Vanessa Carlton, videoblogger David Junior, my former colleague David Gale from MTV, and Dina Kaplan, COO/founder of Blip TV. What a wonderful event. It’s rare an agency, especially one that already specializes in digital, to want to constantly introduce themselves to outside points of view. It was an honor to be included.

John McCarus,
VP Brand Content, Digitas.

Via Business Week:

Where TV Ads Really Resonate

By Ben Levisohn

The screen may be smaller, but the payoff for broadcasters and advertisers is bigger. People who go online to watch a TV show are more engaged with the program—and its ads—than their couch-potato counterparts, says Simmons Market Research Bureau. Simmons surveyed 17,000 people to assess their involvement in the last TV show they viewed—asking, for example, how “inspiring” or interesting it was. The answers showed computer watchers to be 25% more involved than TV set viewers. “People watching online,” says John Fetto, a Simmons product manager, “are going to a Web site to find a specific program.” The online crowd was also 47% more likely to find ads “useful” than TV watchers—and more inclined to make a purchase. Web TV watchers “only click on [an ad] if they’re interested in it,” says Darcy Gerbarg, a senior fellow at the Columbia Institute of Tele-Information. “That’s more valuable to an advertiser.

If you’re a regular viewer, you may have noticed a new sponsor across many of our networks this week: Lionsgate’s new movie WAR, which hits theaters this Friday. We’re pretty excited about this campaign, not just because it’s nice to have major sponsors interested in our programming, but it’s also offered us a chance to demonstrate a number of the advertising models we think can be effective for our networks, besides standard banner advertising placements.

For instance, on Fast Lane Daily, we’ve put a 15-second spot in what we’re calling first position. It’s not quite a mid-roll, as it’s early in the show, and it’s not a pre-roll, as viewers first get an intro to the episode from the hosts, and we don’t force them to watch the ad. On Bleacher Bloggers, we’ve run a brief sponsor bumper at the top of the show, then a 15 second spot at the end. And on a couple of our networks, we went a step further.

We felt there was an opportunity, based on the audiences we have, to do something deeper. So we put out a challenge to our network managers and show producers: could we show the value of an advertiser becoming part of the programming, allowing us to set our sights higher on a few episodes. What we all agreed on: the sponsored episode needed to be authentic, credible, totally transparent, and give something to the community that watches the show.

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This post has absolutely nothing to do with the internet, or networks, or any of the stuff we do here.

I’ve been cleaning out my drawers lately which caused me to scan some of my stuff and throw it on my Flickr page. Some of it’ll eventually get linked to on my old branding agency archive, but who knows about the rest.

The picture above is from the 1939 World’s Fair in New York City. It’s from a random collection of photographs I found in a box at a junk shop specializing in then-uncool mid-century furniture. I couldn’t resist the hundreds of vintage prints of these amazing deco buildlings I’d really only seen in amazing stylized illustrations from the fair. I had no idea what I was going to do with the snaps –hell, I still don’t know what I’m going to do with them– but they were great just to have.

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In the late 70s I was producing jazz records and became friendly with Michael Cuscuna, soon to become one of the medium’s most revered producers and the leading reissue producer in history. (more…)

Prior to my lengthy stint at MTV Networks, I spent about 2 years on and off working for the producers who made the commercials for the regional electronics chain, Crazy Eddie’s.

If you’re over 30 and grew up in the New York area, you’ll probably remember Jerry Carroll, the Crazy Eddie’s spokesman ranting into camera and ending each spot with “his prices are INSANE.” The spots were occasionally memorable, but totally unavoidable if you spent any time watching late-night television.

I would find myself preparing crew lists one day, and up in the studio rafters the next, dumping bushels of artificial snow on Jerry while he carried on about Christmas in July. If a take got botched, we’d all climb down, sweep up the mess and reload for the next try. When extras were needed, we were elves, Easter bunnies, or whatever the particular season required. The pay sucked, but it was the one job where I could actually turn on the TV and see something I had worked on.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but the experience shaped my way of thinking about promotion. Crank ‘em out, make ‘em cheap, and make ‘em iconic and recognizable as all hell. Crazy Eddie’s was out of business by the late 80’s, but nearly 2 decades later we still remember the commercials. How crazy is that?

For me, one of the fascinating joys of travel is seeing what’s interesting to different peoples about culture. Generally, and stupidly, I don’t think of Western Europen media at a great divide from the US, but then I pick up the International Herald Tribune and there’s an article celebrating the 50th anniversary of a typeface for goodness sake (The IHT is owned, of course, by the New York Times, where I could rarely imagine such frivolous writing). Helvetica is at once the most famous font of the modern age, and one of the most dismissed, ignored, and revilled. It’s so common that though I think of myself as a middlebrow type hobbiest, I had no idea it was introduced as late as the 50s, which would mean when I first worked with it professionally it was less than 20 years old.

Read the article, see the movie, use the type. We do.

(Thanks to Richard Rutter for the great photograph of the great Helvetica documentary poster.)

Oooh, I love it when they like us so much.

Hey AD SALES GUYS!!! says our friend Fred Graver (awesome creator/producer of the Best Week Ever) in his on-point rant on how big media ad folk have been doing the do for the past ten years. Interestingly, from my point of view, is how in the decade before that they completely resembled the new media crowd of today.