TurboTax Continues a An Annual Tradition of Branded Entertainment with NBC
Community is my new favorite primetime comedy. Joel McHale finally gets to stretch his wings (a long way from his Burger King days), supported by a brilliant ensemble cast featuring Donald Glover from Derrick Comedy and Chevy Chase.
Last night’s episode, “Investigative Journalism” (now on Hulu), featured cameos from Jack Black, Owen Wilson, and TurboTax. Yes, everyone’s favorite DIY tax software got an unbranded mention in the first minute of the episode, as a feature of a fictional hyper-realistic video game (“You can even do your taxes.” “But don’t get audited, cuz that’s bad.”).
Then the first commercial break kicked off with a sneaky spot that featured Ken Jeong (in character as Spanish professor Señor Chang) and Jim Rash (in character as Dean Pelton) in what appeared to be the Greendale Community College cafeteria from the show. Jeong/Chang had a laptop in front of him and was pretending to interview Rash/Pelton about what it takes to be the Dean, but was actually doing his taxes with TurboTax — the Dean quickly discovered that he had only been invited so that Professor Chang could write off his lunch. (I haven’t been able to find a video yet, but I’ll post it when I do.)
Cute spot, but really a seamless integration of the show — if you had DVRed the episode, you certainly wouldn’t have fast-forwarded over it. Another great example of a TiVo-proofed spot on what is presumably a highly timeshifted network show. TurboTax ran a similar $20 million integration with NBC this time last year.
TurboTax is also running its own integration on NBC.com, featuring all of NBC’s Thursday night comedies. I didn’t stick around for Parks and Rec last night, but perhaps there were branded entertainment integrations during that episode as well.
Rupert Murdoch’s Misunderstood Plan to Institute Paywalls Might Just Work
If he were still alive today, the legendary and unconventional San Francisco ad man Howard Gossage might be the only person around voicing support of Rupert Murdoch’s plans to turn his content into a walled garden. While I don’t agree with Murdoch’s political views, I am an ardent disciple of Gossage, and so to me this application of his principles is worth exploring.
In August 1965, Gossage published an essay entitled “Our Fictitious Freedom of the Press.” This piece expressed one of many seemingly contradictory perspectives held by “The Socrates of San Francisco,” given his position as the head of an ad agency: it took issue with the very fact that publications relied so heavily on advertisers.
In this century we have seen effective control of our press shift from the public, for whom it presumably exists, to the advertiser, who merely uses it to sell his wares to the public. It has shifted so much that the life or death of a publication no longer depends on whether its readers like it but whether advertisers like it.
If you doubt this, consider that well within our lifetime over half of the daily newspapers in this country have folded and that most of them have done so with their circulations more or less intact; that magazines with circulations into the millions have gone under not because their readers didn’t love them, but because advertisers didn’t.
Gossage goes on to explain how we got into this mess in the first place:
Originally, a publication was almost wholly dependent upon its readers for financial support and therefore charged them accordingly; if a magazine was worth five cents, they paid five cents for it. However, with the growth of advertising the publication enjoyed more and more income from paid space. Now this was a very pleasant situation indeed: the advertising revenue was, in effect, found money. Moreover, it provided yet another reason for getting new readers: more could be charged for the advertising as more people bought the publication — still at a profitable five cents. Now here was an incentive plan. My God, how the money rolled in.
But not for long. At some point two opposing economic spoilsports — rising production costs and competition — started to ruin the whole lovely thing. On one hand it was necessary to raise the price to the reader; on the other hand it was desirable to keep the price down so as to attract more circulation and more advertising dollars.
Well, the publication couldn’t do both, so it made a decision, a fateful one as it turned out, for it thereby committed itself to an increasingly irreversible course, which it still pursues. It probably didn’t seem like much of a decision at the time, however. Why antagonize the customers and help the competition by raising the price from a nickel to a clumsy figure like six cents? No, what we’ll do is give the reader a break so we can keep up the circulation and get more advertising.
Some break. On the day the reader first bought a publication for less than it cost to produce he lost his economic significance and became circulation. Moreover, he traded off his end of freedom of the press. It was a forced sale; the publisher had already traded off the other end. Of course the editor was still free to write anything he wished without government censorship, but there are other freedoms upon which this freedom depends — the freedom to publish, for instance. Is freedom to publish really significant if the power to kill it has been assigned to outsiders? … None of it means a damn if the rug can be jerked out from under it by a third party.
Gossage offers a solution: forgo the allure of advertising revenue, and return to a sustainable model of subscription pricing.
Do you know what I’d do if I had a magazine that was in trouble? I think I’d change it back more or less to what it was before…. At least I’d try to give them the same feel. And then I’d let the readers in on the act: I’d write them all letters and explain to them what I was doing and why I was doing it. I think I’d level with them about some of the economic facts I’ve talked about here: of how effective control had slipped from their hands into the hands of advertisers, and that to readjust this imbalance we were going to cancel all trick subscription deals and raise the price from, say, twenty-five cents to forty cents or fifty cents, whatever it took to do it. And I’d tell them that the net result might be that the circulation would go down to perhaps three million, but they’d be the three million subscribers who really wanted the magazine; it would be their magazine, not something put out to cadge advertising revenue. If advertisers liked it, fine, but that was incidental to the purpose of putting out a magazine in the first place.
This story is eerily familiar (once you account for inflation). It’s been a big year for magazines closing their doors, and everyone is struggling to figure out how to save journalism.
One man has announce a bold, reactionary approach. Rupert Murdoch wants to stop giving away his content for free, and even go so far as to shut Google’s crawlers out of News Corp media properties. In an interview with Sky News, Murdoch discussed these two key elements of his plan.
In the age of transparency, of “new media,” this is heresy. Some even find this idea laughable. Mashable, a leading voice in the social media echo chamber, provided their analysis in a post titled “Rupert Murdoch Plans To Hide His Sites From Google, The World Yawns” back in November:
I honestly can’t understand what’s his plan here. If he plans to charge for websites, why hide them from the search engines? If you can’t actually read the content without paying, then making the content at least partly accessible to Google and other search engines can’t hurt? In fact, the WSJ that he mentions as an example isn’t hidden from Google’s indexes, you can easily find Wall Street Journal articles via Google.
This is just one part of the quite lengthy interview, but it all boils down to this: Mr. Murdoch is not ready to accept any of the changes brought forth by the Internet and the social media movement. Moreover, he doesn’t seem to understand how some parts of it work.
[Does anyone ever step back and reflect on how much "the social media movement" sounds like a cult? Just calling it a movement makes me shudder.]
I don’t mean to imply that Mashable is alone in laughing (or yawning) off Murdoch’s plan. It’s an easy position to take because his approach seems so counter to what we think we know about successfully producing content on the web; it’s just so un-Cluetrain Manifesto. But that alone is not enough reason to discredit it just yet.
News Corp’s chief digital officer, Jonathan Miller, later provided some additional context on the plan.
There is real tension surrounding the free versus pay debate. It will play out in the next two years. We believe that the value of high quality content is not recognised online [by giving its away for free] so something needs to happen.
He also went on to explain why News Corp is willing to give up all of the traffic coming from Google:
The traffic which comes in from Google brings a consumer who more often than not reads one article and then leaves the site. That is the least valuable of traffic to us… the economic impact [of not having content indexed by Google] is not as great as you might think. You can survive without it.
An interesting observation. Sure, Google is driving millions of visits a month to News Corp properties, but maybe those visitors aren’t really worth all that much — a visitor is not a visitor is not a visitor. They apparently don’t contribute to time on site. It’s not hard to imagine (although I’m just speculating) that they’re significantly less likely to support News Corp’s advertisers (i.e. click on banners). And they certainly aren’t the folks who are going to be willing to pay a subscription fee for News Corp’s content.
So in fact, it seems Murdoch might not have all that much to lose by closing his doors to freeloaders.
In the end, of course, it will come down to Murdoch’s ability to convince his most loyal readers of the value of a paid subscription to what will necessarily have to be content of the highest quality. His pitch to them is simple: you will receive a superior editorial product as the result of the increased independence from advertisers and search engines. If he can deliver on that, he might just discover a sustainable model for journalism — in fact, the original model. Stay tuned.
Exploiting User Behavior…in Print
There’s a pretty smart execution in the most recent New Yorker. It’s for a luxury hotel called San Ysidro Ranch. These folks decided against using a more traditional ad format featuring a montage of attractive room and amenity photos that the most readers would skip right over, and instead opted for a handwritten note with a scribbled sketch.
Why does this work? Well, I’ll start with a confession: when I pick up an issue of the New Yorker, my first pass through is just to read all the cartoons. The shame! The thing is, I have a hunch that I’m far from alone on this. And when I’m quickly flipping through, I’m scanning for something that looks exactly like this ad, i.e. a scribbled drawing. This is the print equivalent of Pepsi “TiVo-proofing” their ads, and clearly it caught my attention — not just by being different, but by being smart about its audience.
(Cartoon copyright TNY’s The Cartoon Bank)
Find the contradiction
The copy reads:
“I am treated as an individual, I am not a number. People at Senior Whole Health know me by name.”
And his name would be… “Member, age 67.”
I bet that stock photo guy feels pretty darn special.
(click the image or here for full size)
Forgive Me a Moment of Pride
It’s not every day you have a reason to publicly say, “I’m honored to work with the people I do.” This is one of those opportunities.
(To be clear: I had absolutely nothing to do with the TV spot in question — it was produced years before I joined the team. But I’m proud to work with the people who are responsible for it.)
Mobile Integration: A Huge Missed Opportunity for Pepsi’s New Campaign
By now you’ve seen them everywhere: brightly colored billboards featuring the new Pepsi logo inserted into exclamations like “HOORAY!” and “HOWDY”. I like to imagine the strategy behind this campaign went a little something like this:
Step 1: Come up with a long list of words that contain the letter “O”.
Step 2: Take over as much out-of-home inventory around the country as you possibly can, to show off all those “O”-words you came up with.
Step 3: Activate your campaign with an integrated mobile partnership with Pongr or Mobot. Incentivize “collecting” cameraphone shapshots of all your different creative units, via a contest or retail promotion. Tie it all together with a (post-moderated, please) live feed of all the submitted photos on a social media-enabled branded microsite. (Oh wait, you already have one? Go ahead and use that.)
Except Step 3 never happened. Tens of millions of dollars of media put against a national OOH branding campaign with no message and essentially no brand mention — fine. But why not set aside a few grand to take your advertising beyond mere impressions?
This is a plea for better integration in advertising. Who will answer the call?
Best Ad of ’09?
I announced the Worst Ad of 2009 not long ago, but I thought it would be a while before I could name a contender for the title of Best Ad of ’09. But here it is. These are currently running all over Boston, mostly in and around public transportation. In case you can’t make out the photo, the copy reads:
We Delete Users Unfit To Date!
www.PlentyofFish.com
100% Free Dating Site
Whether or not you take issue with this judgmental philosophy, you have to admire the direct approach: “Value proposition; memorable URL; category and cost” — BAM. Not a bad way to set yourself apart in a sea of competition (you have heard of Darwin Dating, haven’t you?).
Reminds me in spirt of the winner of the 2008 Jamie Scheu Integrity in Advertising Award. Bravo.
How To Merchandise a Primetime TV Show
I think I can safely make the claim that How I Met Your Mother is the best-merchandised show on television. The producers have brilliantly sustained a tradition of transforming in-show jokes into real-life merchandising opportunities.
Take, for instance, the recent episode in which Barney Stinson (played by Neil Patrick Harris — and yes, his character has his own blog, as referenced frequently in the show) creates a new holiday called Not A Father’s Day. Before the episode aired, the producers made sure to launch the respective minisite, from which you could buy gear and apparel to show your not-a-fatherhood pride (such as the following mug which I purchased):
(After all, why should Dads get all the tacky coffee mugs?)
Or, for instance, the recently published Bro Code, which I discovered in a bookstore last week – allegedly written by Barney Stinson himself:
And that’s only the beginning. In addition to these merchandising opportunities, CBS also launched a minisite based on an in-show reference at LilyAndMarshallSellTheirStuff.com, which featured an auction of clothes worn by the actors (the proceeds of which went to Children’s Hospital Los Angeles).
The list of in-show jokes with parallel real-life sites goes on. Check out:
- http://www.tedmosbyisajerk.com/
- http://www.tedmosbyisnotajerk.com/
- http://slapcountdown.com/
- http://guyforceshiswifetodressinagarbagebagforthenextthreeyears.com/
Of course, all of these site and product tie-ins are completely unnecessary. These off-air properties don’t make the show one bit funnier. And the revenue from coffee mug sales has probably proven to be pretty minimal. But this tradition has provided an opportunity for die-hard fans of the show to engage just a little bit deeper with the stories, the characters, and the cast. What TV producers wouldn’t want to give their fans that opportunity?
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