From AdAge:

Watch out, Arnold Palmer — you’re getting some new competition.

Michelob Ultra will introduce a line extension next year called Ultra 19th Hole Light Tea and Lemonade, according to a memo Anheuser-Busch InBev sent to distributors today. Billed as a “light alcohol beverage” infused with natural lemonade and iced-tea flavors, it will vie with fast-growing offerings such as Boston Beer Co.’s Twisted Tea Hard Iced-Tea Light and Arizona Beverages’ recently launched Arnold Palmer Hard Half & Half.

Ultra 19th Hole, scheduled for a national launch in April, has 4% alcohol by volume, 140 calories a can and “offers a great opportunity to capitalize on outdoor drinking occasions, including recreation and golf,” according to materials sent to distributors.

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From David Soloff at Adage:

Traditional newspaper and magazine publishers, responsible for most of the high-quality and original content we consume, have seen a huge decline in advertising revenues. While it’s the easy and obvious call to support premium publishers as they point fingers and blame VCs for investing in disruptive buy side tech, I’m going to go out on a limb and say something blunt: Publishers, you deserve every bit of this.

Publishers have not generated much of the almost infinite supply of channel-choking inventory, but they have also done next to nothing to preserve what is good and proprietary and “premium” about their own inventory. In some cases, they have chosen lowest common denominator ad networks, exchanges and supply side platforms to do the hard work of selling.

Publishers of high-quality content with large, desirable audiences need to reclaim their online ads inventory. Only big data tools can dig them out of the undifferentiated, over-supplied, machine- driven nightmare of the sell side by enabling publishers to scalably and cost-effectively analyze, price and allocate inventory in the new environment.

And 2011 has seen hopeful signs as publishers such as International Data Group, Weather.com, Forbes, CBS, Conde Nast and quadrantONE formed private exchanges to reclaim their rightful place in the display advertising value chain. At quadrantOne, for example, a joint venture of Gannett, Hearst, Tribune Co., and The New York Times Co. that aggregates uncommitted inventory from more than 300 local newspaper sites, real-time bidding on their private exchange increases the ad unit rate by more than 50 percent vs. a typical blind transaction in a public marketplace such as RightMedia or Google AdEx. And like other private exchanges, quadrantONE can retain exclusive ownership of the data surrounding the transaction, all while generating more income for publisher partners.

As another example, The Financial Times, one of our global publisher customers, uses big data analytics to optimize pricing on ads by section, audience, targeting parameters, geography, and time of day. Our friends at the FT sell more inventory because the team knows what they have, where it is and how it should be priced to capture the opportunity at hand. To boot, analytics reveal previously undersold areas of the publication, enabling premium pricing and resulting in found margin falling straight to the bottom line.

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From AdAge:

Advertising during the Super Bowl is expensive. It’s the price you pay for an audience of 100 million, many just as interested in the ads as the game itself.

But would it surprise to know that Super Bowl ads from 2011 have been watched more than 360 million times — on the web? In 2012, we estimate that number will be a half billion.

For decades, the Super Bowl has been the most celebrated event in sports, with much anticipation for US consumers. The media is abuzz with team rankings, talk shows featuring QBs and coaches, stats on every yard of the game, and expert commentators with projections on their favorite picks.

And then there are the Super Bowl advertisers who, for the most part, dole out upwards of $3 million on top of the millions they spend on the creative months before the game. All for a mere 30-second slot in front of approximately 100 million people watching the Super Bowl on TV (who are growing at roughly 3 percent annually).

While advertisers and their agencies are constantly assessing and justifying their commitment for a major marketing investment, one wonders if the recurring debate and the scrutiny from the CMO’s office would somehow subside if buyers could substantially extend the reach and frequency of the creative beyond the scope of the 30-second window during the game. Diligent media buyers need look no further than online, where social sharing of Super Bowl ads, both pre and post-game, could significantly alter the economics of such high-stakes advertising.

The new water-cooler
While Super Bowl advertising on TV hasn’t really changed all that much over the years, a lot has changed about the way people talk about their favorite Super Bowl advertisements after the game. According to Visible Measures’ Super Bowl Ad Syndication Research for the past three years (a study of over 150 Super Bowl ads in 2009, 2010, and 2011, conducted in partnership with YouTube), people watched Super Bowl ads and associated creative executions over a hundred million times in four weeks post game each of the last three years.

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From MediaPost:

After a test period that began earlier this year, Meredith Corp. is unveiling the first major advertising client for its “Engagement Dividend” program — a pioneering new service created by the women-targeted publisher that guarantees that print advertising in its magazines will result in a certain amount of sales lift.

Consumer packaged goods giant Kimberly-Clark, which owns brands including Kleenex, Huggies and Cottonelle, will be the “premiere advertising partner” for Engagement Dividend when it debuts early next year.

The Engagement Dividend program uses Nielsen data as well as Meredith’s own proprietary database of 85 million consumers to connect magazine ad exposure with actual purchases. It compares the purchase behaviors of two groups of panelists drawn from Nielsen’s Homescan, a national consumer panel of 100,000 individuals who agree to allow Nielsen to track all their product purchases.

They are identical in most respects, including demographic and income attributes, with a single difference: One group of panelists subscribes to Meredith titles, while the control group does not.

Product purchases by the two groups are then compared, allowing Meredith to connect advertising to sales lift. This, in turn, provides the basis of sales guarantees, in which Meredith promises a certain amount of sales lift for a certain amount of ad investment in Meredith titles.

The publisher also promises to make good any shortfalls on these guarantees with additional advertising.

Describing Engagement Dividend as a “breakthrough product for the magazine industry,” KC Global Media Director Mark Kaline stated: “We believe its focus on driving return on investment (ROI) for advertising dollars is vital to marketers seeking to build brand sales and leadership.”

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From AdAge:

There’s a digital twist to the automobile test drive: Strut your stuff on social media and drive a new Chevrolet for three days.

For the second time this year, General Motors‘ volume division has contracted with Klout, the service that rates and ranks a person’s “social influence,” then runs a kind of sampling program for the Web 2.0 era, putting products into the hands of the digital influential. The samples, called “perks,” might include software, deodorant, coffee or, in this case, a car.

Chevrolet is paying Klout an undisclosed sum to arrange three-day loans of its new American-made subcompact, the 2012 Sonic, to people with a “Klout score” of at least 35. The program, which began this month and runs through Dec. 14, follows a collaboration earlier this year promoting the Volt, Chevy’s $40,000 plug-in electric hybrid. Twenty Klout participants drove the Volt, and all but one posted blogs complimentary to the car, said Cristi Vazquez, a Chevrolet spokesperson in Detroit. The participants also generated about 2,000 tweets, she said.

Ms. Vasquez said that 139 drives would be offered before mid-December in Chicago, New York, Atlanta, Dallas and San Francisco. GM is supplying four or five Sonics in each of the five cities. “It’s effective for getting out the message,” said Ms. Vasquez. “One of the things we’ve found is that the best way to get people to change their perception about our company is to get them behind the wheel.”

Klout scores range from zero to 100 (though they’re hardly scientific) and are intended to measure a person’s social influence. Those participating in Chevy’s latest program must also have a valid driver’s license but are not required to post good things about the products that they test. They can say negative things, or they can say nothing at all.

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From Adage’s “America’s Hottest Brands” series:

When the four co-founders of Warby Parker were readying the launch two years ago of their internet-based eyewear venture, they channeled a who’s who list of marketing role models: Apple as a master of design and function; Zappos for customer experience; Nike for building an enduring brand; and Method and Patagonia as trailblazers with clear “do good” missions.

The high aspirations appear to be working. The young company hit its first-year sales target in three weeks, sold out of its top 15 styles and had a wait list of 20,000 customers after a month in business.

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From WSJ:

If you shock them, will they buy?

Italian clothing chain Benetton is trying to drum up attention for its flagging brand with ads showing global leaders kissing. President Barack Obama locks lips with China’s Hu Jintao and with Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez. A picture of Pope Benedict XVI embracing Sheik Ahmed al-Tayeb, the imam of the al-Azhar mosque in Cairo, was hung from a bridge near the Vatican early Wednesday.

The campaign got a quick reaction from the Vatican.

“We must express a firm complaint for the unacceptable use of his Holy Father’s image, manipulated and exploited in an advertising campaign with a commercial purpose,” Vatican spokesman Rev. Federico Lombardi said in a statement. Benetton said it is pulling the version featuring the pope, but that it hasn’t received other complaints.

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From Media Daily News:

The 30-second TV spot is far from dead — but the time has come to stop thinking about TV ads as stand-alone messages. Rather, they should be seen — and utilized — more like “trailers” for “deeper branded digital experiences.” At least that’s the view of Shiv Singh, the global head of digital for PepsiCo Beverages, who shared his thoughts on the subject recently on the Harvard Business Review’s HBR Blog Network.

Singh said he sees three big changes on the horizon for TV advertising, including a re-adjustment in the value placed on ads “as we seek to account to for engagement metrics in the pricing.” The story arc of ads will also change as marketers adapt the view of advertisement as trailer “versus the whole story.” And third, said Singh, “location-aware technologies will force a greater degree of engagement on a format that has historically been passive, impersonal and certainly without any extensions.”

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From AdAge:

On Wednesday, November 9, we got the news from Adobe that they have discontinued their development on the Flash player for browsers on new mobile devices (which means both phones and tablets). They will instead focus on the AIR platform, which developers can use to create apps for mobile, desktop and TV. In addition, Adobe will keep driving HTML5 innovation as the new standard for mobile.

What does it mean for consumers?
This news is not a surprise. Very little will really change, as far as the user experience goes, for the mobile web. Flash on mobile browsers simply didn’t catch on, and despite the fact that Apple threw its weight behind HTML5, there were very few Flash sites that were optimized to work on mobile devices.

Create once, deploy everywhere
But the biggest misconception coming out of these new developments is that Flash ‘lost’ to HTML5. And while that might be true in mobile, both technologies are a part of our development toolkit, and should be used where and when appropriate. Flash is still the most consistent way to create rich content for the desktop browser. HTML5 on the other hand is now the official language for mobile browsing, as virtually all smartphones and tablets support it. In addition to that, with the release of Flash 11, Adobe is focusing the player on gaming and native 3D support.

This is a welcome strategy, as it will give developers better direction for when to use which technology. It just goes to show that Adobe is trying to position both technologies as complimentary rather than in competition with one another. Flash offers immersive content for the web, and people on mobile devices are looking for easy access to information. For immersive content, consumers turn to apps. Apps, as Adobe emphasizes, are now the main focus for their continued development on the AIR platform, which is in essence an extension of Flash. Because of this fact, repurposing Flash code into apps that are made with AIR is a huge time and money saver, as they can be deployed on iOS, Android, TV and the desktop with only minor tweaks. The same principal that helped propel Flash into the main stream is now true for the mobile age: create once; deploy everywhere.

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From The Wall Street Journal:

When L’Oréal Paris’s trademark slogan “Because I’m Worth It” was coined 40 years ago, it captured a feminist revolution. Now, it’s trying to weather a digital one.

The French cosmetics brand has surfed on its slogan, tweaking its pronouns and its glamorous spokesmodels as it went, yet clinging to its self-esteem-boosting message. L’Oréal Paris, part of parent company L’Oréal SA, celebrated the slogan with a birthday bash in Paris Monday, and celebrities such as Jane Fonda, China’s Fan Bingbing and Freida Pinto attended the event.

But the brand is fighting a fusty image and stagnating sales. That raises the question of whether the tagline, which hails from an era of power-dressing female empowerment, can be modernized.

“Feminism has taken us well beyond the need to make this claim,” says Grant McCracken, an anthropologist who has written a book called “Big Hair.” “How long can L’Oréal ride this pony?”

The problem isn’t L’Oréal’s alone. The digital era is revolutionizing slogans and what they stand for. Today, attention spans are shorter and consumers zap past unwanted commercials. Slogans are shrinking too, as advertisers try to limit them to two to three words. Lucozade, a British energy drink, recently picked the succinct tagline “Yes.”

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