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Continue reading GM's Super Bowl ad: Utterly pointless?

GM's Super Bowl ad: Utterly pointless? originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Mon, 04 Feb 2008 14:12:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Ronco, the company made famous for late-night commercials promoting such useful products such as the pocket fisherman and of course the Veg-o-Matic, has hit hard times, and is currently in Chapter 11 bankruptcy. "But wait!" as the commercials used to say. "There's more!"

The bankruptcy court proceedings were recently livened up by a discussion of Jill Kelly, whom CFO.com described with a straight face as an "award-winning porn star." It turns out that former Ronco CEO Richard Allen has asked a U.S. Bankruptcy Court in California to examine what current CFO Ronald C. Stone disclosed about his work with Kelly as finance chief for Jill Kelly Productions, a producer of adult entertainment that's not of the Trivial Pursuit nature.

CFO.com, unfortunately, is light on the juicy details. Still, Allen mentioned in court an interview with Kelly by AVN (Adult VIdeo News) in which she disclosed firing Stone for poor performance (as CFO) and blamed him for allowing the company to fall into insolvency. The Web site adds that most of the assets of Kelly's company were later sold to Penthouse Media Group for $1.8 million.

Continue reading Porn and Veg-o-Matics: The Ronco story turns bizarre

Porn and Veg-o-Matics: The Ronco story turns bizarre originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Tue, 31 Jul 2007 19:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

iPhone release date June 29 confirmed; Apple fans sigh, rejoice originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Sun, 03 Jun 2007 23:25:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

The New York Times ran an interesting piece about TV commercials that involve suicide, a theme that is cropping up with some frequency. Washington Mutual recently pulled an ad that showed bankers standing at the top of a building as if about to jump, and General Motors Corporation (NYSE:GM) and Volkswagen AG (FRA:VOW) also are discontinuing ads dealing with suicide.

I hardly consider myself a prude, but I just don't understand how any advertising executive could think it's okay to talk about something like suicide in a commercial, even if it is in the name of comedy. And the theme of suicide is not the only trend emerging in ads that some find disturbing. An ad for a candy bar was pulled after complaints from gay rights groups that it perpetuated stereotypes.

My message to the ad execs: we don't need advertisers pushing the envelope as far as taste. Advertising that is offensive has no place on television, especially when it can run during any show and be seen by anyone of any age.

Suicide in advertising originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Wed, 14 Mar 2007 17:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Worried about the futures of companies with huge television and cable businesses, like News Corporation (NYSE:NWS), Viacom, Inc. (NYSE:VIA), Time Warner Inc. (NYSE:TWX) and General Electric Company (NYSE:GE), as American consumers supposedly watch less TV?

Count the sheer number of television sets around the country these days and it will ease your worries. In barber shops, tanning salons, grocery stores, day cares, massage parlors and pizza joints -- Americans love their television viewing time. In fact, TVs now outnumber the quantity of actual humans inside U.S. households. There are 2.73 televisions and only 2.53 actual people in the average American home.

This stat flies in the face of research that says television networks are losing throngs of customers to ad-skipping TiVo and Internet browsing, among other things.

Is television viewing on the decline? The number of TVs would *seem* to indicate that TVs are being utilized now more than ever.

New TV technology is a big part of that story. Huge and heavy CRT televisions are now being replaced by LCD TVs at a fast rate, which opens up new areas where TVs can be placed. It's hard to have a 15" TV on the kitchen counter, but you can throw a 15" LCD TV there pretty easily these days without compromising space. Why not watch The Food Channel while cooking up a Paula Deen recipe in the food center of every home, the kitchen? Paula would call that faintsy.

With half of American homes having three televisions these days -- and only 19% having just one -- it's hard to imagine the television going away anytime soon. That would be some packed landfills in the next decade if predictions of "the death of TV" were to come true!

It's the content that will come across those screens that is likely to change, yes? HDTV, cable television, DBS satellite and possibly WiMAX-TV will all be battling for each viewer while still trying to get viewers to watch advertising that gadgets will make an afterthought. So, how many TVs do you have in your household?

Don't dump those television stocks just yet originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Fri, 29 Sep 2006 12:25:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

I knew Nielsen didn't formally track the viewership of TV commercials as part of its television ratings, but somehow, I didn't know it. It seems like an obvious win -- after all, ever since the days when VCRs reared their 12:00-blinking heads in the world's living rooms (and don't even get them started on TiVo), broadcasters have been wondering whether people were watching commercials.

Well here you are, Nielsen: I watch TV ads, and so do my children, so they can nag me. But you'll know that soon, as you're about to start formally breaking out commercial breaks in the TV numbers you report. Everyone's expecting, of course, to see that viewership declines sharply during advertisements. And the natural evolution of the negotiation strategy: advertisers will start asking to pay less for their 30 seconds' worth of that reduced number of eyeballs. Money will flow away from the TV breaks and toward that other, far more measurable medium: the internet.

Or will it? So many advertisers have already made their mark by liberally sprinkling their products throughout the plots of your favorite shows. Take Kyle XY, the ABC Family show I've become addicted to. Kyle and his "brother" use Sour Patch Kids as currency. Watched the Hallmark Channel original movies recently? Boy have I never seen such loving treatment of an automobile. The camera loves the minivan ...

And isn't the "get up at the commercial and get a snack" contingent already calculated into the equation when advertisers decide how much they'll pay?

Continue reading Are you watching TV (commercials)? Nielsen knows

Are you watching TV (commercials)? Nielsen knows originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Tue, 11 Jul 2006 13:27:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.