GM Tops at Oscars

LOS ANGELES General Motors supplanted Pepsi as the top advertiser during last night's Academy Awards telecast with four minutes of commercial exposure, topping latecomer L'Oreal's 3 1/2 minutes, Coca-Cola's 3 minutes, JC Penney's 2 1/2 minutes and the 2-minute short by M. Night Shyamalan for American Express, per ABC.The AmEx spot is the first two-minute ad in the telecast's recent decades, said Geri Wang, svp of prime-time sales at ABC, New York.Shyamalan's spot, vetted more than created by WPP Group's Ogilvy & Mather, New York, via a series of conversations to establish the brand parameters, shows the director's supernatural sensibility at work as he sits alone in a restaurant and imagines the patrons' secret lives. A baby carriage rolling down the aisle evokes an imagined argument between a couple that seems distant. A man scratching his neck, then his cheek, seems not of this world. A woman telepathically causes actor Joe Grifasi to choke on his angry words. Ghosts trip waitresses. A waitress snaps Shyamalan back to reality. "My life is about finding time to dream," he says, moving on to a new restaurant, as a voiceover. "That's why my card is American Express."According to Nielsen Monitor-Plus, a unit of Adweek parent VNU, last year's spots, at $1.5 million per 30-seconds, garnered $72 million in total ad revenue, down 13 percent from the prior year. A source said unit sales have consistently been pegged at 24 minutes of national ads in the roughly three-hour broadcast and that total ad revenue has increased every year. Last night, the source said, there was one more 30-second unit than last year."We are betting on a different kind of television," said Diego Scotti, vice president of global advertising for AmEx, New York. "Maybe you don't need to be so loud and obvious to capture consumer attention. When you go quieter, with longer takes, you break through more."Scotti said the brand is moving toward "voluntary adoption"—an "opting in" by viewers. "We're betting on engagement, rather than repetition, frequency and disruption. The notion of 'value to me' is important." He said the call to action in what is largely an entertainment spot involves the connection to the brand in "how personal it is" in the lives of cardholders. The "artists-in-residence" notion relies, he said, on "authenticity.""The trend we're seeing is increasing seasonal campaigns," said Beth Harris, marketing director of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, Beverly Hills, Calif. "The growing trend is to create promotional campaigns that tie in to the whole first quarter, from the end of January when we announced the nominations, culminating with ads in show." Harris said the Coke effort last night, which included ads in an expanded one-hour pre-show, was one of the largest deals the academy has participated in, though she declined to state the value. She said Oscar night is becoming "more like a tent-post event [for advertisers] like the Super Bowl and that "more and more sponsors are running fresh creative and looking to tie in with the academy when repositioning a brand or product."

Brand Marketing

GM Tops at Oscars

Gregory Solman

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Gregory Solman