ALLOY, MUSICLAND TEAM FOR GEN Y CAMPAIGN
Teen Internet site Alloy.com and Minneapolis, Minn.-based Musicland Stores Corp., the parent company of Sam Goody, will join forces today in an attempt to cross-market their brands to Generation Y customers.
According to the agreement, New York-based Alloy will provide Sam Goody with a powerful link to the sought-after online teen demographic, while Sam Goody will give Alloy offline access to Gen Yers. Partnership benefits for Alloy include an in-store presence in the 650-plus Sam Goody stores and promotion in the company’s magazine, Request, which has a circulation of more than one million.
“Teens spend a ton of time in malls,” said Samantha Skey, Alloy’s vp of e-commerce and sponsorships. “Any way we can get in front of them with our brand works to our advantage. We want our brand to be available in all spaces,” she added.
SamGoody.com will be Alloy’s exclusive music commerce partner and all of Musicland’s additional retail Web sites, including Suncoast.com, MediaPlay.com and OnCue.com, will link to Alloy’s Web site.–Sarah J. Heim
ATOMFILMS GETS IN FOCUS
Buoyed by last year’s successful syndication and advertising deal with Auburn Hills, Mich.-based Volkswagen of America, AtomFilms, the Seattle-based online entertainment company, today premiers the first of three independent short comedic films, co-produced with Ford Motor Company and J. Walter Thompson, at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah.
Each six-to-eight-minute film features both direct and subtle placements of a Ford Focus throughout, which AtomFilms believes will revolutionize the way advertising and entertainment meld online–in addition to the creation of a micro site (www.focusinfilm.com), and direct marketing.
“It is better than a banner,” said Seth Levenson, vp of sales for AtomFilms. “I have been sure of few things as much as this. It’s a whole different world.”
Along with today’s release of “Little Man on Campus” by Morgan Lawley and “The Kiss” by Anthony and Joe Russo, “gulp,” a film by Jason Reitman about a young man trying to save his tropical fish, will debut as part of the Sundance competition on Wednesday.–Erik Gruenwedel
BRILLIANT LAUNCHES 3D BANNER
Brilliant Digital Entertainment, the Los Angeles-based online entertainment content provider, has inked a deal with Infogrames to provide rich-media banner advertising for the N.Y.-based entertainment software provider’s upcoming online gaming titles.
In addition, ad pepper media, New York; BMC Media, Sydney, Australia; and AdForce, Cupertino, Calif., have agreed to sell and serve, respectively, 3D banners online, according to Kevin Bermeister, president of BDE.
“It’s clear … traditional banners do not provide value … when compared to other media,” said Bermeister. “We believe [rich media banners] will provide retention of advertiser message and click-through rates commensurate with the expectations of media buyers, planners and marketing executives.”–Erik Gruenwedel
COUNTRY LIVING, EBAY LAUNCH CROSS PROMOTION
Country Living, a shelter and lifestyle title published by New York-based Hearst Magazines, has launched a cross promotion program with eBay this month, tying a new branded area on eBay’s auction site to the print magazine’s monthly “Country Icons” column.
For example, you can buy the same pale green Depression Glass on eBay, based in San Jose, Calif., that you find in the pages of Country Living’s February issue (at www.ebay.com/countryliving). According to Nancy Soriano, the magazine’s editor in chief, the specific items featured on the eBay page will change each week. Soriano, who said she approached eBay about creating the Country Living area, explained that the partnership is an editorial one, with no money changing hands. But it’s also a promotional one. Country Living will promote the eBay pages in its print publication as well as on its own Web site (countryliving.com). EBay will feature the branded area on its front page as well as on related category pages, such as Antiques & Art.–Jennifer Owens
BRAND ADVERTISERS FILL SUPER BOWL DOT-COM VOID
Following the lead of next Sunday’s Super Bowl XXXV TV broadcast, the big game’s official Web site–SuperBowl.com–is also being sponsored by mostly traditional advertisers, including title sponsor Miller Lite. NFL executives claim the site’s revenue should show a 30 percent increase over last year.
E*Trade, one of only three dot-com advertisers signed up for this year’s telecast, is likewise the only major dot-com company represented on SuperBowl.com’s list of advertisers. And yet, while the dearth of dot-com advertisers in this year’s Super Bowl telecast has been news in recent weeks, Mark Mariani, president of marketing and sales for Sportsline.com, said he isn’t surprised by the Web site’s mostly traditional advertising base. According to Mariani, more than 80 percent of Sportsline.com’s regular advertisers are traditional brands. Sportsline is hosting and producing the Super Bowl site for the first time this year.
“Our business has been traditional sports advertisers from the beginning,” he said. “There is a very fertile ad-supported sports marketplace out there and we should be talking to those sponsors. The same ones that buy weekend sports coverage or cable prime-time coverage are the sponsors we need to train onto the Internet.”
According to Chris Russo, senior vp of NFL new media, only E*Trade plans to advertise on both the telecast and the Web site. Besides E Trade and Miller Lite, SuperBowl.com’s sponsors include Accenture, Frito-Lay, Gallo, RCA, Southwest Airlines, Coca-Cola, Ford and GoTampa.com, representing the Tampa Convention and Visitors Bureau. Russo noted that most of these names are familiar ones. “Many of these companies are NFL league sponsors,” he said.–Jennifer Owens
MOVERS
Book4golf.com, a North America tee-time reservation network, named PETER M. GEORGE, SANFORD (SANDY) MILLER, and WES SCOTT to the company’s board of directors. George was previously the vice-chairman and chief executive officer of the Beverly Hills, CA.-based Hilton Group and is currently a director of the Hilton Hotels Corporation, US Airways Group and Magna Entertainment Corporation. Miller has been chairman and chief executive officer of BudgetGroup, Inc., and Scott has been the chief corporate officer of BCE Inc. since February 2000.
San Francisco.-based COLO.COM, a provider of interactive, high-speed networks, named ROBERT L. KAMBA senior vice president of operations, engineering and information technology. Kamba was formerly at PSINet, Washington, D.C., where he was senior vice president and president of global operations and engineering. –Sid Ross
THE SCOREBOARD
Opening stock prices for 1/22/01:
Digitas-DTAS: 7 1/4
Agency.com-ACOM: 4 7/16
Organic-OGNC: 1 1/2
Razorfish-RAZF: 2 5/16
MarchFirst-MRCH: 1 7/8
Sapient-SAPE: 18 1/8
iXL-IIXL: 2 9/16
Modem Media-MMPT: 4 1/8
AOL Time Warner-AOL: 53/3/4
Yahoo-YHOO: 33 13/16
eToys-ETYS: 7/16
Qualcomm-QCOM: 70 3/8
@Home-ATHM: 8 11/16
Amazon-AMZN: 19 15/16
DATA
In an attempt to address the measurement policies of the Internet audience, some of the top Net research firms and online media publications have joined forces with the American Association of Advertising Agencies and the Wireless Advertising Association to form the Internet Measurement Initiative (IMI).
The IMI, which includes Nielsen Media Research, NetRatings, PC Data Online, Comscore, OgilvyOne, Arbitron, DoubleClick, WashingtonPost.com and Newsweek Interactive, started as the Radiate Internet Roundtable, named after its early sponsor, Mountain View, Calif.-based Radiate, a technology services company. The IMI will address issues such as industry categorization, which is the standard by which metrics firms identify Net companies and audience definition.
The objective of the panel is to create more uniform standards when presenting and evaluating Internet research. “We must first identify what it is we are measuring before we can measure it,” said Gerard Broussard, partner at OlgilvyOne. –Sid Ross
IQ Morning Briefing, Jan. 22
