Automotive Execs Plot Comebacks, Hype Super Bowl
AdAge

At a major international auto show, the marketing machine is rarely on stage, even on press days. Of course, chief marketing officers might be observed wandering the show floor, eyeballing the competition or taking part in a panel. Then they're gone. Celebrities they are not—even if they are rock stars in the marketing world.

Jim Farley, VP-global marketing, sales & service, Ford is an exception. He is slick and engaging, a persuasive presenter. It was he who led the high-profile press conference introducing the Lincoln MKZ concept earlier this month.

And Mr. Farley has also been instrumental in the creation of a new advertising agency with WPP to be based in New York, temporarily called Team Lincoln. The agency will be charged with reinventing the image of the Ford subsidiary, which has languished in luxury-car limbo for more than three decades.

His message—and his instruction to the creative agency taking the reigns—is for Lincoln to "distinguish itself again by providing more individual, specialty motor cars, and a more personal and crafted experience to match." Lincoln plans seven new or refreshed cars by 2014, and a production version of the MKZ sedan is to be unveiled in April at the New York auto show.

A prominent strategy for Mr. Farley going forward is to emphasize vehicle prelaunch marketing efforts. The aim, he said, is "generating interest in a product before it goes on sale, [making] your media conditionally based on how much progress you make, so you don't have to blow all your money in three or four months on mainstream media."

Another part of Ford's agenda includes reducing the number of vehicle platforms worldwide to nine from 20. And instead of pouring money into developing multiple global ad campaigns, the company will limit the number of campaigns and focus on telling those stories more broadly.

Sam Adams Crowdsourcing Its Next Beer
Ad Week

Samuel Adams is hoping the beer it's preparing for SXSW will be a crowd-pleaser. Hence, it's letting the crowd tell them how to make it. The brewer is teaming up with social-media wizard Guy Kawasaki to create what it claims is the first "collaborative ale," by having followers of Sam Adams's myriad social networks vote on the color, clarity, and malt/hops/yeast ratios.

The winning combination will be used as the recipe for the new brew, which will be available only in select Austin, Texas-area bars during SXSW and at the Boston brewery. It's a cool idea—Mountain Dew and Coca-Cola have done similar things—but clearly no one at Sam Adams read Susan Cain's New York Times article about the pitfalls of collaboration. They may wish they had once the beer snobs roll in and hijack this project.

Many Brands Bid For Placement on ‘Modern Family’, But Few Make it
AdAge

Advertisers are working furiously to get their goods into the hands of the characters on ABC's "Modern Family." But only a select few will make it, as the producers are wary of turning the nation's best-loved TV family into a clan of shills.

"It is one of the shows where, across a lot of categories, you always hear people saying, 'How can I get involved?'" said Brent Poer, exec VP-managing director at Publicis Groupe's MediaVest. Although requests from advertisers have ramped up in recent months, "we turn down, I would say, about 90%" of them, said Steven Levitan, one of the comedy's executive producers and creators. "We get offers constantly. We do very few. We try to be extremely selective." Mr. Levitan said the show will attempt one to three of these integrations per season, perhaps more if the story takes the cast to a remote location.

Fox’s ‘Touch’ Inks Historic Global Deal with Unilever
AdAge

When he played Jack Bauer in "24," Kiefer Sutherland outmaneuvered terrorists, mad bombers and other threats to national security. Now he's teaming with Unilever to conquer the world.

In a move loaded with challenges, News Corp.will simultaneously launch a Fox drama starring Mr. Sutherland, called "Touch," in more than 100 countries with a global marketing effort from Unilever. Advertising for the popular deodorant known as Sure in the U.K., Degree in the U.S. and Rexona everywhere else will accompany the effort.

The concept, which took more than a year to organize, illustrates the pressures big media companies face as digital technology and social media make it easier for consumers worldwide to follow TV programs. It also shows advertisers' demand to court them.

"People feel so connected now, and they can, via the internet, know exactly what's happening in the U.S.," said Marion Edwards, president-international television, Twentieth Century Fox Film Distribution. "They can access episodes immediately after they air here. They can follow on Twitter. It's all part of this huge informational universe where everyone feels very up to the moment."

But finding a piece of content that reaches them all at a single moment is tough. In a typical process, it often takes months for a U.S. TV program to debut on foreign shores. Dialogue has to be dubbed and tweaked for different audiences. Promotions and marketing materials that appeal to various cultures have to be designed. While various News Corp. divisions can broadcast "Touch" in different parts of the world, the company isn't everywhere, and in some instances had to tap outside partners to ensure "Touch" and Unilever had proper scale.

Microsoft Reorg Will Shift More Marketing Power to Product Groups
AdAge

Microsoft spent nearly $14 billion on global sales and marketing in the fiscal year ended June 2011, with $1.9 billion dedicated to advertising. Yet revenue fell short of expectations in the most recent quarter, which included holiday sales, and net income declined.

The company employs high-profile agencies such as CP&B, Deutsch and Razorfish, but most of its ads in the past several weeks surveyed below average with online consumers in recall, relevance and likability, according to an analysis by Advertising Benchmark Index.

There's one exception, however: Xbox. The marketing structure for that brand seems to be the model for Microsoft's marketing reorganization, which will shift power from a central group to individual product teams. It's a key move at a critical time for the tech giant, as products soon hitting the market will determine if it has a future in mobile.

Robert Matthews, head of global consumer marketing for Microsoft's interactive-entertainment division, leads the Xbox marketing team. Arguably one of the company's most autonomous groups, it is described as "the wild boys that do what they want to do," by one executive close to Xbox. The renegade approach has been met with great success, as TV ads from AgencyTwoFifteen score high in awareness, call to action and understandability, according to ABX's measurement. With its Kinect gesture controller, Xbox was the top-selling game platform last year, according to NPD.

The companywide revamp will shift some accountability from centralized marketing to product-focused business units, such as Windows and Office, according to three executives familiar with Microsoft. The goal is to reduce bottlenecks and redundant roles, and Bloomberg Business Week has reported that the changes could result in the elimination of hundreds of jobs. The move comes months after Chris Capossela, a former marketer at Office, took over for Mich Mathews as chief marketer.

"Part of Microsoft's challenge is reorienting itself to its changing market position," said Sarah Rotman Epps, Forrester Research senior analyst on consumer computing.

The biggest change is the threat from Apple, a famously product-centric company that's now Microsoft's biggest competitor in computing across all devices.

Brands Leave Millions On The Table without ROI Crystal Ball
Marketing Daily News

Retail, financial services and technology brands continue to leave more than $112 million in sales on the table that they could add to their coffers by being more aggressive in search engine optimization. That's according to findings scheduled for release Monday by BrightEdge, a digital marketing platform provider.

BrightEdge analyzed terabytes of page rank, social signals, keyword, backlinks and cost-per-click data to identify the financial opportunities left behind in specific vertical market segments. The company found that retail brands leave about $51 million in potential revenue, followed by financial services at $51 million, and hardware and software companies at $5.4 million.

Advertisers attempting to predict the return on investment for search engine optimization have struggled for years to find tools that prove it, according to Mark Mitchell, head of search in the U.K. at Omnicom Media Group. He views it as a catch-22. SEO has often been under-invested in because it has been difficult to predict ROI for organic search campaigns.

Mitchell claims that Omnicom found a forecasting tool in the BrightEdge S3 platform. Agencies and clients spend a lot of time trying to build out methods and tools, but it is time-consuming and difficult to aggregate all the data, which makes forecasting difficult.

Ad Industry Rails Against Costly SOPA/PIPA Compliance
Marketing Daily News

It will cost ad networks, payment processors, hosting services, search engines and others in the online advertising supply chain estimated billions to monitor content and links embedded on Web pages to comply with proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA) U.S. legislation, claim industry executives.

The opposition says the proposed legislation will force venture capitalists to pull investments earmarked for online companies, suppress social media advertising and reverse growth for online ads. eMarketer estimates U.S. ad sales grew 23% to $32 billion in 2011, and should reach $39.5 billion this year, outpacing spending on print newspapers and magazines.

Ad executives said it will become "incredibly costly" to monitor every piece of content contributed to a Web site. Kara Nortman, SVP of publishing at CityGrid, which supports Citysearch and Urbanspoon, likens SOPA to The Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act of 2002, which set a new reporting standard for all U.S. boards, management and public accounting firms in the wake of the Enron, Tyco and WorldCom scandals.

The SOX stipulations cost companies millions in compliance; industry insiders believe SOPA could do something similar.

The CPA Journal reported the results of a 2004 survey revealing the total costs of first-year SOX compliance with section 404 could exceed $4.6 million for each of the largest U.S. companies, with more than $5 billion in annual revenue.

On Sunday, Martin Lafferty, CEO of Distributed Computing Industry Association, who calls SOPA "SOX on steroids," plans to chronicle events on his company's Web site that led to the proposed SOPA/PIPA legislation. "If the combined bills would have passed years ago, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter would have been shut down before the companies made it to their first week of operations," he said. "Part of these bills would destroy the Internet by attacking the domain name system, which is fundamental protocol to how it works."

If Amazon refuses to shut down a Web site hosted through its cloud services after a client is accused of copyright infringement that business unit could be in jeopardy of being sued or shut down too. Amazon becomes liable for damages through the legal court process if they choose not to take down the site.

"The burden of proof showing they did not infringe copyrights goes to the defendant," said Eric Orme, CTO of Remark Media, a global digital media company focused on developing social media businesses. He explains any company accused of aiding in copyright infringement runs the risk of being served under the same court order.

For a social network like Facebook with more than 600 million users, Orme estimates the price tag at millions to create services that moderate user comment, photos and videos. "I don't think you can stop piracy by suing the platform somehow associated to it."