The 10 Best Commercials of 2011 – The Year’s Most Impeccable Craft and Storytelling in Advertising
AdWeek

Many people groaned last winter when it became clear that Super Bowl XLV would be packed bumper to bumper with automotive ads. It's not a category that's exactly wowed with its creativity in recent years. It was a pleasant surprise, then, when many of the car spots proved not only tolerable but wonderful. Now, with the year almost passed, it's become clear that two of those ads in particular—Chrysler's "Born of Fire" by Wieden + Kennedy and Volkswagen's "The Force" by Deutsch—weren't just among that evening's best spots. They turned out to be among the year's best.

Those two ads are joined by a third car commercial, Nissan Leaf's "Gas Powered Everything" by TBWA\Chiat\Day, in Adweek's ranking of The 10 Best Commercials of 2011, presented here. Those auto spots were all expertly conceived and executed, with great atmospherics, details, and flourishes. And interestingly, they're all so different—an environmental appeal in a bleak alternate universe; a rugged defense of Motor City's heritage and pride, featuring a powerful celebrity cameo; and a kid in a Darth Vader mask just trying to exert a little mind control around the house. Together, they represent the best automotive advertising has to offer.

Elsewhere, the list celebrates work across a wide variety of products, themes, styles, and geographies. You've got candy bars and zombies, cats with thumbs, and film-directing bears. You've also got two spots focused on the environment, and two explicitly about the humanizing power of technology—fundamental concerns in an age when our lives, and the world, can feel like they're spinning out of control.

Understand, Improve Customer Engagement
Marketing Daily News

Got engagement? You’d better hope so. Customer engagement is an important indicator of marketing and value proposition performance. It takes on increased urgency in a recessionary environment that demands businesses get more value from existing customers (especially given the cost of acquiring new ones).

Effectively influencing customer engagement takes understanding how they engage, and what drives their behaviors, like the business’ and its competitors’ actions, natural customer characteristics, and changing category dynamics.

Typically, most businesses try to grow this understanding of customer engagement through more static, point-in-time approaches. They tend to classify present customers in segments based on here-and-now behaviors as revealed by database information captures.

But it’s more telling to dig into customer behavior longitudinally, to understand the variations in engagement patterns that occur over time. Moreover, first impressions are critical: customer behaviors in the initial stages of their relationship with the brand are key predictors of their future engagement. That makes it valuable to study behaviors of specific, defined sets of customers – cohorts – rather than merely the current base.

Consider this three-step process:

Step 1: Diagnose customer engagement. Pick a representative cohort of your customers to follow over time (e.g., three years). Use a simple, easy-to-understand customer engagement metric, such as revenue or number of transactions. Determine the patterns of engagement that exist in your customer base, using advanced analytics.

Step 2: Identify opportunities to improve engagement. With engagement patterns identified, you can grow your understanding of what makes customers tick by amassing information about those falling into specific patterns: attitudes and motivations; category behavior with your brand and competitors; experience across your channels; service experience; transactional behavior; and exposure and response to marketing efforts.

This all can be gathered through various forms of primary research and by leveraging various internal databases. It’s also important to understand how category dynamics have evolved over time. Analytics can also help determine the relative importance of different elements in driving improved levels of customer engagement. This, combined with inspired ideation, can lead to a host of tactics to improve customer engagement.

Step 3: Start realizing results and develop a test and learn agenda. Step 2 will typically reveal low hanging fruit that can be acted upon right away, but you’ll also come up with more complex ideas that will need to be tried out and evaluated. Develop an efficient test and learn plan that prioritizes the ideas and helps build a business case for the most effective ones.

Advertisers Tap Brakes on Digital in Q4
AdAge

When Rich Antoniello, CEO of Complex Media, looked at his digital sales pipeline for the fourth quarter two weeks before the end of the third, he was ecstatic: digital revenue was on pace to double year-over-year. But in the month and a half that followed, advertisers pulled off the table 30% of what Mr. Antoniello considers "qualified revenue"—revenue from deals on which, at a minimum, negotiations have begun—compared with 10% in an average month.

Mr. Antoniello's company will still finish the quarter up 74% on digital revenue year-over-year—good news by most measures. But online publishers are facing a weaker fourth quarter than anticipated as marketers take a cautious approach this holiday season

At Yahoo, brand advertising dropped off in the first six weeks of the quarter vs. the same period last year, according to an analysis by Macquarie Capital analyst Ben Schachter. He said high-margin custom brand ads accounted for 23% of Yahoo's home page in the first half of the quarter this year, vs. 32% last year. AOL also showed weakness, with just 19% brand ads.

With the all-important last quarter half over, traditional online publishers are suffering from marketers' conservatism in the face of global economic uncertainty and their focus on social media and new mobile formats such as smartphones and tablets.

"More of a concern is what is happening broadly at the portals. Are some of these dollars going to Facebook and YouTube? The answer seems to be yes," Mr. Schachter said.

Donnie Williams, chief digital officer at Horizon Media, said the fourth-quarter digital spending pullback has been a popular topic in his conversations with "everyone from Tier 1 publishers to video-ad networks." Mr. Williams said his agency has not felt the brunt of this slowdown because of its focus on adding clients rather than increasing budgets with existing accounts. He singled out consumer packaged goods and retail as categories where spending seems to be slowing.

Mr. Schachter's analysis found weakness in financial services, as well ad drop-off in daily-deals advertising. An insider at another large online publisher said the company has also seen softness in fourth-quarter package goods spending, and in consumer electronics and pharmaceutical categories.

Colin Kinsella, CEO for North America at Digitas, said his agency sat down with its big clients in late summer as stock-price fluctuations dominated and lowered projections for the end of the year. Mr. Kinsella said Digitas continues to see spending increases on mobile, especially search, as well as on social campaigns.

Broadly, ad spending continues to shift toward digital, but marketer caution is affecting the ambitious programs that can make or break a quarter.

"We continue to see share-shift toward digital but less of an appetite for experimental digital solutions and more focus on things that they know," said Wes Nichols, CEO of Marketshare Partners.

Offline, signs also point toward a weak quarter. In the magazine industry, where advertisers have to commit spending ahead of time, ad pages across monthly magazines' October, November and December issues declined 6.8% from the fourth quarter of last year, according to the Media Industry Newsletter. Spending in TV's last-minute "scatter" market is also expected to be weak, but that has much to do with marketers' buying more ad inventory ahead of time in the TV-buying upfront last summer.

CBS, Turner Expect Hoops to Net Big Bucks
AdWeek

Despite a softening ad marketplace, CBS and Turner Sports are close to locking in the first major sponsor of the 2012 NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament.

While no major deals have been finalized, multiple sources tell Adweek that CBS/Turner are close to wrapping a deal with a returning beer sponsor. And platinum NCAA corporate partners AT&T, Capital One, and Coca-Cola are certain to sign on as well.

Now in the second season of a 14-year partnership, the broadcaster and cable outfit have unleashed a full-court press on advertisers, using the success of the March Madness on Demand service to secure higher rates.The online simulcast service was an unqualified success in 2011, serving up 43 million video streams across broadband and mobile platforms, an increase of 63 percent versus March Madness 2010. And with the tremendous boost in reach that MMOD gives the tournament—despite the proliferation of weekday afternoon tip-offs, office drones don't have to miss a minute of live action—the CBS and Turner sales teams can demonstrate that a record number of consumers were exposed to their clients' ad messaging.

"It's a matter of 'more equals more,'" says Jon Diament, executive vice president of ad sales and marketing at Turner Sports. "Whether you're talking about people watching on computers or iPads, there was an amplification of the audience across the various digital extensions. And...people stuck with their games and stayed put for the ads."

Matching the haul from the 2011 spring tournament will be no mean feat. According to Kantar Media, CBS and Turner had snatched up $743.4 million in ad revenue, up 21 percent over the 2010 tourney, prior to their partnership. (MMOD sales accounted for fewer than 8 percent of the 2011 total—but that just means it has growth potential.)

The one spot of bad ad news so far: The insurance category is a no-show after The Hartford elected not to renew its deal."Brands are really starting to re-evaluate the value of an NCAA tournament sponsorship," says a senior consultant for a sports-media rights group, who notes that March Madness is one of the most expensive propositions in media. "An advertiser asked to spend more money has a lot to consider before making that move. There are a lot of options to mull over."

NBA’s Holiday Gift to Marketers? An End to the Lockout
AdAge

The National Basketball Association and its players reached a labor agreement that would settle an antitrust lawsuit and end a work stoppage nearing its sixth month.

NBA Commissioner David Stern said the league plans a 66-game season starting with a Christmas Day triple-header. If players and owners ratify the deal reached early Saturday morning, Mr. Stern said the NBA will open training camps Dec. 9 and he expects the free-agency period to begin that day as well.

"We've reached a tentative understanding that is subject to a variety of approvals and very complex machinations, but we're optimistic that will all come to pass and that the NBA season will begin Dec. 25," Mr. Stern said in a news conference.

The news will be welcomed by a variety of media and marketing players, including NBA sponsors such as Kia, MillerCoors and American Express. It will also come as good news to TV outlets such as Disney's ABC Sports/ESPN and Time Warner's Turner Networks, the latter being particularly exposed to a prolonged lockout because it lacks lots of substitutable sports programming. Other TV networks have been looking to poach advertising dollars that would ordinarily go to NBA games.