And the Oscar Winner is Big-Event Television
By STUART ELLIOTT | The New York Times | February 16, 2007

THE Super Bowl and Grammy Awards are barely memories, but Madison Avenue is already beating the drum for the next big live television event, the Oscars.
For the Feb. 25 broadcast of the 79th annual Academy Awards ceremony, ABC, the longtime Oscar network, has already sold all the commercials it plans to run during the show. The buyers are a score of blue-chip marketers that include AT&T, Bank of America, Coca-Cola, Eastman Kodak, General Motors, Mars, MasterCard, McDonald’s, Microsoft, J. C. Penney and Unilever.

Some of those advertisers — among them, AT&T, Coca-Coca, G.M. and Kodak — are doubling down, sponsoring awards coverage on an official Web site, oscar.com, along with the show. And in another indication of the growing importance of the new media, ABC is for the first time talking to marketers about buying mobile ads that would accompany content for cellphone users.

“Wherever the consumer wants to get the Oscars, we’ll be there for them,” said Geri Wang, senior vice president for prime-time sales at the ABC Television Network unit of ABC in New York.

The sold-out sign for the broadcast went up a bit earlier than last year, despite slightly higher prices. ABC, part of the Walt Disney Company, is charging an estimated $1.7 million for each 30 seconds of commercial time during the show, compared with around $1.65 million last year and $1.6 million in 2005.
As expensive as the 2007 Oscar commercials are, they are a relative bargain compared with the 30-second spots sold by CBS during Super Bowl XLI on Feb. 4, which went for an estimated $2.6 million apiece. More than 93 million people watched the Super Bowl; 38.9 million people watched the Academy Awards last year.

The Oscar event is typically the second-most-watched show each year, after the Super Bowl; the Grammys drew 20.1 million viewers to CBS on Feb. 11. ABC and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences are both running campaigns that encourage viewers to tune in to the show, whether or not they are familiar with the nominated films and actors.

The robust demand for Oscar commercials is indicative of the continuing ardor among advertisers for what is known as big-event TV. The term refers to shows that audiences anticipate and watch live, rather than delayed on digital video recorders, paying attention to the commercials as well as to the contents.

“We had so much success with a write-your-own-ad contest that debuted on the Academy Awards last year, it made sense to come back,” said Chris Jogis, vice president for United States brand development at MasterCard Worldwide in Purchase, N.Y.

The contest last year, asking consumers to finish incomplete vignettes in the long-running “Priceless” campaign, “had 100,000 entries, which blew us away,” Mr. Jogis said, adding: “We had 800,000 people come to the Web site, priceless.com, that we promoted on the Academy Awards. And the amount of time they spent there averaged seven minutes.”

“So we’re driving people to priceless.com, like we did last year,” Mr. Jogis said, this time with a 60-second spot for a new product, PayPass, that invites consumers to watch five humorous “Webisodes” on the site.

J. C. Penney, back on the Academy Awards as the exclusive retail sponsor, will present a new campaign, carrying the theme “Every day matters.” The commercials are the first work from the new Penney agency, Saatchi & Saatchi in New York, part of the Publicis Groupe.

“If you’re going to do something, do it big,” said Mike Boylson, chief marketing officer at Penney in Plano, Tex.

“With media proliferation, you’ve got to pick your spots and run deep,” he added. “You can’t rain on the ocean.” Among the other recent big-event shows Penney has sponsored, Mr. Boylson listed the Video Music Awards on MTV.

Coca-Cola, another returning Oscar sponsor, is using the occasion to introduce a campaign for Diet Coke from that brand’s new agency, Wieden & Kennedy in Portland, Ore. There will be three commercials offering a tongue-in-cheek look at the effects of Diet Coke deprivation.

“There’s a very important place in our marketing mix for big-event television,” said Katie J. Bayne, senior vice president for Coca-Cola brands in North America at Coca-Cola in Atlanta.

“Especially for Diet Coke, it makes all the sense in the world,” she added, because of the brand’s longtime association with celebrities and entertainment.
To capitalize on that, the first Diet Coke spot to run during the show takes place on the set of a movie. The plot is centered on the crew’s coping with a temperamental star’s particular demands for refreshment, which include a certain soft drink and a “bend-y straw.”

General Motors is also taking the occasion to run new work, the first commercials for Saturn from that brand’s new agency, the Marina del Rey, Calif., office of Deutsch, part of the Interpublic Group of Companies. The company also plans to run three spots for Cadillac that have appeared previously, from Modernista in Boston, and a commercial promoting the G.M. corporate image, which may be repurposed from one that ran during the Super Bowl.

The Dove brand sold by Unilever was on the Super Bowl last year, but not the Oscars. This year Dove is reversing its game plan, running a spot during the Academy Awards to reveal the winner of an online contest that asked women to create a commercial for a new product, Dove Cream Oil Body Wash.
The company expected perhaps “a couple hundred entries” but instead received 1,200, said Kathy O’Brien, marketing director for Dove at the health and personal care division of Unilever in Greenwich, Conn.

Three finalists from the contest will be brought to Los Angeles and will watch the show together to find out whose commercial won, Ms. O’Brien said. The finalist spots are on the contest Web site (dovecreamoil.com), where the winning commercial will appear after ABC broadcasts it.

The attention that Oscar commercials draw, like the hoopla surrounding Super Bowl spots, is a two-edged sword. The publicity can amplify the ad buy, but can backfire if the commercials disappoint or dismay viewers and critics.

“For the Academy Awards, everybody’s at their best, and it has to be your brand at its best,” said Joyce King Thomas, executive vice president and chief creative officer at the MasterCard agency, the New York office of McCann Erickson Worldwide, part of the McCann Worldgroup unit of Interpublic.
The spotlight may be daunting, she added, “but you don’t want to duck, either.”

Microsoft will be another Oscar advertiser trying something different. Of the five or six commercials in one pod, or break, during the show, three will be for Windows Vista, telling a story with a beginning, middle and end; the rest will be from other sponsors. The Microsoft spots are being created by the McCann Erickson office in San Francisco.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company