Month: June 2023

Heinz turned to Reddit, TikTok and Instagram to find stories about the irrational devotion that consumers have for its products. The results inspired the 150-year-old brand’s first global campaign, “It has to be Heinz,” which is Kraft-Heinz’s largest media investment to date. Created by agency Wieden+Kennedy New York, the platform launches June 1 with a…

For the first time in 150 years, Heinz will have a unified creative strategy. Observers say the company’s stepped-up brand budgets are paying off.

There’s a Serena-sized hole in the professional tennis landscape, but marketers aren’t dwelling on what they’ve lost–instead they’re focusing on the next generation of potential scene stealers and trophy winners to draw fans to this summer’s U.S. Open. For a campaign launching this weekend, executives at the U.S. Tennis Association and agency Dentsu Creative also…

After 10 months of courtship, marketing tech holding company The Brandtech Group finally completed its acquisition of Jellyfish, a digital media and marketing group with global reach that Brandtech didn’t have. The newly beefed up company plans to take another step toward winning more business from the giant marketers that roam the Earth.

Put together, the firms tally up some 7,000 employees globally and generate some $1 billion in revenue, according to Brandtech Group’s founder and CEO David Jones, who said the company essentially has two core models sitting above a unified technology platform: an in-housing model through its Oliver content creation shop, and then Jellyfish’s end-to-end integrated model.

“It gives us two really compelling core offers, because not everyone wants the same thing. Some people want it all joined up, [and] some people want it in house,” said Jones. “I think the one thing that is absolutely consistent is, everybody wants to deliver content better, faster and cheaper using tech.”

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Digital media and marketing group Jellyfish has been wholly acquired by The Brandtech Group, driving their combined revenue to more than $1 billion. Jellyfish, which was co-founded in 2005 by chief executive Rob Pierre, currently operates across 38 offices and employs more than 2,000 people. It has worked with clients such as Google, Uber and…

“No Straight Answers,” a six-minute game show parody from the Madwell agency, pits a team of younger LGBTQ+ influencers against older ones.

Publishers have long looked for ways to prove the efficacy of their digital ad products to brand partners. In the last year, media companies including Cond? Nast and Insider have begun experimenting with attention-based ad metrics to more clearly quantify their value, ultimately looking to drive more ad revenue. Using attention-based metrics–devised often by a…

While boxed wine may remind some drinkers of cheap juice and college parties, startup wine brand Juliet is highlighting a different attribute of the bag-in-box package: its carbon footprint. Juliet is also aiming to revamp the reputation of boxed wine and lure high-end, sustainably-minded drinkers to the category. It’s part of a larger push within…

A vestige of the COVID-19
television era returns for a new special on Friday — and in the process, revives memories of a pandemic period in TV that now seems more remote with each passing day.

When I think of the pandemic now, I scratch my head (figuratively) and wonder: What the hell happened? What was all that, anyway?

The official
span of the COVID-19 pandemic began on March 11, 2020, when the World Health Organization declared that the worldwide outbreak of this new illness indeed represented a pandemic.

It ended only this past May 5, when WHO officially declared it to be over. For the vast majority of us, however, the pandemic and the fear and uncertainty that surrounded
it since March 2020 had already long since passed.

The TV Blog went back in its personal archives to retrieve the pandemic past and found that I had
forgotten much more than I remembered about how the TV biz adapted to this new reality.

One of the ways was to produce content on the cheap. One such example
was “The Greatest @Home Videos” on CBS, hosted by Cedric the Entertainer. Seen in the photo above, the show’s interview subjects stayed home, and so did Cedric.

“The Greatest @Home Videos” may be the last vestigial example of a COVID-era show, and it lives on in a series of occasional specials. The fourth such special comes this
week. 

This unscripted series sprung from the explosion in home-based videos that were being made and posted on
social media in ever-greater numbers as people quarantining at home sought diversions to keep them entertained and busy.

The lesson here is: While pandemics
are only temporary, homemade videos of cute babies, curious dogs, and children doing backflips are eternal.

But this COVID curated clip show was only the tip
of the iceberg. Remember “Tiger King” on Netflix? This oddball docuseries about people who maintain self-styled zoos was heralded as the first TV phenomenon of the home-confinement
era’s first few weeks.

It was also said to have played a role in the growth of streaming in the COVID era. As binge-watching became a national pastime,
subscriptions soared.

In the pandemic shutdown’s first weeks in 2020, the conventional wisdom held that TV would flourish from the shutdown.

By June 2020, however, the TV trade press was already reporting that the pandemic ratings spike was over.

Production on new scripted shows shut
down completely, affecting TV platforms across the board. Before long, a whole series of COVID-era TV shows came and went.

One of the most curious of these was an
NBC sitcom that was basically a Zoom conference. The show, titled “Connecting …,” was an effort to exploit the Zoom craze that spread across the world about as quickly as COVID.
“Connecting …” was soon disconnected.

If memory serves, even “Saturday Night Live” tried to do shows in which its performers
were seen on Zoom. The shows were terrible.

TruTV’s “Impractical Jokers” also did their shows on Zoom from their homes, but there was a big
problem: There were no impractical jokes. Thus, there was no real show.

Perhaps the most prevalent form of COVID-era content had to do with entertainment and
news personalities beaming it in from home.

Jimmy Fallon cavorted at home with his small children from a “Tonight Show” desk that they
built. 

Stephen Colbert did one “Late Show” from home seated in a bubble bath in which he was fully clothed. Late-night guests
appeared from their homes as well.

So did all the hosts of TV talk shows from network morning shows to the evening talk shows on cable news, and their
guests.

Some of these professionals worked hard to create a broadcast-worthy environment in which to place themselves on-camera from their homes.

But some did not. Many guest “experts” and windbag commentators on the cable talk shows took no such care.

Viewers
were often shocked at what slobs these people were as they sat for interviews on national TV in front of unmade beds, open closet doors and piles of junk stacked in corners.

Less serious and a lot more fun were the conversations with whomever you were watching TV with about the qualities of the home décor of TV personalities. 

Two local New York weatherman did their weather segments from what appeared to be their basements. 

Another did his reports from his kitchen in the suburbs. On another station, a veteran correspondent did his
stand-ups from the living room of his Manhattan apartment.

We who watched were quick to pass judgement. Is that the best he can do for a kitchen? It’s
so dated! And the correspondent’s living room? When was it last decorated — the 1980s?

The live Upfronts were cancelled, and these too ended up on
Zoom. Live sports disappeared too. 

In one of the era’s greatest examples of desperation, Fox re-aired
the 2008 Super Bowl XLII in April 2020, just weeks after the start of the shutdown (the Giants beat the Patriots).

What a time it was. And yet, the question
remains: What the hell happened?