Charlie Buchwalter

Having been to just about every ad:tech show during the last 10 years, I have to say that the show in San Francisco this week was one of the best ever. The Moscone West venue was great, the keynotes were superb, and sat through a number of panels with top-notch panelists and moderators. And there’s nothing better than reconnecting with some of the great friends I’ve made over the years in the interactive space.

The folks at socialmedia.com hosted the ad:tech Chairman’s reception Monday night, and I gave the killer list of attendees an overview of our Global Online Media Landscape” report. Immediately after my presentation, Tina Sharkey (Chairman & Co-Founder of babycenter.com) moderated a great panel discussion. One of the panelists, Carol Kruse, VP of Global Interactive Marketing at Coca Cola, made one of the most memorable comments ever during one of her responses. She was saying that ALL brand managers are doing everything they can to bring digital into their marketing mix.

I asked, “Carol: after the 5,000 or so online effectiveness studies that have been conducted over the last 10 years, and all the online folks whining that marketers aren’t spending more on online, why, all of a sudden, are brand managers at Coke wild about digital?” Of course, I was fully expecting to hear that Coke’s brand managers and researchers are finally responding to online’s performance metrics, which clearly speak for themselves, right?

Well, not quite. Her answer? “It’s really pretty simple. Digital is sexy now. After all, celebrities are all over social media.” As soon as the words came out of her mouth, I knew that Carol was speaking the truth. Many players have worked very hard for years to demonstrate the inherent value of a medium that we’re passionate about. And one gets the sense that after all these years, online has crossed the chasm.

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Read more from Charlie Buchwalter and the Nielsen Online team at the Connecting the Dots blog.

Britain’s top brand? Coca-Cola, which racked up £969 million in sales in 2008. Following behind – and showing impressive 16 percent growth – was bread brand Warburtons, with sales of £710 million.

“A strong brand, which focuses on its core value proposition, can outperform own label even in tough times.  Consumers want products that are known quantities,” said Jake Shepherd, Marketing Director, Nielsen UK.

In addition to Warburtons, bread brands Hovis and Kingsmill also ranked in the top 10.  Other top 10 brands included Cadbury Dairy Milk chocolates, Walkers Crisps and Nescafe coffee.  The fastest growing brand was Danone Activia, an active health yogurt, which posted a strong 42 percent increase in sales in 2008. New entries in the top 100 list included laundry brand Surf and Kettle premium potato crisps.

Nielsen’s Guide To March Madness, tracks a range of consumer and media information surrounding the event including advertising trends and demographic reach of the multi-week event. Ad buys for CBS’s coverage of the NCAA Tournament have risen steadily over the last five years – from $434 million in 2004 to $580 million in 2008 – a surge of almost 34 percent.  Spending for the Final Four Championship game has grown 47 percent over the last five years.  Last year’s final game saw $97.5 million in advertising, with the cost of a 30-second commercial over $1 million.

Over the last five years, General Motors has spent the most on ads with a total of $317 million. Last year, the auto company was the top spender, with $64.7 million in spending.

The automotive category was the top-spending category for each of the last five years.  Last year, automotive was top, followed by financial – investment services, fast food restaurants, wireless phone services and beer.

Scoring With Fans?

Are these advertisers reaching their targets?  According to Scarborough Sports Marketing, a joint venture between Nielsen and Arbitron, the answer is a resounding “yes.”  Viewers and listeners of the tournament are likely to be male, educated and married.  They have higher than average annual household incomes and and a wide range of interests, hobbies and consumer preferences:

An NCAA Fan Is…

• 10 percent more likely to have visited a casino in the last year
• 17 percent more likely own three or more vehicles in their household
• An avid fast food consumer, and is 34 percent more likely than the average adult to have visited a fast food chain 10 or more times in a week
• 33 percent more likely to have consumed any beer in the last month, with Bud Lite, Budweiser and Corona the leading brands in the light domestic,  regular domestic and imported categories.

Download Nielsen’s complete Guide To March Madness

According to a report released Monday by Nielsen’s Telecom Practice, Americans should expect to see more text message marketing in the future.  Given the immense popularity of texting in the U.S. and abroad, it’s not surprising that marketers have ramped up their use of the medium to engage their customers — where there’s an audience, marketers are not far behind.

So far, Nielsen’s report notes, marketers have used short code marketing in a tight but creative range of ways: from simple information messaging, to rewards programming, to couponing, and even direct SMS purchasing.

Coca-Cola’s My Coke Rewards program, which had engaged 1.1 million AT&T and Verizon Wireless customers as of Q3 2008, according to Nielsen, is a notable example.  Subway, Arby’s, Jiffy Lube, BestBuy, Papa Johns, Village Inn, and other major brands have also provided special offers through text and multimedia messaging.

Short codes are also changing the way Americans engage with traditional media.  Participation TV falls into this realm — with “American Idol” being the most prominent example of viewers engaging with a TV program over text messaging.

Radio listeners are also increasingly being called to action via text message.  In Q2 2008, for example, Nielsen’s tracking of short codes showed more than a million transactions with the short code “A-L-I-C-E” (or 25423), a short code assigned to the station Alice 97.3 KLLC-FM in San Francisco.  Alice listeners are frequently invited to send text messages directly to the studio to make requests, win prizes, and enter polls. 

View Nielsen Telecom Practice’s full report.

Read coverage of Nielsen’s findings in Wireless and Mobile News.

How do consumers feel about talking to brands via texting — the same way they talk with their friends and family?  Read more on Nielsen Wire.

Broadcast television placements grew by almost 12% between January and June of 2008, while placements on cable television declined by 20%.

Changes in program line-ups accounted for the growth of broadcast placements — and the decrease in cable placements. 

On the broadcast side, two programs with a significant number of product placements aired more episodes in early 2008, boosting the overall number of placements in the first half of the year.  NBC’s “Biggest Loser,” which normally airs in the fall, moved the start of its fifth season up to January 2008, while FOX’s “Hell’s Kitchen” started its fifth season in April, several months earlier than it did in 2007. 

On the cable side, shows like TLC’s “American Chopper” and “Miami Ink,” MTV’s “Run’s House” and “Pimp My Ride,” and A&E’s “Driving Force” and “Dog The Bounty Hunter,” which featured a large number of product placements in early 2007, aired less frequently or were removed from cable primetime line-ups during the first half of 2008. 

Overall, 204,919 product placements aired on broadcast and cable TV programs between January and June of 2008. 

Nielsen’s report includes data for 11 networks, including ABC, CBS, CW, FOX, MNT, NBC, A&E, Bravo, HGTV, MTV, and TLC.

View the full press release.

Read more about product placement trends in Nielsen’s “Consumer Insight” newsletter.

Read coverage of Nielsen’s findings in Condé Nast Portfolio, Ad Age, Variety, The New York Times, Multichannel News, Broadcasting & Cable, The Globe and Mail, and MediaPost.

Ads created especially for the Beijing Games by Coca-Cola, General Electric, Oreo, and Visa were among the best-remembered and most-liked commercials during the first week of the Beijing Olympics, according to Nielsen IAG, which uses an online panel to track the performance of advertising.

A Coca-Cola ad in which animated birds use straws swiped from Coke bottles to construct a nest resembling the Olympic stadium in Beijing was especially popular with Olympics viewers, Nielsen reported.

An ad for Oreo cookies showing two girls on a train in China copying each other’s every move — including eating Oreos, also scored well with Olympics audiences, according to Nielsen.

View Nielsen’s ranking of the top ten Olympics-themed ads.

In a Nielsen survey of Chinese consumers conducted in May 2008, Olympics ads featuring celebrity endorsements by Chinese athletes were among the most recalled. 

Liu Xiang’s Coca-Cola ads were most frequently recalled by consumers — 62% remembered them, according to Nielsen.  Yao Ming’s China Unicom and Coca-Cola ads also proved memorable — 48% recalled them.  Meanwhile, diver Guo Jing Jing’s Coca-Cola ads were recalled by 36% of those surveyed.

But despite their high profile, celebrity endorsements carry no guarantee that consumers will recognize advertisers’ brands, according to Nielsen. 

According to the Nielsen survey, a significant number of Chinese consumers wrongly associated Yao Ming with Nike, Adidas, and Pepsi.  Similarly, Liu Xiang was incorrectly associated with Pepsi and MengNiu dairy products by 15% and 13% of consumers, respectively.

View the full press release.