MediaFile

Sweating out the Super Bowl

With the Super Bowl less than a week away, this is when the anxiety really boils on Madison Avenue. Is our spot going to bomb? Are we too late in the game? Is anyone going to watch Pittsburgh vs. Arizona? Is any of this madness worth it?!!????

Advertising Age puts at least a bit of that fear to rest:

Surely, spending $3 million on a Super Bowl ad in the midst of a crushing economic downturn is a foolish waste when chief marketing officers’ jobs are on the line?

On the contrary, it’s a bargain.

The Super Bowl presents not just a huge platform with astounding audience numbers where consumers actually lean forward to watch your ad. It also pays surprising ancillary dividends in awareness: reams of press coverage that drive word-of-mouth and stampeding traffic to websites. Most importantly, for the right company, it can establish a relationship and sell product.

Of course, you still have to get the creative right and hope that audiences are interested in the game. Feel any better?

Keep an eye on:

    Movies sales were slow, but not totally missing, at the Sundance Film Festival, which ended Sunday in Park City, Utah (New York Times) Publicis won a global advertising deal with French supermarket group Carrefour, boosting its shares and depressing those of rival Havas, which previously held a large part of the contract (Reuters)

(Photo: Reuters)

from Fan Fare:

MySpace Cafe at Sundance. Is it Yahoo II: the sequel?

USA/Years ago at the Sundance Film Festival, Yahoo! sponsored a small cafe where festivalgoers could drop in -- if they were on the list -- and grab a quick bite to eat. But over time, it seems Yahoo's fame and fortune as an Internet portal have receded, and in it's place popped up social networking site MySpace. And in recent years, MySpace has sponsored the cafe at Sundance.

Now, it seems that in its fifth year (2009) MySpace is facing the keen competitive threat of social networking site Facebook. So, when we sat down with MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe in the MySpace Cafe, we couldn't help but note the irony. Could MySpace be "Yahoo II: The Sequel"? (We couldn't resist the movie pun. It is Sundance, after all). DeWolfe laughed. He doesn't see it that way at all and, in fact, he said the outlook for MySpace appears bright.

"During the first half of our fiscal year, we are up (in revenues) year over year, and we're profitable. We're cautiously optimistic over the next 6 months," he said about the business climate. "The overall advertising marketing, in general, both online and offline is softening ... how that affects us in three or four months is really difficult to say ... (but) the economic downturn during Bear Stearns and the financial crisis, we've done great through all that, and again we're up year over year."