The jury is out on whether advertising will ever work for online video sites as they strive to become real profit-generating businesses. Well, it’s worked for Hulu, but not in the profit-generating kind of way — at least not right away.

Hulu jumped to become the fourth most-watched video site in the United States last month thanks to a major advertising spot during the Super Bowl, according to Internet audience measurement firm comScore in this Reuters story. Those spots featured Alec Baldwin telling viewers about Hulu’s “evil plot to destroy the world” by turning people’s brains to mush.

Comscore said Hulu’s viewership grew 42 percent to 34.7 million unique visitors watching around 333 million videos.

The irony of Hulu’s “ratings” success on the back of a TV advertisement during one of the most watched events on the planet is not lost on us. Like many other Web video sites Hulu isn’t quite bringing in millions of dollars in profits for its owners yet, but this might be a start.

Google’s YouTube is also on the hunt for revenues and profits to match its huge popularity. We’re not sure if advertising on national television will help as it already has three times the number of viewers that Hulu does. YouTube’s issues might have more do with the reluctance of mainstream advertisers to make major commitments to advertising on its site which is dominated by user-generated clips rather than professionally made ones. Hulu, which only features TV shows and archive movies, has had more success with advertisers.

Even if YouTube decided to advertise during the Super Bowl, it might not have the same return on investment. As the New York Times explains here, Hulu paid next to nothing for Super Bowl ad spots worth nearly $3 million as this year’s football extravaganza was broadcast by part owner NBC.

Keep an eye on:

• MySpace, BT to offer Web contract domains to users (Reuters)
• Investor supports Comcast’s buyback strategy (NY Post)
• Houston Chronicle cuts 12 percent of staff (Reuters)

Did you feel like all you saw in the first half of the Super Bowl — well, besides Pittsburgh’s James Harrison taking his interception 100 yards to the house — were commercials? Certainly there were a lot of them. In fact, a record amount of commercial time ran over the entire course of this year’s Super Bowl.

According to a just issued report from TNS Media Intellegence, NBC aired 45 minutes, 10 seconds of advertising messages, including paying sponsors, NFL messages and in-house promotions.

Outside of NBC’s promos, four companies accounted for 40 percent of the total paid ad time: PepsiCo, Anheuser-Busch Inbev, Viacom and General Electric, which, of course, is the majority owner of NBC. But TNS warns not to read too much into the big GE ad buy.

The softening ad market for 2009 Super Bowl spots led to speculation that General Electric divisions might be required to step in and buy unsold inventory to help out sister-company NBC. The movie studio and theme park divisions of GE have regularly advertised in previous Super Bowls on other networks, so it’s far-fetched to construe their presence in the 2009 game as the outcome of an inventory fire-sale.

What’s a ‘normal’ level of in-house ad activity for the Super Bowl broadcaster? The past four years have seen four different networks air the game. During this cycle, the advertising presence of the network’s owner has ranged from 30 seconds to 4-1/2 minutes. GE’s 2009 footprint of 2:30 is larger than either News Corp in 2008 or National Amusements in 2007. However, it lags the 4:30 of air time that Disney-owned entities had in the 2006 telecast on ABC.

(Reuters photo of James Harrison)

 Who won the Ad Bowl? Who knows?

It really depends on who you listen to. I liked the Pepsi Bob Dylan advertisement, and was a bit turned off by the Teleflora wisecracking box commercial. But when I spoke with Professor Tim Calkins of the Kellogg School of Management, who oversees a Super Bowl advertising review,  he had nothing but good things to say about the spot, calling it “an astonishing piece of advertising.”

Hmmmm.

In fact, Calkins and I were not the only ones at odds over the SuperAds. Just check out the web…

Experts and consumers told the Wall Street Journal they favored the Monster.com site.

Monster’s ad, which starred a low-level worker who shares his cramped office with the backside of a stuffed moose, was among several humorous commercials in the Super Bowl line-up that scored high marks with advertising executives and consumers.
    “Touchdown. This is how a lot of people feel right now.” said Rita Rodriguez, chief executive for the U.S. division of WPP’s Brand Union.
    “Hysterical, maybe the funniest ad of the night,” said Don Weir, a 41-year-old comedian from Media, Pa. Added Jessica Madden, a 29-year-old bank analyst in Chicago: “It appeals to the crowd now, because we are all wondering if we will have a job when we wake up.”  

And they hated the Cash4Gold spot:

A campy spot for Cash4Gold.com, which buys gold jewelry from consumers, involved former late-night TV personality Ed McMahon and rapper MC Hammer ostensibly selling their possessions; it was panned. “Unwatchable,” said Eric David, a creative director at Kaplan Thaler Group, a unit of Publicis Groupe. “They are making a joke out of something that is not a joke in this bad economy.”

But guess what? Advertising Age figures Cash4Gold may have gotten the best bang for  the buck.

Cash4Gold? On the Super Bowl? Really?
 
Things are even worse than we thought.
 
Not because it’s pitiful that the down-and-out Ed McMahon and MC Hammer should humiliate themselves before 100 million appalled eyewitnesses. Not because in the Dustbowl Super Bowl poor NBC is reduced to accepting a schlocky direct-response spot thinly disguised as a winking spoof of schlocky direct-response spots. Not even because the economy is so bad that we’re panicked into trading our jewelry and bridgework for 17î on the dollar of gold value.

The truly scary thing is that this skeazy exercise from Euro RSCG Edge and Arnold Worldwide will generate, by far, the biggest ROI of the Super Bowl.

Barbara Lippert of Adweek had this to say about the spots she disliked:

Let’s get to the bad spots. Teleflora was so awful that it exploded the space/time continuum. Speaking of coffins, H&R Block seemed to build itself a nice one by using the Grim Reaper, voiced by Abe Vigoda. What were they thinking?

She also ranked Doritos and GoDaddy very low. But, of course, USA Today’s Ad meter put Doritos at the top, followed by two Budweiser Clydesdale spots and a Bridgestone spot.

It wasn’t just the Arizona Cardinals who met their match in the Super Bowl — so did Madison Avenue. 

And it could be a game-changer. For the first time, it wasn’t an ad agency that created the best-liked Super Bowl commercial. It was two unemployed brothers from Batesville, Ind., whose ad for Doritos — created for an online contest for amateurs — won them $1 million from Doritos maker Frito-Lay, and leaves ad pros with a lot of ’splaining to do.

Go figure.

Keep an eye on:

• With a week to go until News Corp’s quarterly results, investors wonder how bad things will be and are girding for sharper-than-expected profit declines, asset writedowns and perhaps more severe job cuts (Reuters).
• The tension between Apple and the music industry stems from Apple’s power over the industry, but it also echoes the traditional divide between suppliers and distributors (NY Times)

The Super Bowl — that little football game that is watched by a few people and attracts a bit of interest from advertisers — has come and gone. Was it a blockbuster year? We’ll let you decide, but clearly companies had more at stake this time around than usual.

Shelling out up to $3 million for a 30-second spot, when each day thousands more people are handed pinkslips, can’t sell their house, can’t stand to open their 401Ks and are in no mood whatsoever to be told by some CMO that they need to rush out and buy some beer or soda or potato chip or whatever is, well, a bit risky.

So how did they do? Take a look at a handful below. Let us know you’re thoughts. After all, you’re the target audience.

When you’re spending up to $3 million for 30 seconds of Super Bowl time, you really, really want to get your money’s worth. So what do you do? Hold press briefings, drag executives out for interviews, hold contests, and, of course, post the commercials on YouTube even before they air on game day. Gone, mostly, are the days when advertisements would actually debut at the Super Bowl.

Fair enough.

So just pretend it’s Sunday and check out some of the big day’s commercials…

The New York Times confirmed this morning that it’s looking to get rid of its stake in the Boston Red Sox baseball team, something previously reported by a number of news outlets.

The Times could raise at least $200 million selling its stake, analysts have said, though it should be noted that selling anything these days — even part of a first class baseball organization — is no easy task.

Check back to MediaFile for more on the sale shortly.

Meanwhile, here’s a recap of the New York Times decline in quarterly results:

The Times’ fourth-quarter net income fell 48 percent to $27.6 million, or 19 cents a share, compared with $53 million, or 37 cents a share, in the quarter a year earlier.

Excluding a writedown related to the International Herald Tribune, its European newspaper, the Times reported earnings of 26 cents a share. The average analyst estimate was 27 cents a share, according to Reuters Estimates.

Revenue fell 10.8 percent to $772.1 million, beating the average Wall Street forecast of $761.1 million.

In the fourth quarter, advertising revenue fell 17.6 percent. Ad revenue at the news media group — which includes its namesake newspaper, The Boston Globe and other local papers throughout the United States — fell 18.4 percent.

Online revenue, including About and its newspaper websites, fell 2.9 percent to $92.5 million.

Keep an eye on:

• Only days before the National Football League’s championship game, Pepsi executives are still debating which advertisements they will run during NBC’s broadcast of the Super Bowl on Sunday, which will likely be viewed by nearly 100 million Americans (Reuters) 
• Union moderates fighting for control of the deeply splintered Screen Actors Guild on Monday ousted the hard-line chief negotiator they blame for months of stalled contract talks with Hollywood studios (Reuters)
• A cable channel from Paramount Pictures, MGM, and Lionsgate that is intended as a competitor to HBO and Showtime will be name Epix and wil launch online in May (New York Times)

(Photo: Reuters)

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)

We recently wrote that advertisers have even more riding on this Super Bowl than usual. There may be no better illustration of this than Anheuser-Busch InBev, brewer of such Super Bowl marketing staples as Bud and Bud Light.

Yesterday, the company gave the press a glimpse of some of its advertising for this year’s big game. The company has purchased 4-1/2 minutes worth of advertising time, once again making it the biggest Super Bowl advertiser.

At first glimpse, Anheuser-Busch InBev’s plans don’t seem that different than other years. It will go for humor in Bud Light spots and emotion in its Budweiser spots, using the Clydesdale horses. (Actually, it will run a record 3 Clydesdale commercials during the game).

But you get a sense from company executives that they feel like there is a lot riding on this year’s marketing blitz, given it comes during a recession when all budgets –  including, and perhaps especially, advertising — are under close scrutiny. Tossing a few million bucks at some commercial time is no easy decision right now.

Moreoever, the company has to rebuild some bridges after the rush of bad publicity that came with the takevoer last year by InBev (Think foreign super-company taking over American beer icon and you’ll get a sense how this thing was being played).

Executives acknowledged that with the takeover they want to remind the consumer that Budweiser is still that same proud, traditional beer.  

“That’s one of the things people are going to be looking for from Anheuser-Busch. It’s ‘Hey, what are you going to change?’” said Keith Levy, vice president of marketing. “The best thing we can do as marketers of a 133-year-old brand, in the case of Budweiser, is reassure them that the things they’ve grown accustomed to and love and feel are relevant still remain.”

We’ll see. Just a couple more weeks until kickoff.

Keep an eye on:

• The world financial crisis has produced more than its share of losers. MySpace and other online social networks want to capitalize on them (Reuters)
• Yahoo Inc’s new Chief Executive Carol Bartz will receive a compensation package of about $19 million in 2009, in addition to a bonus and stock options (Reuters)
• The Minneapolis Star Tribune filed a Chapter 11 bankruptcy petition Thursday night, the latest victim of the industry’s huge problems (StarTribune.com)

Since we’re coming up on year’s end, it’s worth a quick review of the television season so far. It has stunk. There. That’s about all you need to know.

Don’t take our word for it, look at the weekly Nielsen numbers that came out yesterday. The lone exception is CBS, which continues to hold up relatively well in the face of all the challenges facing the TV market.

Here’s the Hollywood Reporter’s roundup:

Following its 12th consecutive weekly victory in total viewers, CBS became the first major broadcast network this season to move into positive year-to-year territory since premiere week.

Through Dec. 21, CBS has averaged 12 million viewers, up 1% from last year. NBC, ABC and Fox are each down 9%.

All of the Big Four are still in the red in the adults 18-49 demo, with CBS closest to breaking even at minus 3%.

As we all know by now, everything will probably change on January 13, when American Idol returns to Fox. Perhaps that — or the introduction of midseason shows — will give ratings a broad boost. If not, it’s going to be a long cold winter in the TV business.

Keep an eye on:

• As growth in online advertising slows, some Internet companies are easing the restrictions they impose on the categories and formats of advertising they will accept (WSJ.com)
• FedEx is pulling out of the Super Bowl due to budget worries amid the downturn (NY Post)
• China’s broadcasting watchdog has ordered a crackdown on low-brow confessional talk shows as part of a campaign against base entertainment (Reuters)

(Photo: Reuters)

How odd is it that perhaps the most exciting story in network television is not about “Lost”, “Fringe” or some other edgy, expensive small-screen phenomenon, but instead, about a veteran night time talk show host moving to prime time?

According to reports, NBC is set to announce today that Jay Leno, who relinquishes his “Tonight Show” gig next May, will get a new show at 10 p.m. each night “in a format similar to “The Tonight Show.”

This news comes as last-place NBC tries to cut costs during the economic slowdown. It wants to streamline creative decision-making. I suppose you can’t streamline it any more than putting the same gab-fest on every weekday night to compete with everything from legal and espionage yarns to hospital dramas and time travel shows.

But don’t sneeze at the idea: Jay Leno is a proven entertainer with a solid audience– more than can be said for sidelined shows like “My Own Worst Enemy” and “Lipstick Jungle.” Even better — the move may save NBC $200 million annually.

So what’s next? Three-nights-a-week of some kind of variety or singing competition? Wait, oh… nevermind.

Keep an eye on:

• Has the growth of “Guitar Hero” peaked? (Edge-Online)
• Myspace has opened its platform to third-party developers, a move that helps to build web services on its social network
• It may be tough for NBC to unload its remains Super Bowl ad slots. (AdAge)

(Photo: Reuters)