Advertising and Marketing

Subterms

    More stories

    • 100 Shares149 Views

      in Television

      Netflix and the N.F.L. Sign a Three-Season Deal

      by

      Football joins pro wrestling and comedy specials in an expansion of the streaming service’s live offerings, a key step in the company’s overall live TV strategy.Netflix is no longer simply in the “sports-adjacent” business. On Wednesday, the streaming giant announced a three-season deal with the National Football League that will include showing two Christmas Day games on its service this year. It’s the first time Netflix has become partners with a major sports league, and it likely won’t be the last.The move follows Netflix’s increasingly aggressive push into the business of live events. In the past two weeks, “The Roast of Tom Brady” was its most-watched English-language TV show; a quirky six-day John Mulaney talk show went viral as part of the Netflix Is a Joke live comedy festival in Los Angeles; and the stand-up special “Katt Williams: Woke Foke” was viewed 4.3 million times.“Last year, we decided to take a big bet on live — tapping into massive fandoms across comedy, reality TV, sports and more,” Bela Bejaria, Netflix’s chief content officer, said in a statement. “There are no live annual events, sports or otherwise, that compare with the audiences N.F.L. football attracts.”The two Christmas games will pit the Houston Texans against the visiting Baltimore Ravens and the Pittsburgh Steelers against the visiting Kansas City Chiefs (raising the odds for greater viewership with a potential Taylor Swift sighting).The streaming business has matured in the United States, and though Netflix is the dominant service, it still needs to keep growing. With subscriptions relatively maxed out in America, the growth of other revenue streams has become crucial to the company’s success. Advertising is chief among them.At a time when more people are dropping their traditional cable subscriptions, live sports remain catnip for advertisers because they are one place where audiences are guaranteed in real time. That is especially true for the N.F.L., which remains a ratings juggernaut.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 88 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      Taylor Swift’s ‘The Tortured Poets Department’ Arrives

      by

      The pop superstar’s latest album was preceded by a satellite radio channel, a word game, a return to TikTok and an actual library. For her fans, more is always welcome.Taylor Swift was already the most ubiquitous pop star in the galaxy, her presence dominating the music charts, the concert calendar, the Super Bowl, the Grammys.Then it came time for her to promote a new album.In the days leading up to the release of “The Tortured Poets Department” on Friday, Swift became all but inescapable, online and seemingly everywhere else. Her lyrics were the basis for an Apple Music word game. A Spotify-sponsored, Swift-branded “library installation,” in muted pink and gray, popped up in a shopping complex in Los Angeles. In Chicago, a QR code painted on a brick wall directed fans to another Easter egg on YouTube. Videos on Swift’s social media accounts, showing antique typewriters and globes with pins, were dissected for clues about her music. SiriusXM added a Swift radio station; of course it’s called Channel 13 (Taylor’s Version).About the only thing Swift didn’t do was an interview with a journalist.At this stage in Swift’s career, an album release is more than just a moment to sell music; it’s all but a given that “The Tortured Poets Department” will open with gigantic sales numbers, many of them for “ghost white,” “phantom clear” and other collector-ready vinyl variants. More than that, the album’s arrival is a test of the celebrity-industrial complex overall, with tech platforms and media outlets racing to capture whatever piece of the fan frenzy they can get.Threads, the newish social media platform from Meta, primed Swifties for their idol’s arrival there, and offered fans who shared Swift’s first Threads post a custom badge. Swift stunned the music industry last week by breaking ranks with her record label, Universal, and returning her music to TikTok, which Universal and other industry groups have said pays far too little in royalties. Overnight, TikTok unveiled “The Ultimate Taylor Swift In-App Experience,” offering fans digital goodies like a “Tortured Poets-inspired animation” on their feed.Before the album’s release on Friday, Swift revealed that a music video — for “Fortnight,” the first single, featuring Post Malone — would arrive on Friday at 8 p.m. Eastern time. At 2 a.m., she had another surprise: 15 more songs. “I’d written so much tortured poetry in the past 2 years and wanted to share it all with you,” she wrote in a social media post, bringing “The Anthology” edition of the album to 31 tracks.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      Taylor Swift Sells a Rainbow of Vinyl Albums. Fans Keep Buying Them.

      by

      Artists across pop genres are finding success with colored vinyl and different variants of their releases. For Swifties, the urge to collect them all is strong.When Taylor Swift released nine vinyl editions of her album “Folklore” in 2020, Tylor Hammers, a fan in Florida, took notice. But it wasn’t until “Midnights” two years later that he became a true collector, scouring the internet and retail shops for every variation of her albums he could find — spending about $1,000 in the process — and cataloging the technicolor expanse of Swift’s LP output in an online discography.“I get enjoyment out of being a completionist,” Hammers, 24, said in a recent interview.He’s not the only one.Although streaming remains the dominant music format, physical media has been a growing niche where the industry can cater to so-called superfans, who express their dedication to artists by shelling out big bucks for collectible versions of new releases, sometimes in multiple quantities. K-pop acts like BTS pioneered this strategy by putting out an array of elaborate CD packages, often featuring goodies like postcards and photo booklets, which helped the boy band repeatedly go to No. 1.But nobody does it quite like Swift, or at least at the same scale. Last year she sold 3.5 million LPs in the United States, thanks in part to five pastel-hued variants of “1989 (Taylor’s Version),” a rerecording of her 2014 album, and the popularity of Swift’s entire catalog during her record-breaking Eras Tour.When Swift’s latest album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” comes out on Friday, it will be available in a portfolio of different versions — on vinyl, CD and even cassette — with bonus tracks and, on certain “deluxe” editions sold through Swift’s website, trinkets like magnets, photo cards and engraved bookmarks. Some items, like a standard CD, go for as little as $13. But last weekend, Swift’s site offered a limited run of autographed LPs for $50, which, according to fans on social media, vanished in 20 minutes.“The Tortured Poets Department” comes out on Friday in a number of different versions and formats including CD, left, and cassette. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Television

      How Hertz Turned O.J. Simpson Into the ‘Superstar in Rent‐a‐Car’

      by

      The famous ad campaign paid dividends for both the company and its pitchman, who died on Wednesday.Executives at the rental car company Hertz knew what they wanted to project to potential business travelers in the 1970s: speed, reliability and efficiency.They quickly realized that one man radiated all of those qualities. So they made the football player O.J. Simpson, who died on Wednesday at the age of 76, the first Black star of a national television advertising campaign.“They had a slogan — the Superstar in Rent‐a‐Car — and I was the current reigning superstar as far as the competition was concerned,” Simpson told The New York Times in 1976.The campaign would pay dividends for both the company and its pitchman, who in early Hertz ads was shown racing through an airport terminal and leaping over rope barriers, clutching a briefcase instead of cradling a football. In some of Simpson’s later ads, average Janes and Joes cheered him on as he ran, yelling, “Go, O.J., Go!”At that time, decades before Simpson was acquitted of killing his former wife and her friend, he was known for dazzling on the field for the University of Southern California and the Buffalo Bills. His athleticism and speed made Simpson the perfect choice for the Hertz commercials that widened his stardom beyond the gridiron, offering him up as a suave, smiling promoter known to football fans and businessmen alike.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      How Ozempic Turned a 1970s Hit Into an Inescapable Jingle

      by

      The diabetes drug has become a phenomenon, and “Oh, oh, oh, Ozempic!” — a takeoff of the Pilot song “Magic” — has played a big part in its story.In February 2023, David Paton, guitar case in hand, strode across the most famous pedestrian walkway in rock history and into London’s Abbey Road Studios.Paton was no stranger to the rooms where the Beatles changed the course of popular music: His 1970s pop-rock band Pilot recorded two albums there. In his second life, as an in-demand studio and touring musician for the likes of Kate Bush and Elton John, he clocked numerous sessions with the prog-rock outfit the Alan Parsons Project, whose namesake produced Pilot’s signature hit, “Magic.” He even spent some time there with his boyhood hero, Paul McCartney, singing backup vocals on Wings’ “Mull of Kintyre.”Paton had come to London to record a new version of “Magic.” “It was a great thrill to be back at Abbey Road, singing my song,” he said in a recent video interview from his home studio in Edinburgh, an array of guitars displayed behind him. The track’s stair-step chorus — “Oh, oh, oh/it’s MAAA-gic” — could test Paton’s vocal range even back in 1974, and again a year later, when the song became a worldwide hit, peaking at No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100.“It’s just about the enjoyment of life,” he said. “About waking up in the morning, you know? I was 22 when I wrote it.” Now he was 73, and unsure if he could still reach those high notes. But Paton took his place in front of the Abbey Road microphone and confidently sang that indelible hook, only with the word “magic” swapped out for something less ephemeral and more pharmaceutical: “Oh, oh, oh, Ozempic.”As television viewers are all too aware, that altered chorus from “Magic” serves as the advertising jingle for the Type 2 diabetes medication Ozempic. Since the product arrived in 2018, the bowdlerized version of “Magic” — first rerecorded by work-for-hire musicians, and then re-rerecorded by Paton at Abbey Road — has taken its place alongside such classics of the form as Subway’s “Five Dollar Foot Long” and McDonald’s “I’m Lovin’ It” as marvels of marketing ingenuity.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      The Designer Who Makes Movie Posters Worthy of Museums

      by

      You’ve seen Dawn Baillie’s posters for thrillers, comedies and dramas outside cineplexes. Now her work is being exhibited at Poster House in Manhattan.The killer’s knife, a woman cowering before it.This was typical horror movie box cover stuff before 1991, when Dawn Baillie was asked to design a poster for a cerebral new thriller called “Silence of the Lambs.” She learned it was about a young F.B.I. agent-in-training, Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster), who enlists the help of an imprisoned serial killer, Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins), to solve a case.“It came to me that I could illustrate ‘Silence’ if Clarice was the ‘lamb’ and the moth — or the bad guys — is what has left her without the right words,” Baillie explained in an email. “I think the poster works in showing vulnerability, strangeness and eeriness.”In other words, the poster said: This isn’t your typical scary movie.Starting March 14, Baillie gets marquee billing in a new exhibition, “The Anatomy of a Movie Poster: The Work of Dawn Baillie,” at Poster House in Manhattan. The show, through Sept. 8, takes us from her first poster, “Dirty Dancing” (1987) to “The Tragedy of Macbeth” (2021), for which she was the creative director. Along the way are posters for films as varied as “Zoolander,” “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” and “The Truman Show.”Baillie’s career as a movie poster designer and creative director spans over four decades. Born in 1964, Baillie entered advertising in the 1980s when the industry was dominated by men and posters were mostly made by hand, not computer. After working at the agencies Seiniger Advertising and Dazu, in 1992 she co-founded BLT, the agency behind memorable posters for recent films (“Barbie”), TV shows (“The Last of Us”) and Broadway (“The Music Man”).Angelina Lippert, the chief curator and director of content at Poster House, called Baillie a “design genius” with a style defined by “effortless simplicity.” Take the poster for “The Silence of the Lambs.”“It’s visual anxiety that you get when you look at this, which is what makes it indelible,” Lippert said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      Ad Nods to Taylor Swift and Football, Drawing Cheers and Criticism

      by

      A Cetaphil commercial showed a father and daughter connecting over football and the music superstar. But a social media influencer said the idea was stolen from her.When an advertisement for Cetaphil lotion was released online days before the Super Bowl, it drew rave reviews for a narrative that evoked a familiar story for parents, football fans and followers of Taylor Swift.In the commercial, a father unsuccessfully tries to interest his teenage daughter, who’s distracted by something on her phone, in a football game. She goes to her bedroom to complete her skin-care routine — using Cetaphil on her face. She then walks downstairs to see her father watching a football game while wearing a white jersey bearing the No. 89. The announcer can be heard saying, “Well folks, there she is, the most famous fan at the game,” drawing a smile from the daughter.The father, sensing an opportunity, later walks into her room with a red No. 13 jersey for her and jokingly applies cream to his face before imploring her to come and watch the game. She goes downstairs, lays her phone on the coffee table and curls up next to her father. The ad ends with them wearing their jerseys on the couch and laughing. An on-screen message reads, “This season, dads and daughters found a new way to connect.”Though it does not directly mention Taylor Swift, the ad is a nod to how the music superstar’s relationship with the Kansas City tight end Travis Kelce was said to have gotten more fathers and daughters watching N.F.L. games together this season. The No. 13 and No. 89 jerseys were implicit references to Ms. Swift’s “lucky number,” 13, and her (and Mr. Kelce’s) birth year, 1989. And the father in the ad wore friendship bracelets, as do many of Ms. Swift’s fans.Users on social media reacted positively to the ad, drawing connections to their own lives. One TikTok user who posted the ad said it “has me in tears.” On X, fan accounts for Ms. Swift lauded the commercial, and one user said, “as the daughter of a football coach and a die-hard Swiftie, I adore this.”But on Friday night, a woman who has a popular TikTok account, Sharon Mbabazi, said the company had stolen the idea for the ad from her. On her social media accounts, she shared a TikTok post from September in which she is doing her makeup when her stepfather walks in and tells her about Mr. Kelce’s surge in Instagram followers, jersey sales and popularity since his relationship with Ms. Swift became public.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 100 Shares169 Views

      in Television

      All the Super Bowl Commercials So Far, Ranked

      by

      Here is our ranking of the Super Bowl commercials we have been able to track down ahead of the big game.In the spirit of “Who actually watches the game?,” here is our ranking of all the Super Bowl commercials we have been able to track down so far, from best to worst.Ground rules: Only ads being shown on the national CBS broadcast during the game are eligible. Certain spots, including several advocating a boycott of Tesla and a number of CBS promos for its own primetime series, were omitted from this ranking. Commercials not available beforehand or with a live component — including spots from FanDuel, TurboTax, the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism and the controversial Chinese e-commerce company Temu — will be added after the game. (If Travis Kelce proposes to Taylor Swift in a surprise ad for The Knot, we will probably have our winner.)The Best of the BunchThese are the ones we’ll remember for at least a day or two.BMWChristopher Walken makes fun of people making fun of Christopher Walken, with a cameo performance by the Super Bowl halftime star Usher. As always, he walks the walk.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More