Hasta La Creative!

Alas, it’s that time of year again when the industry converges on New York City for Advertising Week (damn, time flies). So, to help kick off the event, we gathered a few folks from the creative, media and publishing sides last week in our Mediabistro studios to discuss the weeklong festivities (as  well as various other non-Advertising Week-related industry issues). Those taking part in the lively, free-flowing chat include PSFK founder/CEO Piers Fawkes, Huge creative director Ross Maupin and Scott Schwartz, senior partner, integrated planning at MEC.

The topic of this particular conversation was, yes, Advertising Week, including if its actually still worth attending and if so, what our participants are looking forward to at this year’s event. Tomorrow, the lads discuss the elephant in the room that is the Publicis-Omnicom merger. Stay tuned.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

‘Downton Abbey’ returned with an average audience of 9.5 million last night, the biggest audience to date for a series opener of the period drama.

The 35th anniversary of the Dogs Trust’s “a dog is for life…” slogan is approaching and Campaign figured that was as good a reason as any to ask: what is the greatest UK ad featuring man’s best friend?

EBay, the online auction site, is reviewing its media agencies across Europe, putting Dentsu’s Carat and mobile agency Fetch on alert.

Airbnb wants a bigger piece of the hospitality pie in 2014, and it’s hoping that a brand-marketing push will help.

The San Francisco-based company acts as an online go-between for travelers and local residents, charging 6% to 12% fees on bookings and 3% of what people earn from renting out their homes for short-term stays. In its five years, Airbnb has become a global phenomenon, largely thanks to word of mouth, but it’s teeing up marketing campaigns for the fourth quarter and into next year to become known beyond its core younger demographic.

Airbnb tapped Pereira & O’Dell as its agency of record in July, and two short films that could potentially be used as TV spots are already in development, according to CMO Amy Curtis-McIntyre.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

Broadcasters are hoping the new fall TV season is better than last year’s, when they lost close to 8% of their audience in aggregate and renewed just 10 of the 37 programs that premiered. This year, the Big Four and the CW will roll out 52 scripted series throughout the season. And the success of cable shows like AMC’s “The Walking Dead” and A&E Network’s “Duck Dynasty” are shaping the way broadcasters will attack the new season this fall.

What to keep on your radar:

Less is more

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Virgin Money, the bank owned by the Virgin Group, has launched a campaign highlighting its “soulful” approach to banking, in response to high profile campaigns from rivals TSB and Lloyds Bank.

Even if you don’t watch TV, you’d be hard-pressed to escape the shadow of the “Duck Dynasty” empire.

These days, you can’t step into a Walmart without seeing “Duck Dynasty”-related merchandise from beach towels to sunglasses. The clan’s got three books on The New York Times nonfiction best-seller list. And all of this from a reality show based on family-friendly hijinks — rather than ginned-up shouting matches and catty gossip — might seem like a long shot.

But the A&E reality show about the Robertson family of West Monroe, La., is a ratings smash. In its fourth season, “Duck Dynasty” is averaging 10.5 million viewers. The season premiere pulled in 11.8 million, making it the best-performing nonfiction-series telecast of all time on cable.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

The TV business remains stuck in the past, which is why Silicon Valley has long salivated at the idea of reinventing it. But wouldn’t it be ironic if the company to finally crack the code wasn’t Google, Apple, Samsung or Sony but the decidedly less-glamorous Intel?

That’s entirely possible, due largely to the efforts over the past two years of 40-year-old former BBC exec Erik Huggers, who launched Intel Media to transform the chip maker into a consumer-products company. Mr. Huggers is doing this not by trying to destroy the pay-TV model, but by negotiating deals with distributors and hiring some of the best user-experience talent in the Valley.

Intel’s TV box — rumored to be called OnCue — will make its debut this fall if all goes to plan and it can surmount the efforts of the cable and satellite guys to keep it at bay. For consumers it means another, possibly better, option for pay TV. For the industry it brings the promise of new thinking and new ad models. A net win coming from an unlikely corner of the tech world.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

A key part of Twitter’s ad strategy rests on the assertion that the service is a complement to TV viewing. Deb Roy is bringing scientific rigor to that claim.

A tenured MIT professor who came to Twitter in February via its acquisition of the social-TV-analytics startup he co-founded, Bluefin Labs, Mr. Roy is the company’s chief media scientist. He’s charged with propping up ad sales by applying data to support Twitter’s positioning as a driver of TV tune-in and articulating how its TV-related ad products work, which he did with beautiful data visualizations and his engaging professorial delivery at Cannes.

Mr. Roy, 44, believes the TV industry is undergoing a seismic change — triggered by its audience increasingly dividing their attention between their set and their tablet — akin to what Hollywood experienced during the transition to talkies, which dramatically altered how people related to movies. “There are certain kinds of programming that I think, looking at the data, are social by nature. They just catalyze conversation,” he said. “What’s happening in the TV industry is a search to optimize for that characteristic and create more of it.”

Continue reading at AdAge.com