Advertising: Clips, Quips and Snips: A Wrap-Up of Upfronts

NEXT, ‘THE LUNATICS’? Executives at CBS were unabashedly high on a new comedy with Robin Williams and Sarah Michelle Gellar as a father and daughter team at a Chicago ad agency. The show is called “The Crazy Ones” — in other words, they’re not mad, as in “Mad Men,” they’re crazy, as in the 1990 movie about advertising, “Crazy People.” Interestingly, the cast includes James Wolk, currently portraying a character named Bob Benson on Season 6 of “Mad Men.”

The plot of the first episode of “The Crazy Ones” is centered on efforts by the agency to keep its biggest client, which is an actual company, McDonald’s, rather than, say, Colonial Airlines, the make-believe client company in the 1986 movie “Nothing in Common,” set at a Chicago ad agency. Such verisimilitude is characteristic of “Mad Men,” but already, the knives are out: one online report described the episode as “one long McDonald’s ad” and another described how the characters “all shill for McDonald’s.”

OH, GIVE ME A GNOME …McDonald’s enjoyed a guest appearance during upfronts week when CBS showed a clip of “The Crazy Ones” at its presentation on Wednesday. Another brand, Travelocity, took more direct steps to secure a cameo role by having two executives — Jonathan Rogers, head of brand management, and Bruce Horner, marketing principal — take the Travelocity brand character, a garden gnome, to the events they attended.

“He automatically becomes the biggest star in the building,” Mr. Horner, who held the statue, said, smiling, as he and Mr. Rogers left the NBC presentation. They also brought the gnome “to the bulk” of the Digital Content NewFronts, he added, which preceded the upfronts week.

DON’T FORGET THE ELEPHANT At the ESPN presentation on Tuesday, those attending wondered if executives would discuss the challenges that ESPN faces from a potentially formidable new rival, Fox Sports 1, a national cable channel to be introduced on Aug. 17, along with competitors like CBS Sports Network and NBC Sports Network.

The attendees did not have long to wait. Soon after the presentation began, John Skipper, president of ESPN, said, “I’d like to address the elephant in the room.” He was then accompanied on stage by the elephant mascot of the University of Alabama, Big Al.

“I’ll tell you what, I like our team, and at ESPN, we like competition,” Mr. Skipper said. “I like our hand, and I’d like to extend that hand to you.”

There was another visual pun when Ed Erhardt, president for global customer marketing and sales at ESPN, who typically closes the presentation each year, came out with Mariano Rivera, the relief pitcher for the New York Yankees considered the best closer in baseball.

DO AS I SAY… At the NBC presentation on Monday, Ted Harbert, chairman of the NBC Broadcasting division of NBCUniversal, joked about the proliferation of presentations. “You’ve made it to the final week of the upfronts,” he said, after 70 events since the start of the upfronts season.

There are just too many, he added, “unless you’re a shrimp salesman” or “our friends at Grey Goose.”

Left unmentioned was that the NBC presentation was the first of three this week hosted by NBCUniversal, along with Telemundo Media on Tuesday and USA Network on Thursday. And the 70 events included presentations by NBCUniversal cable channels like Bravo, E!, Oxygen and Syfy along with one for NBCUniversal’s digital properties.

AARON IN UPFRONTSLAND Before the USA Network presentation, the channel hosted a media luncheon with cast members of a new drama, “Graceland,” almost all experiencing the bazaar-cum-cocktail party of the upfronts for the first time.

“It’s cool to see how they roll everything out for the new stuff,” said Aaron Tveit, who has appeared in movies (“Les Misérables”) and as a guest on TV shows (“Gossip Girl”) but was never a series lead until “Graceland.” USA executives “explained that it’s about promoting the series, meeting the advertisers, thanking our supporters,” he said.

For “Graceland,” which will make its debut on June 6, USA offered, for the first time, a two-week preview of a series’s pilot episode on video-on-demand on local cable systems. Chris McCumber, co-president of USA, who attended the luncheon, said the episode was watched from April 29 through Sunday “370,000 times and change, and we’re still counting.”

GETTING TOUGH, EN ESPAñOL Executives at Univision Communications, the leader in television aimed at Hispanics, aggressively went after their English-language competitors during their presentation on Tuesday. They repeatedly reminded the audience that although viewership is declining for most English-language broadcast networks and cable channels, rating are increasing for Univision’s.

In a video, Randy Falco, chief executive of Univision Communications, spoofed the current series of ATT commercials featuring cute children to make a point about how marketers should not buy commercial time from television companies that charge higher rates as their ratings decline.

“Univision is the only network where you pay for more, not for less,” he said.

There was even an animated clip during the presentation that showed a broom sweeping away the NBC logo, symbolizing how the Univision broadcast network finished the February sweeps month in fourth place among viewers ages 18 to 49, ahead of NBC, which fell to No. 5.

GETTING TOUGH, EN ESPAÑOL 2 NBC’s loss to Univision in the February sweeps was the subject of a pointed joke from Jimmy Kimmel, who performed during the ABC presentation on Tuesday. He suggested that NBC’s strategy for the coming season would be to oppose immigration reform.

Bill Carter and Brian Stelter contributed reporting.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/17/business/media/clips-quips-and-snips-a-wrap-up-of-upfronts.html?partner=rss&emc=rss