All entries tagged: HBO
Why the New York Times is crowing about Apple’s marketing embrace
I don’t own an iPhone, but I play with one on TV. Apple’s widely praised ads, with their relentless focus on the phone itself, have demonstrated the magic of its mobile device even to those of us who cling to our BlackBerries. Lately, I’ve been made aware that the iPhone can shoot and edit video and level a bookshelf.
But most of all, I know how good the New York Times website looks on the iPhone. Since the first TV spots in 2007, Apple has chosen to demonstrate its mobile browser almost exclusively with NYTimes.com. And that makes the Times very happy indeed.
“The Times recently secured prime product placement in conjunction with the release of Apple’s iPhone 3G S,” crowed Scott Heekin-Canedy, who runs the business side at the Times, in a memo to staffers last week. He listed all of the newspaper’s cameos in Apple’s latest marketing campaign, including: the homepage in a spot demonstrating copy-and-paste, Inauguration Day coverage in the guided tour, and the Times iPhone app in Apple’s “staff picks.” He also noted, “We’re used to illustrate the iPhone as a ‘breakthrough Internet device’ and ‘it works like no other phone: multi-touch.’”
Not long ago, Apple sought to improve its own brand by linking the PowerBook with Mission: Impossible and, more recently, landing its products on The Office, 24, and seemingly all of HBO’s programming short of Deadwood. Legacy newspapers, meanwhile, have generally relied on history, name recognition, and those boxes on every downtown street corner as their most powerful marketing tools.
But the iPhone campaign demonstrates how in a digital age, device makers from Apple to Amazon enjoy immense power to which news organizations may be unavoidably beholden. In his memo, Heekin-Canedy explained, “Not only does this raise awareness of our iPhone app, but it also extends our innovation message through close alignment with one of today’s top brands.”
Gawker VP says sponsored posts will bring in majority of revenue one day
Expect Gawker Media’s latest advertising innovation to draw criticism, if not blood, when it sees daylight today. The blogging empire is temporarily welcoming a new site into its fold that’s written and paid for by HBO to promote the network’s noir vampire drama, True Blood. And the word “advertisement” won’t appear anywhere in the project’s vicinity.
Entries from the blog, BloodCopy, will appear as cross-posts in the mix of Gawker Media’s eight verticals, which include Gizmodo, Kotaku, and the flagship. They’ll be set off by a border and labeled as BloodCopy posts but otherwise indistinguishable from editorial content — except that the blog is written by an undead, bloodsucking ghoul.
“With vampires, we thought we could be a little looser with the disclosure and create some disbelief,” Chris Batty, Gawker’s vice president of sales and marketing, told me yesterday, dismissing critics of the advertorial as “humorless.” He also made a bold prediction that surprised me so much I made sure to confirm I’d heard correctly: “If we’re around in three or four years,” Batty said, “the majority of our advertising revenue will be in sponsored posts like this.”
Now, I’ll let others hash out the very-legitimate ethical questions this all raises. Gawker managing editor Gabriel Snyder, echoing a 2007 incident, has already denounced the ad sale: “What’s advertising should be called advertising and what’s edit should be called edit. It hurts both to blur the distinction.” But that’s an easy angle compared to what’s also going on here, which is the fruition of a long-held belief that advertising should act more like content.
David Simon: Newspapers could emulate HBO and charge for content
David Simon is the curmudgeon and arch skeptic you’d hope to find in newsrooms everywhere. He took a buyout from The Baltimore Sun in 1995, having grown fed up with his newspaper’s management long before that was the industry standard.
Simon went on to a career in book writing and television, including NBC’s Homicide: Life on the Street and HBO’s The Wire, my (and many others’) two favorite shows of all time. On Wednesday, I had the honor of meeting Simon when he spoke at the Nieman Foundation, and he graciously allowed me to whip out a Flip camera over lunch at The Kebab Factory. The footage is very rough, but for a guy whose work has championed truth over image, it seems kind of appropriate.
We talked about how to charge for news, whether news organizations could adopt HBO’s business model, why objectivity doesn’t preclude having a take, and whether The Wire is journalism. Consider this clip an appetizer — of Indian food — before Simon’s appearance tonight on Bill Moyers Journal. (As they say, check your local listings.) In a snippet from the show, he expands on the notion of truth in his work and explains why Dickensian journalism is an insult.
As for our video, if it aired on HBO, we’d have to precede it with a “strong language” warning. However, there is no “graphic nudity.” A full transcript is after the jump. Keep reading »
