Ecco il testo del nuovo spot TV della Fiat:

La vita è un insieme di luoghi e di persone che scrivono il tempo.
Il nostro tempo.
Noi cresciamo e maturiamo collezionando queste esperienze.
Sono queste che poi vanno a definirci.
Alcune sono più importanti di altre, perché formano il nostro carattere.
Ci insegnano la differenza tra ciò che è giusto e ciò che è sbagliato.
La differenza tra il bene e il male.
Cosa essere e cosa non essere.
Ci insegnano chi vogliamo diventare.
In tutto questo, alcune persone e alcune cose si legano a noi in un modo spontaneo e inestricabile.
Ci sostengono nell’esprimerci e nel realizzarci.
Ci legittimano nell’essere autentici e veri.
E se significano veramente qualcosa, ispirano il modo in cui il mondo cambia e si evolve.
E allora, appartengono a tutti noi e a nessuno.
La nuova Fiat appartiene a tutti noi.

di seguito una divertente parodia

Lo trovo geniale, semplice, ironico e prezioso. Un tipo di adv che mi piace vedere e rivedere.

ernestospinelli.com

The first rule of Startup Club is take the money when you can. Spot Runner CEO Nick Grouf understands that, which is why he just raised $51 million in a C round from a group of strategic investors that include the Daily Mail and General Trust (DMGT), Grupo Televisa, Legg Mason Capital Management, and Groupe Arnault/LVMH. And that’s on top of the $60 million in venture capital he raised in 2006 from a laundry list of A-list investors (Battery, Index, Allen & Co., Capital Research and Management, CBS, and Lachlan Murdoch), some of whom ponied up again this time. Surely, he didn’t burn through his cash already? Grouf says:

No, we were not running out of cash. This was an opportunity for us to build out a bit of a war chest that we will look to use in investments to expand our platform beyond just television and online but into other media, as well as expansion overseas, and acquisitions.

Basically, the money was there, so he took it. Grouf wouldn’t specify Spot Runner’s valuation, but when I asked him if it was higher or lower than the $250 million guesstimate that Silicon Alley Insider recently put out, he laughed and confirmed that it was higher. I’d hope so, with $110 million invested, it should be closer to a $500 million valuation.

If Grouf wants to expand to markets overseas, this group of investors should be able to help. The Daily Mail and General trust is one of the largest media companies in Britain, with papers, Websites, and radio stations. Grupo Televisa is one of the largest media companies in Spanish-speaking countries, with TV channels, cable and satellite services, magazines, and radio stations. And Arnault/LVMH owns one of the biggest collections of luxury brands in the world (Moët & Chandon, Hennessy, Louis Vuitton, Givenchy, Donna Karan, Sephora and TAG Heuer).

Spot Runner automates and the buying of regular TV ads for bothe local and national businesses. Both the creation and placement of the ads is all managed online. Grouf wants to expand beyond TV advertising. Last March, he bought Weblistic, which helps small, local businesses run online ad campaigns. Grouf is already dabbling in radio ads, but wants to ratchet that up, and move into print ads as well.

He’d better move fast because Google has some of the exact same plans—although Google admittedly doesn’t yet have much to show for its TV, print, and radio efforts. Grouf wants to scale up before Google gets serious.

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Over the past couple days, conversations I’ve had with two different video-startup CEOs—Suranga Chandratillake of blinkx and Nick Grouf of Spot Runner—has got me thinking about what needs to be done to make TV advertising as relevant as video advertising. We have a long way to go, but it boils down to two things: 1) replacing 30-second commercials on TV with relevant ad overlays that pop up at exactly the right moment during a show, and 2) automating the buying, creation and placement of TV ads to make it more like buying search ads.

Yesterday, blinkx CEO Suranga Chandratillake dropped by my office and we got to talking about video ads. Blinkx is a video search engine, but it is also building a video ad network called AdHoc that attempts to place contextually-relevant, clickable text ads in a bar above the Web video being watched. For example, in the screen shot of the soccer video above, you will see a text ad for shoes. YouTube is doing something similar with its new AdSense for Video ads. The ads themselves don’t have to be text. They can be banners or logos that pop up, or even new videos-within-a-video under the control of the viewer. The point is that they exist within the main video itself, not after or before it. And they appear briefly at relevant points during a show.

Determining whether an ad is relevant for a video is done with some of the same techniques used on Web pages. Both YouTube and blinkx look at the tags and text surrounding a video, but blinkx actually goes beyond what YouTube does. It uses powerful speech-to-text translation technology to create a transcript on the fly and then matches relevant ads to the words. The ads appear as those words are being spoken. Suranga showed me the transcript-creating capabilities of blinkx, which are not visible to users on his regular site, and it was impressive. He clicked on a word in the transcript and that point in the video started to play. Once you can do that, inserting relevant ads is trivial. He says blinkx can also match ads to related concepts extracted from the transcripts.

What would it take to run ads like this on regular TV? Even if the ads are not clickable, simple banners or graphical buttons that appear in sync with what you are watching would grab your attention. Imagine a Nike logo popping up when you are watching basketball, or cruise ship when someone in a movie mentions the Bahamas. It could be annoying, but not if used judiciously. And it would certainly solve the problem of people fast-forwarding through ads with DVRs.

The big issue would be separating the ads from the underlying video so that new ads could be placed when the show goes to cable or is shown in reruns. Right now, all of those graphics you see on TV are pretty much baked into the video. Suranga said it would basically require new TVs with powerful chips and Internet connections. The computer chips alone would add about 50 percent to the price of most TVs, so it will still be a while before that happens. The other option, of course, is set-top boxes. But the cable companies don’t have any incentive to allow ads they don’t control to be seen on their set-top boxes (which is why they are trying to figure this out themselves).

On the other side of the equation is placing the ads. What is needed is something like Spot Runner’s system, which lets businesses create ads and plan media buys across cable and network TV. These ads are targetable by demographics down to the neighborhood level. Google also has its own experiments with regular TV ads through a trial on the Dish Network, where it has software on Dish set-top boxes. But Google could be doing a lot more. Says Grouf

Google is not selling targeted ads now on TV. It is selling national ads through the smallest company in the satellite space. We expect them to become more aggressive, but have not seen it yet.

These two conversations keep ringing through my head. I can see a day not too far where ads on TV start to look like the text and graphical overlays we are beginning to see with YouTube, AdHoc, VideoEgg and others. But you also need an automated placement and creation system like Spot Runner’s, which today only deals with regular 30-second TV spots. Combine the two together, and there’s the future of TV.

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Spot Runner, an online service that helps local businesses develop and run professional-looking advertisements for TV and radio, has acquired Weblistic, a company that helps these same businesses run online advertising campaigns.

The all-stock deal intends to produce profitable synergies between traditional and new media. As part of the announcement, Spot Runner is citing a Jupiter Research study claiming that TV advertising is the “number one impetus for people to search for a particular company or product online.” So the idea is that the acquisition of Weblistic will allow Spot Runner to set up more complete advertising campaigns for local businesses, ones that don’t overlook the Jupiter findings but rather ensure that TV and radio advertisement audiences find the follow-up information they seek online.

The team behind Weblistic has been working in the local online advertising space since the late 1990s and was actually responsible for YellowPages.com. Spot Runner co-founder David Waxman is confident that the company’s acquisition of Weblistic will give it a unique opportunity to serve local businesses. As he puts it:

We are going to be the first one to be able to offer an integrated marketing campaign to these local guys. When you marry television with online, television can substantially increase lift online.

Given Google’s predominance in the online advertising space, and its interest in television advertising, this acquisition should make Spot Runner an even more attractive acquisition target for them.

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Advertising conglomerate WPP is looking to increase its Web advertising revenues through more acquisitions. Last year it purchased 24/7 Real Media for $649 million, and is currently making a run at Nurun, a Montreal-based interactive ad firm. But it may try to boost its Advertising 2.0 cred even further with more small acquisitions.

The NY Post, not always the most reliable source but pretty good when it comes to Madison Avenue, reports that possible acquisition targets include Spot Runner (cheap TV ads for local businesses), VideoEgg (video ads and a Facebook play), or JumpTap (mobile ads). WPP is already a minority investor in both Spot Runner and VideoEgg. Quick, sell those ad startups before the recession hits.

Spot Runner

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VideoEgg

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Incisivi, immediati, innovativi: sono gli spot da un secondo, una delle scommesse dell’adve del futuro.

Lanciati da Clear Channel negli Usa qualche mese fa, i mini spot sono stati progettati per essere trasmessi solo su radio. “Un modo- ha chiarito Jim Cook, senior vice president di Clear Channel Radio e ideatore dell’iniziativa- per sperimentare le potenzialità di questo media in perenne evoluzione.

Gli investitori richiedono forme sempre nuove per avvincere i consumatori. Allo stesso tempo premono sul fronte spese: quale migliore soluzione per unire l’effetto sorpresa a un immediato riscontro in termini di risparmio?”Composti da sole quattro note, i mini spot (denominati blinks, lampi, proprio per la loro immediatezza) sono trasmessi tra una canzone e l’altra e hanno un solo obiettivo: rafforzare la brand awarness di un marchio già conosciuto. Perché - come puntualizza Daniel Howard, professore di marketing alla Cox School of Business di Dallas- uno spot tanto breve può avere solo uno scopo: far ricordare una marca ai consumatori, rafforzandone la notorietà e scatenando incosciamente il desiderio all’acquisto.”

Prima azienda a sperimentare questa nuova forma di advertising, Mc Donald’s, che ha testato i mini spot radiofonici, usando frame da un secondo del noto jungle “I’m lovin’it” .

Inserito tra un brano e l’altro e ripetuto più volte durante la giornata, il blink ha pienamente risposto alle attese, scatenando la curiosità degli ascoltatori e la loro familiarità con il brano- manifesto della catena di fast food più grande e discussa al mondo.

Analogo esperimento quello di BMW, che ha realizzato spot da un secondo per la pubblicità di MINI Cooper: prima di ogni notizia del radiogiornale una voce ha reclamizzato l’auto, pronunciandone soltanto il nome.

I rischi di questa nuova forma di pubblicità sono però dietro l’angolo, come sottolineano alcuni esperti che pongono l’accento su come “un secondo di tempo non sempre può essere sufficiente per scatenare il ricordo di un marchio, a meno questo non sia stato già ampiamente pubblicizzato su altri media e con ben altri investimenti; l’eccessiva brevità rischia infatti di danneggiare un brand, anziché accrescerne il valore, se il messaggio non è chiaro e già impresso nella mente della gente”.