Outdoor Ad Company Already Had Planes, Now Adds Blimps

September 7, 2012, 2:09 pm

By STUART ELLIOTT

A leading outdoor advertising company is expanding its air force by adding ad blimps to its fleet of planes that carry ad banners.

The company, Van Wagner Communications in New York, is acquiring the Lightship Group in Orlando, Fla., which operates the ad blimps, and the American Blimp Corporation in Hillsboro, Ore., which designs and builds the airships for the Lightship Group.

The Lightship Group's blimps float above the United States, Britain, China and other countries, displaying logos and other pitches for marketers like DirecTV, MetLife, Hangar 1 vodka and HP Hood, the dairy products company.

Van Wagner is privately held and is not discussing the terms of the deal, but the purchase pri ce is being estimated at many millions of dollars. Van Wagner is purchasing the businesses from a group of private investors including James Thiele, the founder of American Blimp.

The acquisition speaks to the growing interest among marketers in outdoor advertising. However, the definition of “outdoor” has lately expanded from the traditional billboard to include video screens in elevators, digital displays in shopping malls and, yes, ads in the skies; thus, some favor the more inclusive term “out of home” advertising.

John Haegele, who is being named chief executive of the Aerial Media Group at Van Wagner, said the company started conversations about two years ago with the principals behind the ad blimps as Van Wagner looked to expand in out-of-home advertising.

“What's more iconic in the air than a blimp?” asked Mr. Haegele, who had been the chief executive of the Sports and Entertainment Group at Van Wagner.

< p>Although blimps are a venerable technology, they are also a new technology play in that the Lightship Group's blimps can be equipped with full-color LED displays like the one, 30 feet by 70 feet, on one side of the DirecTV blimp.

“We want to develop that further,” Mr. Haegele said, “and add social media and interactivity.”

At the peak of summer, there were eight Lightship Group ad blimps flying around the United States. There was a mini-parade, featuring four of them, over the skies of New York City on Thursday, led by a Van Wagner fixed-wing ad banner plane.

The Lightship Group has about 20 ad blimps, Mr. Haegele said, counting those in various stages of preparation, repair and flight-worthy status.

Stuart Elliott has been the advertising columnist at The New York Times since 1991. Follow @stuartenyt on Twitter and sign up for In Advertising, his weekly e-mail newsletter by clicking here.

Deciding What to Leave to Heirs

September 7, 2012, 1:45 pm

By BUCKS EDITORS

Paul Sullivan writes this week in his Wealth Matters column about the $5.12 million gift tax exemption that is due to expire at the end of the year.

For the wealthy, that puts a deadline on making a decision about what and how much to give to heirs. But the questions the wealthy are wrestling with also apply to the rest of us, whose property is worth far less - is it better to give heirs a gift of cash or property? And while some people may believe that leaving a home to their children is a way of keeping the family together, the experts Paul spoke to said such gifts can often lead to unexpected complications.

Have you written your will yet? How have you dealt with gifts to your heirs? Have you fig ured out a way to divide your property so that all your heirs feel they were fairly treated?

On Whether to Use Allowance-Tracking Web Sites

September 7, 2012, 1:46 pm

By RON LIEBER

In this weekend's Your Money column, I write about Tykoon, the newest of a group of Web sites and apps that help parents dole out allowances, track chores and encourage saving.

It's hard to argue with the goal of teaching good money management. The question is whether technology is the best way to do it. Right now, we're using the three plastic jars approach in my house. But I can see a possible point in the future where the allowance amounts will get higher and it will simply be easier to keep track of it online. But that means my daughter would be spending even more time in front of a screen, which isn't a great result either. And it's no longer quite as visceral.

Who among you is using sites like T ykoon, ThreeJars and My Job Chart to help your children manage tasks and run their money? And have any of you steadfastly steered clear of digital allowance tracking even as your children have aged?

ESPN Radio to Broadcast Jets Games in Spanish in New York

September 7, 2012, 10:46 am

By TANZINA VEGA

The New York Jets had a rough preseason this year, but they may soon have a chance to make a fresh start, this time in Spanish.

On Friday, ESPN Deportes, the Spanish-language division of ESPN, will announce it has reached a three-year agreement with the New York Jets to broadcast their games in Spanish.

The agreement is part of a lineup of content that will fill the new 24-hour Spanish-language sports news station, ESPN Deportes Nueva York 1050 AM. The station will make its debut on Friday at 2 p.m., replacing ESPN's English-language sports station, which moved to 98.7 FM in April.

The station shuffle came after Disney, the ESPN parent company, took over 98.7 FM from Emmis Communications. The FM station used to be known as KISS FM and featured classic soul and R & B music. ESPN has 45 affiliate stations in the United States.

Lino Garcia, the general manager for ESPN Deportes, said the station's target audience was Spanish speaking men ages 18-49. Bilingual listeners are also important, Mr. Garcia said, describing them as “that large bilingual group that can take their news and information and also the play by play in Spanish and English.”

While many Latinos are fans of baseball and soccer (the station will air both), the Jets deal signals a desire on the part of ESPN Deportes to get more Hispanics interested in football, said Oscar Ramos, the general manager for ESPN Deportes Radio.

“This is not a simple translation of ESPN radio in English,” Mr. Ramos said. “Our goal is to serve the Spanish sports fan.”

The station expects to run 300 hours of programming annually, including live broadcasts o f Dominican baseball, South American and Caribbean World Cup qualifying games and games from Major League Baseball and Major League Soccer.

On Monday, the network will debut two new shows, including a 2 p.m. broadcast called “Zona ESPN Nueva York,” a sports talk show hosted by Carolina Guillen, Sebastian Christensen and Enrique Rojas. The second show, called “Firma ESPN,” will run from 7 to 10 a.m. and will be hosted by Renato Bermudez and Ernesto Jerez.

ESPN Deportes will also announce new content online at ESPNDeportes.com that will feature more than 200 sporting events that will be shown exclusively online.

 

Friday Reading: How to Add Missing Titles to iTunes Tracks

September 7, 2012, 9:49 am

By ANN CARRNS

A variety of consumer-focused articles appears daily in The New York Times and on our blogs. Each weekday morning, we gather them together here so you can quickly scan the news that could hit you in your wallet.

The Breakfast Meeting: New Amazon Devices, and Apple\'s Plans for Digital Radio

September 7, 2012, 9:22 am

By NOAM COHEN

The intimate connection between digital media and the devices that play them was in full effect on Thursday, as the online store Amazon.com announced a range of new Kindles for reading, listening and watching. Also on Thursday, it was learned that Apple was working on adding an Internet radio service to its devices, along the lines of Pandora.

• At a news conference to introduce the new Amazon devices, including a much more powerful Kindle Fire, Jeff Bezos, the company's chief executive, took on Apple and its iPad directly: “We are not building the best tablet at a certain price,” he said. “We're building the best tablet at any price.” Amazon, Nick Bilton writes, now has models ranging from a bas ic black-and-white-screen e-reader to a color tablet. The largest version of the new tablet - the Kindle Fire HD - challenges the iPad most directly, with an 8.9-inch display, a front-facing camera, 16 gigabytes of storage and the ability to have cellular data connectivity. It also clocks in at $200 less than the iPad.

• Meanwhile, Apple, which has transformed the music industry through the sale of digital songs and albums at its iTunes store, is said to be in the early stages of creating a digital radio service, Ben Sisario and Nick Wingfield write. The scope of the plans, which were first reported by The Wall Street Journal, are still not clear, but the idea would be to compete with Pandora Media by sending streams of music customized to users' tastes â€" perhaps based on the music already on Apple devices. Like Pandora, the service is expected to incorporate advertising.

President Obama‘s acceptance speech Thursday night ended the political co nvention season, as the campaign shifted to battleground states. Mr. Obama's opponent, Mitt Romney, announced a new series of 15 advertisements, Jeremy W. Peters writes, tailored to the issues in eight states: Colorado (military spending), Florida (real estate prices), Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio and Virginia.

• This Sunday, Mitt Romney will appear on “Meet the Press,” a departure from his preferred interviewers, Jodi Kantor writes, including Fox News hosts or Bob Schieffer of CBS News. She adds: “When challenged, he can become the Mitt Romney that aides don't want anyone to see - visibly irritated, annoyed at being questioned.”
• The colleagues of Dan Balz, political writer at The Washington Post, took to Twitter to congratulate him on his 1,500th front-page byline for the newspaper.

The operator of an online eyeglasses store - with the perverse idea that terrorizing his customers would generate Internet publicity abo ut his business and improve his Google search ranking - was sentenced to four years in federal prison after pleading guilty to charges of fraud and sending threatening communications, writes David Segal, who profiled the man, Vitaly Borker, in 2010. In response to the article, Google announced on its blog that it had adjusted its search algorithm so that “being bad is, and hopefully will always be, bad for business in Google's search results.” Mr. Borker read from a statement to address the judge, saying at one point: “I had a big mouth and I couldn't control it.”

Visa\'s Ads to Highlight an \'Epic\' N.F.L. Season

September 7, 2012, 7:00 am

By STUART ELLIOTT

Visa has a new game plan for its sponsorship of the 2012-13 season of the National Football League.

The company, which has been a league sponsor since 1995, played up the Super Bowl in the campaigns it introduced each of the last two Septembers. Last year's campaign followed a fan who won a trip to the big game and the 2010-11 campaign was centered on a group of friends who had never missed a Super Bowl in person.

The new campaign, which is to begin on Sunday, includes the Super Bowl, but it is not the main focus. Rather, the spotlight in the 2012-13 campaign is on offers for fans that range from discounts on video games to a chance to interview an N.F.L. player.

Although “the Super Bowl i s a component,” said Alex Craddock, head of North American marketing for Visa in San Francisco, the campaign runs “from kickoff right through the Super Bowl and into the off-season, too.”

The campaign carries the theme “Make it epic,” a phrase that people with Twitter accounts are encouraged to use as a hashtag with comments they post. As that would indicate, the campaign will have a significant presence in social media in addition to the usual ad tactics Visa uses, like television commercials.

Is there a risk in using a word like “epic” to characterize the offers? The offers will even be found on a “Make it epic” section of the Visa Web site.

“It's a big word,” Mr. Craddock acknowledged. “It comes with some big promises.”

But the campaign will deliver on those promises, he said, through experiences like the chance to ask a player questions.

That experience is dramatized in the first TV com mercial, in which Ray Lewis of the Baltimore Ravens is seen barking at a reporter at a news conference. Then a young girl asks a series of questions like “What's your favorite color?” (Purple, he gladly replies.)

After the child is finished, Mr. Lewis tells the reporters, “Why can't you guys ask good questions like this?” An announcer then comes on, declaring, “For a chance to interview an N.F.L. player, join Visa N.F.L. Fan Offers and make your season epic.”

The spot ends with Mr. Lewis on the field, accompanied by the girl.

The campaign is being produced by the Visa creative agency of record, TBWA/Chiat/Day Los Angeles, which is the Playa del Rey, Calif., office of TBWA/Chiat/Day, part of the TBWA Worldwide unit of the Omnicom Group.

Visa is joining a lengthy list of N.F.L. sponsors that are introducing campaigns as the 2012-13 season gets under way. Others include Bud Light beer, Campbell's Chunky soup, GMC vehicles, New Era caps and Ti de detergent.

Despite Visa's decision to make the Super Bowl a part of its campaign rather than a focus, fear not for the N.F.L. and its ability to attract advertisers to buy commercial time during the next Super Bowl, which will be Super Bowl XLVII.

CBS has already sold about 80 percent of the commercial time during the game, to companies like Anheuser-Busch InBev and PepsiCo. This week, two additional advertisers stepped forward and identified themselves, the Audi division of Volkswagen and Cars.com.

Stuart Elliott has been the advertising columnist at The New York Times since 1991. Follow @stuartenyt on Twitter and sign up for In Advertising, his weekly e-mail newsletter by clicking here.