Quirky Eyewear Brand Tries TV as an Ad Medium

By STUART ELLIOTT

A nontraditional e-commerce company is testing a traditional advertising medium, television, but with a twist.

The company is Warby Parker, which sells prescription eyeglasses online at cut-rate prices, at warbyparker.com. Until now, Warby Parker's marketing efforts for its $95 eyewear (prescription lenses included) have been focused online and on promotions and events like pop-up shops, kiosks in Standard hotels and film screenings.

Beginning on Thursday, the company is entering the realm of television advertising, which is usually the province of much larger companies. But the budget is small, $250,000, and the time frame is short, four weeks.

To be thriftier with its dollars, the company will run the spot on Dish TV and DirecTV using addressable technology, which enables the spot be aimed more precisely to the Warby Parker demographic target: men and women ages 18 to 34 who like to buy designer-style eyewear at lower prices.

Commercials can be steered on a household-by-household basis; the house at 1313 Mockingbird Lane or 5133 Kensington Avenue sees a certain spot, while the house at 1315 Mockingbird Lane or 5135 Kensington Avenue is shown something different.

The effort is a test by Warby Parker to see if television advertising is worth the money. Such tests are common among marketers, large and small, particularly in uncertain times, but for a brand that cultivates an offbeat image it is a bit surprising.

“Our growth strategy is, how do we get more people to learn about Warby Parker, because once they learn they're interested in the value proposition,” said Neil Blumenthal, the co-chief executive at the company with David Gilboa. (They are also the co-founders.) “Our assumption is that TV has the biggest megaphone,” Mr. Blumenthal said, “especially for an unknown brand.”

If the test is deemed successful, he added, there may be “a larger a d buy toward the end of the year” with an eye toward “a larger buy for 2013.”

The idea to use addressable TV came from the Warby Parker media agency of record, Spark, part of the Starcom MediaVest Group division of the Publicis Groupe.

The campaign is only the second using the technology for a Spark client, said Tracey Scheppach, executive vice president and innovations director at SMGx, which works with Spark and the other Starcom MediaVest Group agencies. The first client, two weeks ago, was Allstate, she said.

The concept was that “a cutting-edge brand” like Warby Parker would benefit from trying to “do something with cutting-edge technology” like addressable TV, Ms. Scheppach said.

The commercial is being created for Warby Parker by Partners & Spade in New York, which handles a variety of brand communication tasks for the company. Visitors to a section of the Warby Parker Web site will also be able to watch the spot there.

The commercial is very much in the whimsical style of the Warby Parker brand, featuring animated versions of offbeat images like eyeballs, trains, apartment buildings and stylish young people. The spot looks like a mélange of the opening credits of the “Monty Python's Flying Circus” TV shows, ads for Hendrick's gin and the video for the Peter Gabriel song “Sledgehammer.”

The Warby Parker commercial begins with two eyeballs, each riding a unicycle, and a British-sounding voice asking, “Looking for a new pair of glasses, are we?” The voice continues: “Seek no further than the Internet. There you'll find us, Warby Parker, designers of superlative eyewear as worn by these stylish citizens.”

The spot ends with the eyeballs, together, behind a pair of Warby Parker glasses. “Now that's a good-looking pair of eyeballs,” the voice says. “Warbyparker.com. Don't delay!”

The look of the commercial, and the brand image, stem from “a correlation be tween eyewear and intelligence and reading,” said Anthony Sperduti, who runs Partners & Spade with Andy Spade. After all, Mr. Sperduti and Mr. Blumenthal noted, the Warby Parker name comes from two characters in the works of Jack Kerouac, Warby Pepper and Zagg Parker.

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.

The 47 Percent May Struggle but the Top 20 Percent Are Feeling Flush

September 19, 2012, 7:47 pm

By STUART ELLIOTT

There has been a lot of talk about the 1 percent, the 47 percent, the 99 percent or whatever slice of the population is lately in the spotlight.

On Wednesday, we had some research on the 59 million Americans who live in households with $100,000 or more in annual income - the Mendelsohn Affluent Survey 2012, subtitled “The State of the Affluent Consumer,” which was released by Ipsos MediaCT.

The results of the survey, which has been conducted for 36 years among affluent Americans, are scrutinized by marketers, media companies and advertising agencies for clues on how best to peddle goods and services to people with money.

The affluents, as they are called in the survey, make up about a f ifth of the total population; the subset of the ultra-affluents, in the survey's parlance, who make $250,000 or more a year, is roughly 2 percent of the total population.

Although affluent Americans “don't feel as affluent as perhaps they did in the mid-2000s,” Stephen Kraus, senior vice president and chief insights officer at Ipsos MediaCT, said during a presentation of the survey, there are still “opportunities” to engage with them.

For one thing, Mr. Kraus said, affluent Americans seem interested in “re-engagement with the marketplace,” meaning they are considering shopping and spending again after some pauses and cutbacks.

For another, some affluent consumers are interested in indulging themselves and splurging on non-necessities, he added.

A third opportunity identified by Mr. Kraus was a willingness among the affluents to open their wallets and purses if “they see value in spending more to get quality.”

Indeed, the luxury s egments of many consumer product categories have held up well considering the recent global economic woes.

In studying affluent consumers by age, the survey found the largest group, 39 percent, are baby boomers, followed by Generation X, at 33 percent; millennials, at 20 percent; and the elderly, at 8 percent.

In addition, Mr. Kraus said, 8 percent is Hispanic; 7 percent Asian-American; 6 percent African-American; and 3 percent lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender.

A closely followed part of the annual Mendelsohn survey is its information about the media consumption habits of affluent Americans. The 2012 version of the study suggests they have an almost bottomless appetite for media.

As ownership of smartphones and tablet computers soars among the affluents, according to the survey, those wealthy consumers are pretty much turning to the traditional media as much as they have in the past. So television, radio, magazines a nd newspapers seemingly have little to fear - at least for now - from cannibalization by new media, the survey indicates.

For instance, even as ownership of tablets in affluent households rose to 47 percent this year from 14 percent last year, Mr. Kraus said, and the number of hours online each week climbed 14 percent, print media remained “very much an important part” of the lives of such consumers.

The reach of traditional print media is being augmented by apps, he added, as 4.7 million affluent Americans downloaded apps this year, about twice as many as last year.

And the “hard-copy readership” of six national daily newspapers actually rose 3.9 percent from the previous survey, Mr. Kraus said. (The newspapers are The Financial Times, Investor's Business Daily, The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post.)

Still, the interest in new media among the people rich enough to buy innumerable gadgets cannot be und erestimated.

For example, the percentages of respondents who said they visited or used social media within the previous week were still growing in the 2012 survey. For Facebook, the percentage rose to 63 percent from 58 percent. For LinkedIn, it rose to 18 percent from 13 percent.

And for Twitter, the increase was 50 percent, to 12 percent from 8 percent.

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.

Mitt Says Dave Hates Him. Not So, Says Dave, Who Invites Him to Appear

September 19, 2012, 6:12 pm

By BILL CARTER

Does David Letterman hate Mitt Romney?

Mr. Romney said so on the surreptitiously recorded tape of his comments at a fund-raiser in May, which have stirred a firestorm of reaction in the news media this week.

The reason for the hatred? According to Mr. Romney, it is because he has been on Jay Leno's “Tonight” show more often, thus making Mr. Letterman jealous.

Not so, Mr. Letterman said on his show that airs Wednesday night, a night after President Obama appeared as Mr. Letterman's only guest for the hour.

“I don't hate Mitt,” Mr. Letterman told his audience. “And I think now, more than ever, he and his lovely wife, Mrs. Mitt, are more than welcome to come on the show.”

On the subject of his long rivalry with Mr. Leno, Mr. Letterman added, “I certainly don't hate Mitt because he's done, because he's been on Leno's show more. I mean, why hate a guy who's suffered through that?”

Mr. Letterman's executive producer, Rob Burnett, said Mr. Romney has a standing invitation to appear as a guest “and he will certainly not be shortchanged on time if he comes on.”

Though Mr. Letterman treated Mr. Romney's comments about him mostly as a joke, there has been some backlash against Mr. Letterman in conservative circles for a perceived bias against Mr. Romney. Many conservatives still harbor ill feelings toward the CBS host over comments he made about Sarah Palin, and especially her daughter, in 2009. Those comments led to an on-air apology from Mr. Letterman, but Mrs. Palin has never relented in her criticism of the comedian.

And this year, certainly Mr. Letterman has made Mr. Romney the target of nu merous jokes, mainly picking on him for what he has alluded to as a disconnect with real people â€" and dogs.

Mr. Letterman, long a dog lover, has pounded the Republican candidate about the episode when Mr. Romney tied the family dog to the roof of his station wagon on a long vacation trip. As he often does with bits he likes, Mr. Letterman has repeated - on dozens of occasions in this case - an animation showing a dog popping down from a window to peer in at Mr. Romney driving.

On the show Wednesday, however, Mr. Letterman seemed to take pains to characterize Mr. Romney in positive terms, citing a night when the candidate read a Top 10 list. Mr. Letterman said of Mr. Romney, “very genial, very likeable, very personable.”

Of course, landing Mr. Romney as a guest would now virtually guarantee a night of big ratings for Mr. Letterman. Mr. Obama's appearance Tuesday night gave Mr. Letterman a 4.0 rating in the nation's 56 largest cities, his best performan ce in two and a half years.

The complete comments from Mr. Letterman about Mr. Romney:

And then [Mitt] got to talking about me and Jay Leno, and then he said that he's been on Jay Leno's show more than he has been on this show, and I think that's probably true. He's been here, what, three, four times … And Mitt was on the show and had done the Top Ten, very genial, very likeable, very personable … So anyway, Mitt's been on the show, and Mitt goes on to say that I hate Mitt, that's what he says. He says that on the tape, because Mitt has done the Jay Leno show more often than he's done my show, and that we're all very jealous and petty and bitter and backbiting and show business â€" unlike politics …

I don't hate Mitt, and I think now more than ever, he and his lovely wife, Mrs. Mitt, are more than welcome to come on the show, and I'm telling you, if you think you're going to get to the White House, you've gotta spend time in this chair … We'll get him in here and we'll see how it goes, that's it. But I don't, I certainly don't hate Mitt because he's done, I mean, been on Leno's show more. I mean, why hate a guy who's suffered through that?”

Mr. Romney's assessment of his television options at the May fund-raiser:

I've been on Letterman a couple of times, I've been on Leno more than a couple of times, and now Letterman hates me because I've been on Leno more than him. They're very jealous of each other, as you know. And I was asked to go on “Saturday Night Live.” I did not do that, in part because you want to show that you're fun and you're a good person, but you also want to be presidential. And “Saturday Night Live” has the potential of looking slapstick and not presidential. But “The View” is fine, although “The View” is high risk because of the five women on it, only one is conservative and four are sharp-tongued and not conservative, Whoopi Goldberg in particular. Although the last time I was on the show, she said to me, “You know what? I think I could vote for you.” And I said, “I must have done something really wrong.”

Bill Carter writes about the television industry. Follow @wjcarter on Twitter.

Delta Cracks Down on Mileage Tracking Sites

September 19, 2012, 2:38 pm

By ANN CARRNS

Delta Air Lines is the latest big carrier to crack down on start-up Web sites that aim to help travelers manage their frequent flier miles from multiple airlines.

Travelers provide their user names and passwords for their airline mileage programs (and other loyalty programs, like those offered by hotels). The Web sites use them to obtain balances and mileage expiration dates, so the travelers can see all this information in one place. The sites can also help users figure out when to pay cash for a ticket, and when it makes sense to use miles.

Back in April, the Your Money columnist Ron Lieber wrote about American Airlines and Southwest's efforts to block several such sites, including MileWise, from g aining access to information from the airlines' Web sites.

Now, MileWise executives say their site has stopped offering access to information to users' accounts at Delta, after the airline last month sent the site a “cease and desist” letter.

Another site, AwardWallet, has also stopped serving Delta fliers after it got a letter from Delta's lawyers. AwardWallet's co-founder and chief technology officer, Alexi Vereschaga, said the site could address Delta's concerns by using different methods to get access to customer information, but it has not been able to talk to the airline - even though some 70,000 Delta frequent fliers, including 10,000 elite Medallion members, used the site. An online petition has been started to ask Delta to reconsider its decision.

Sanjay Kothari, MileWise's chief executive, said the site complied with Delta's demand because it did not have the financial resources for a legal fight, and because the site held out hope of working out an arrangement with Delta. MileWise would like to talk with Delta officials so it can address the airline's concerns, he said, but so far it has not been able to do so.

“We have complied with their request,” he said, “but we're hoping to speak with them and have a business conversation.”

A Delta spokesman, Paul Skrbec, said in an e-mail, “While we understand some customers have become accustomed to using tools like AwardWallet, we do not have a contractual relationship with them.” He added, “The use of information from delta.com was unauthorized and employed automated screen scraping techniques that we don't allow.”

He said that the Fly Delta app “has been consistently rated highly by our customers and we plan to continue offering highly usable information for their travel experience.”

Mr. Kothari said airlines had said they were concerned that “screen scraping” - in which access to customer in formation on the airlines' Web sites is obtained automatically - might impair the performance of the airlines' own Web sites.  That could potentially be true, he said, if the volume of accounts to which access was being gained was large - say, in the millions.  But he said technology was available that the airlines could employ to counteract any slowdown that might occur.

Have you used one of the mileage tracking Web sites? Do you find that they offer information you cannot find on the airlines' sites?

Two Out-of-Print Nora Ephron Books to Be Published as Single Volume

Books September 19, 2012, 1:42 pm

By JULIE BOSMAN

Two out-of-print books by Nora Ephron will be reissued on Oct. 16 in a single-volume paperback and e-book edition, the publisher, Vintage Books, said on Wednesday.

“Crazy Salad: Some Things About Women” and “Scribble, Scribble: Notes on Media” will be combined and produced in their entirety for the first time, according to Vintage, which is a division of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group of Random House.

Both books were originally released in the 1970's. “Crazy Salad” contains one of Ms. Ephron's most memorable essays, “A Few Words About Breasts,” which was originally published in Esquire in 1972. She died at the age of 71 in June.

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Free A.T.M.\'s at the New Barclays Center

September 19, 2012, 11:07 am

By ANN CARRNS

A start-up that provides fee-free A.T.M.'s supported by advertising is expanding in the new Barclays Center in Brooklyn.

Bucks first wrote about the 20-something Clinton Townsend and his company, now called Free ATM Inc., last fall after he installed a machine at Brooklyn's Knitting Factory nightclub. His approach is to put A.T.M.'s in underserved locations and offer cash without charging a fee. The catch is that patrons watch and listen to advertising displayed on the screen while their cash is being dispensed.

Now, Mr. Townsend said he has signed a five-year deal to put seven of his cash-dispensing machines inside the Barclays Center, the soon-to-open 19,000-seat arena that will be home to the Net s basketball team and serve as a venue for big-name music acts. (The rapper Jay-Z is a part-owner of the arena). The opportunity was available, he said, because Barclays doesn't have a big retail banking presence in the United States. So he won't be competing with the bank's own A.T.M.'s.

Mr. Townsend says he sees a big opportunity for his machines in the arena. One of the machines will be accessible to the general public whether they're attending an event or not. The rest will be available to ticket-carrying patrons. “This is a huge platform,” he said.

Mr. Townsend said the machines will feature ads from the cellular provider Metro PCS and the online review site Yelp.com (The machines themselves don't charge any access fees, but patrons' own bank may charge them a fee for using an out-of-network A.T.M.)

The question when Mr. Townsend introduced his machines was whether most customers would tolerate ads in exchange for an ab sence of fees. He said that up to 20 percent of the A.T.M. users at the Knitting Factory location are repeat users, suggesting that they don't mind the ads. “I think we've proven that,” he said. “This is really a consumer win.”

Let us know what you think about Free ATM's machines.

The Breakfast Meeting: More 47 Percent Fallout and a Diller-Rudin E-Book Venture

September 19, 2012, 9:51 am

By THE EDITORS

The now-infamous 47 percent video â€" secretly taped at a Mitt Romney donor event in May â€" is still reverberating in media circles as well as political ones.

Mother Jones, which posted the full version of the video Tuesday, enjoyed one of its best days online, according to Clara Jeffery, one of the magazine's co-editors. James Carter IV, the unemployed researcher who helped bring the video to light, received a congratulatory note from his grandfather, the former president Jimmy Carter. (Earlier, Ben Smith at BuzzFeed chronicled the video's long strange trip to Mother Jones.)

President Obama had a public opportunity to respond to the video during his appearance on “Late Show” with David Letterm an, saying that Mr. Romney “was writing off a big chunk of the country.” As Bill Carter reports, the host also managed a reference to Clint Eastwood's performance at the Republican National Convention and “got an immediate laugh by noting the empty spot next to the president and asking: ‘Is there anything you want to say to the empty chair?'”

Barry Diller, the chief of IAC/InterActiveCorp, and Scott Rudin, the Broadway and Hollywood impresario, are getting into the e-book business. The pair have teamed up with Frances Coady, a publishing industry veteran, to invest in The Atavist, the Brooklyn-based electronic book publisher. The new venture, called Brightline, will look to eventually publish physical books as well.

Apple, which has aggressively gone after its rivals in commercials like “1984” and its series of “Mac vs. PC” ads, is now on the receiving end. Samsung, which recently lost a billion dollar patent case to Apple, has been taking direc t aim at the new iPhone in a series of print ads, including one with the headline “It doesn't take a genius.” On the blog Gizmodo, Apple fans immediately began retaliating with their own parodies based on the Samsung ads, one with the headline “Don't settle for cheap plastic.”

The magazine Closer, which recently published topless photos of Kate Middleton, has been ordered by a French court to stop all distribution of the pictures and to hand over the originals to the royal family.

Also in France, the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo has published cartoons mocking the prophet Muhammad, setting off another wave of protests in the Middle East. In New York ads calling Islamic jihad “savage,” will soon appear in subways after a federal court ruled that the transit authority could not refuse the ads, which were purchased by the American Freedom Defense Initiative, a pro-Israeli group.

NBC's hit show “The Voice” will add Usher and Shakira as stand- in judges while two of the show's biggest stars, Christina Aguilera and Cee Lo Green, take one season off to record and tour.

And Steve Sabol, for years the creative force behind NFL Films, the revered and much satirized chronicler of the football league, has died at the age of 69.

Wednesday Reading: How to Avoid a Smartphone\'s Bite While Abroad

September 19, 2012, 8:03 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.