Another E-Commerce Site Tests Advertising on TV

September 23, 2012, 9:00 pm

By STUART ELLIOTT

Decades ago, commercials for Fab detergent were a ubiquitous presence on television.

Beginning on Monday, another brand named Fab will also be turning to TV to advertise.

The newcomer Fab is the social shopping Web site that has a focus on what it calls “everyday design.” Fab is working with the Arnold Worldwide agency to test whether a presence on television will further stimulate interest in, visits to and sales through fab.com.

If the test is deemed successful by Fab executives, they would add TV to a media schedule that until now has been dominated by social-media services like Facebook. Fab has used Facebook extensively, running Facebook ads, so-called sponsored stories and, most r ecently, buying ads on the Facebook log-out page.

The TV test, with a budget of $1 million, will run for three weeks on broadcast and cable outlets in six markets: Austin, Tex.; Baltimore; Denver; Nashville; San Diego; and West Palm Beach, Fla. A 30-second commercial created by Arnold, part of Havas, will be used for the test.

Fab becomes the second e-commerce firm in a week to start testing whether a traditional medium like television will help sell merchandise online. The first was Warby Parker, which sells discount prescription eyeglasses; Warby Parker's test of TV began Thursday.

A major reason for new kinds of retailers experimenting with a tried-and-true medium like television is the so-called second-screen effect, which refers to how millions of people now watch TV with devices like cellphones and tablet computers on hand.

“Mobile is huge for us,” said Jason Goldberg, chief executive at Fab, who founded the com pany with Bradford Shellhammer, whose title is chief design officer. Thirty percent of Fab sales come from mobile devices, Mr. Goldberg said.

Fab has 7.5 million members, Mr. Goldberg said, an increase of 50 percent from five million on July 1. “We're definitely starting to break into the mass market,” he said, which offers another reason to try TV as an ad medium.

Another reason for Fab's interest in TV is that its audience is 70 percent women, who are heavy viewers of television.

If the test works, Mr. Goldberg said, “we'll take the ad national and expand” the budget to “double-digit millions.”

The commercial is about a style-challenged young man who, when the spot begins, is asleep in bed. (Mr. Shellhammer joked that the original idea for the television test was “an infomercial with me as the star.”)

As the man wakes, he looks out the apartment window and sees a young woman arriving in a taxi cab.

Startled, he gets ready for her arrival. When he taps his unstylish alarm clock, it suddenly turns into a better one. He keeps tapping it until it becomes one he likes.

Inspired, the man spends the rest of the commercial running around his dowdy apartment, tapping the furniture, wall hangings, bric-a-brac and, finally, his clothes, until they are transformed into stylish trappings.

The spot ends with the woman entering the apartment and, pleased by what she sees, joining the man on the sofa, which a moment before had undergone its own style makeover. She taps the man and gives him a knit cap with a built-in face warmer known as a Beardo, one of the most popular items on fab.com.

Other items in the commercial in addition to the Beardo are “products we've sold on Fab,” Mr. Shellhammer said. “We want people to say, ‘What is that?' and go to the site.”

Scott Ballantyne, chief marketing officer at Fab, said the goal of the commercial was to “bring the Fab color, ener gy, experience, to life.” He said he recommended Arnold Worldwide to work on the spot based on his previous experience working with the agency.

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.

\'Frankenweenie\' Digital Book Updates the Movie Tie-In

September 23, 2012, 8:44 pm

By GREGORY SCHMIDT

Coffee-table books, while entertaining to thumb through, tend to gather dust when they languish on said table. So to showcase the animated movie “Frankenweenie,” Disney Publishing Worldwide took an interactive approach, bypassing the traditional oversize tome and heading straight for the iPad.

On Monday, Disney Publishing, a unit of the Walt Disney Company, will release “Frankenweenie: An Electrifying Book,” a making-of look at Tim Burton's feature-length remake of the short film he made in 1984. The digital book, which is free on Apple's iBookstore, contains original art and production photos, taking readers from sketch to screen. It also features music, videos and interviews with some of the movie's creators, including Mr. Burton.

“ ‘Frankenweenie' presented a great opportunity to give our readers an immersive, behind-the-scenes look into the making of the film,” said Andrew Sugerman, an executive vice president at Disney Publishing. To demonstrate the creative process, animated storyboards, called animatics, were created to accompany concept drawings, he said.

The book also includes a foreword written by the actor Martin Landau, who has appeared in several of Mr. Burton's movies, including “Frankenweenie,” which will be released in theaters on Oct. 5.

“I was happy to do it,” Mr. Landau said of the foreword. “Tim visualized this movie 30 years ago and never lost touch with the way he wanted to do it.”

In the movie, Mr. Landau plays the voice of Mr. Rzykruski, the science teacher of a grade-school Victor Frankenstein. “I love the movie,” he said. “It's moving, it's funny, it's charming, and it's scary, all the thin gs that Tim wants it to be.”

To create the e-book, Disney Publishing decided to go for the first time with the iBooks Author software from Apple.

“Apple's iBooks Author allows us to deliver great content through the use of galleries, video, interactive diagrams and 3-D objects,” Mr. Sugerman said, “to create a very robust interactive experience that will appeal to both young adults and Tim Burton's active fan base.”

He added that the digital publishing team at Disney collaborated closely with Mr. Burton on the project, which took about two months to complete.

Chapter 4 of the book gives a look at a “Frankenweenie” exhibition now being shown around the world. Other chapters offer opportunities to explore related books in print, as well as listen to clips from the movie's soundtrack and score, which can be bought in the book through iTunes. There's even a feature that allows readers to search for theaters where the movie is being shown and buy tickets.

And unlike traditional coffee-table books, this one can become a never-ending story. Disney Publishing is exploring opportunities to update the e-book over time.

“One of the major advantages of digital publishing is that we are able to enhance and update our products as more content becomes available and as technology evolves,” Mr. Sugerman said.

Using Twitter to Promote the Fall TV Season

September 23, 2012, 7:46 pm

By TANZINA VEGA

Lots of people are accustomed to watching television while simultaneously posting updates to Twitter or Facebook or looking up information online, or what is known in media circles as “the second screen experience.” But why watch two screens when you can start with one?

To showcase its new fall season, the CW network will use Twitter as a platform to preview the season premiere of the show “Emily Owens, M.D.” To promote the show, CW will include an insert in the Oct. 5 issue of Entertainment Weekly that will feature what is essentially a small cellphone screen that will wirelessly display a short video showing stars of new CW shows and then a live Twitter feed of the network's account, @CW_Networ k.

Rick Haskins, CW's executive vice president for marketing and digital projects, said the screen would feature the six most recent posts to the network's Twitter handle. An in-house social media team managing the feed will delete only messages that include profanity or other unacceptable language, he said. And if someone posts saying they don't like the show or the network?

“To me that's what starts the dialogue,” Mr. Haskins said. “We will not editorialize that out. We no longer own our brand. The consumer owns the brand and the more people that embrace that and entertain it, the stronger the brand is going to be with their audience.”

Joel Lunenfeld, Twitter's vice president for brand strategy, said more television networks were considering using the platform to introduce content before it runs on television. On Friday, Fox used Twitter to preview the season premiere of “Raising Hope.” Seeing something on Twitter, Mr. Lunenfeld said, actually helps the chances of people flipping on the television to watch.

“I think we saw a lot of that activity during the Olympics this year,” he said. “People are seeing things unfold on Twitter, engaging with it and then tuning in to watch it happening.”

Alan Cohen, the chief executive of OMD, the media planning and buying agency that is a unit of the Omnicom Media Group, part of the Omnicom Group, and the agency that worked on producing the insert, said marketing new television shows was increasingly difficult because of the amount of content available to viewers. Mr. Cohen said the agency was focused on “reinventing print” by combining multimedia elements like the Twitter feed.

“Now people need a little push to know what to watch because there's so much television,” he said. “We believe that print is one of the vehicles where you want to get people to notice.”