Absolut Vodka Takes a Rare Step and Adds an Agency to Its Lineup

Executives who sell Absolut vodka are doing something they rarely do: expanding the roster of advertising, marketing and communications agencies they work with.

The Absolut Company, a division of Pernod Ricard, is adding Sid Lee, an agency based in Montreal that also has offices in cities like Amsterdam, New York and Toronto. The agency, which works for marketers like Adidas, Cirque du Soleil and Ubisoft, is being named to create the next worldwide campaign for Absolut, which is scheduled to begin appearing in summer 2013.

There was no review or pitch before Sid Lee was added, said Mathias Westphal, global brand director for Absolut, which is based in Stockholm. Absolut executives simply liked the work the agency had produced for clients like Cirque du Soleil.

The campaign is to include traditional advertising; digital advertising; so-called experiential marketing, which involves events and other ways to bring products to life in tangible forms; social me dia; and branded entertainment, meaning the production of content in which Absolut will be interwoven into the plots.

Absolut has for many years worked with two agencies that lead the global work on its campaigns. One, specializing in television, print and other mainstream forms of advertising, is TBWA Worldwide, part of the Omnicom Group, and its TBWA/Chiat/Day office in New York. The other is GreatWorks, based in Stockholm, which specializes in digital advertising.

It is TBWA/Chiat/Day and a predecessor, TBWA Advertising, that have created the well-known Absolut ads featuring the brand's distinctive bottle, artists like Andy Warhol, flavored vodkas and novelties like snow globes and gloves. That relationship with Absolut dates back more than 30 years, through several owners and distributors of the brand.

Both TBWA and GreatWorks will continue to work on Absolut, Mr. Westphal said.

The reason that Absolut decided to “appoint Sid Lee as one of our l ead agencies on a global level,” Mr. Westphal said in a phone interview on Thursday, was a rethinking of how Absolut needed to be advertised and marketed, particularly when it came to millennial consumers.

“There's a bit of a shift in our marketing model, to doing from saying,” Mr. Westphal said - in other words, away from traditional ads that talk about the product to focusing on experiences that the product can offer consumers.

Sid Lee is “bringing a lot of fresh, new thinking to today's millennial generation,” he added.

Another reason for reconsidering how Absolut is sold is what Mr. Westphal called the “fierce competition” in the premium segment of the vodka market that confronts Absolut.

Absolut was once almost alone in its field of imported vodkas that cost more than domestic brands like Smirnoff. Now it faces scores of rivals, both in its price range as well as from vodkas that are known as superpremiums, brands like Grey Goose and Ketel One that cost more than Absolut.

“As a brand, when we started out, we were challenging conventions,” Mr. Westphal said. “We need to do that now.”

Absolut is the fourth-largest spirits brand in the world, behind Bacardi, Smirnoff and Johnnie Walker, meaning it is still the biggest brand of imported vodka. In most countries in which it is sold, including the United States, it is also the best-selling premium or imported vodka.

At Sid Lee, the Absolut work will be primarily handled out of its Amsterdam office, with the New York office, a relatively new addition, and the Toronto office also taking part.

“It's a big deal for us,” said Bertrand Cesvet, chairman of Sid Lee in Montreal.

And “it's humbling,” he added, to join TBWA on the Absolut agency roster, because “there's a great body of work and a great heritage.”

“Absolut has been one of the most consistent brands in history” in terms of its ad approaches, Mr. Cesvet said. “It's a new era.”

Eric Alper, vice president for strategy and lead account partner for Absolut at Sid Lee, based in the Toronto office, said: “To reach, touch and engage millennials, advertising can't be like wallpaper. You have to create advertising that can compete with pop culture.”

TBWA will continue to create campaigns for other brands sold by the Absolut Company and the Pernod Ricard parent, among them Jameson and Kahlua.

After the campaign for Absolut for 2013 begins to run, Mr. Westphal said, “where we go in the future is an open question.”

Asked if, going forward, each assignment from Absolut will be a so-called jump ball, with the roster agencies competing to be selected for the work, Mr. Westphal replied, “Right now, Sid Lee has caught that ball.”

In another sign of how competitive the vodka market is , another vodka brand said on Thursday that it was hiring an agency it had not worked with before.

Belvedere vodka, produced and distributed by LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, selected BBDO Worldwide, also an Omnicom agency, to handle a project, creating its next global campaign. The ads are expected to begin running in spring 2013.

Belvedere had most recently worked with another Omnicom agency, the Arnell Group in New York, as its creative agency of record.

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.

Two Senate Seats in South Carolina, but Few Democratic Prospects

The unexpected retirement of Senator Jim DeMint, a conservative Republican from South Carolina who will vacate his seat to become head of the the Heritage Foundation, will create an unusual circumstance in which both of the state's Senate seats are on the ballot in 2014.

A special election will be held to fill out the remaining two years of Mr. DeMint's term, which was originally set to expire after the 2016 election. In addition, South Carolina's other senator, the Republican Lindsey Graham, who was re-elected in 2008, will also be on the ballot in 2014.

Mr. DeMint's retirement could conceivably help Mr. Graham, whose approval ratings in South Carolina are middling. Mr. Graham also draws the ire of some Republicans for being seen as too willing to compromise with Democrats, making him potentially vulnerable to a primary challenge.

If the stronger Republican candidates are drawn toward competing for Mr. DeMint's former seat instead, Mr. Graham could be spared a difficult test. On the other hand, some of the candidates whom Gov. Nikki R. Haley might appoint to fill Mr. DeMint's seat for the next two years, like Representative Tim Scott, are viewed as having bright political futures while being more reliably conservative than Mr. Graham, meaning that Mr. Graham could still be the more vulnerable target in a Republican primary.

Opportunities for Republicans to ascend to the Senate in South Carolina ought to yield competitive primaries because there is a large supply of well-qualified candidates.

All nine of South Carolina's elected executive officials, from the governor, Ms. Haley, to the agriculture commissioner, Hugh Weathers, are Republicans. In addition, six of the seven representatives that South Carolina will send to the Uni ted States House in January are Republicans; the exception is the Democrat James E. Clyburn, who represents South Carolina's majority-black Sixth Congressional District.

The abundance of Republican elected officials in South Carolina precludes Democrats from having much of a “bench” in the state - and may prevent them from making a strong run at either Senate seat in 2014.

The statistical models that FiveThirtyEight uses to forecast Senate and gubernatorial races include, among other factors, a variable to designate a candidate's credentials, which is based on the highest office that he or she has been elected to. The more prominent the races that the candidate has won, the better he or she tends to do when running for the Senate or for governor.

We divide the offices into three tiers, which might be thought of as tantamount to professional baseball's system of major and minor leagues.

In the top tier are candid ates who have already done the equivalent of ascend to the majors by having been elected to a United States Senate seat or a governorship at some point. But these candidates are hard to find unless they are already the incumbents in those races. (An exception is when a governor crosses over to run for the Senate, or vice versa.)

So in practice, parties draw more heavily from the second tier of elected officials, which provide them with their top prospects when they want to compete for a Senate or gubernatorial seat. In this group are United States representatives and statewide elected officials, like attorneys general and secretaries of state.

Because almost none of these officeholders have been Democrats in South Carolina, the party has had to draw from the third tier of candidates, which consists largely of state senators and state representatives. These candidates face a far bigger transition when trying to compete for a major elected office like United States Senate or governor, in terms of raising funds, building name recognition and developing platforms that allow them to appeal to enough voters to win statewide.

And in some cases in South Carolina, Democrats have nominated candidates who have not held elected office at all. In 2010, their candidate for the United States Senate was Alvin Greene, an Army veteran who had never run for public office and who was unemployed when he was chosen as the nominee.

It is not mere happenstance that Democrats have had trouble fielding competitive candidates for statewide elections in South Carolina. Much of it has to do with the demographics and the geography of the state.

President Obama won 44 percent of the vote in South Carolina this November, more than he did in 19 other states. However, in South Carolina, it can be exceedingly difficult for a Democrat to go from winning 44 or 46 percent of the vote to 50 percent.

This is because of a concept we call elasticity, which is related to the number of swing voters in each state who might consider voting for either party.

Some red states like Alaska are also fairly elastic, meaning they have their fair share of voters who are political independents or who have moderate or mixed political views. Democrats usually lose in these states - but they can compete with the right candidates and under the right circumstances.

In South Carolina and some other states in the Deep South, however, there are very few swing voters. African-Americans vote for Democrats in overwhelming numbers, while the vast majority of whites are conservative and vote Republican.

This makes the outcome of elections in these states much more predictable. Democrats have a high floor for how many votes they receive, but also a low ceiling, and they almost always wind up coming up short of 50 percent.

Democrats' problems are compounded in South Carolina because of the geographical distribution of black voters, who are heavily concentrated in certain cities, counties and Congressional and legislative districts.

This year, Mr. Clyburn, the Democrat, won overwhelmingly in South Carolina's Sixth Congressional District, taking 94 percent of the vote and facing no Republican opposition. But Democrats lost the other six United States House races, and their candidates won no more than 45 percent of the vote in any of them.

This does not just make it difficult for Democrats to win elections in South Carolina. When they do, it is often in overwhelmingly Democratic districts. The candidates may have lit tle practice in appealing to a broader constituency of voters, and they may accumulate liberal voting records that make them unacceptable to the few moderates in South Carolina.

Instead, the closest thing South Carolina has to a crossover candidate may be Mr. Scott, who won re-election this year in the First Congressional District. He is African-American - and Republican.

Publishing Chief at Warner Music Gets Expanded Role

The Warner Music Group, the smallest of the three major record companies, has had several management defections since it was sold a year ago, and now its upper ranks have been reshuffled once again with the departure of one of its top record label chiefs and an expanded brief for the head of its publishing division.

The company announced on Thursday that Todd Moscowitz has resigned after two years as co-president and chief executive of Warner Brothers Records, one of its flagship labels. At the same time, Cameron Strang, the chairman of Warner/Chappell, the publishing unit, will take over the company's West Coast operations, including the Warner Brothers label.

The change is the second promotion in a month for Mr. Strang, who joined Warner only two years ago when the company bought his publishing firm, Southside. (Music publishing concerns the copyrights for songwriting and composition, as opposed to recordings.) He was recently given control over Rhino Enterta inment, Warner's catalog arm, and now he will also have authority over one of the company's two recorded music divisions.

Rob Cavallo, the chairman of Warner Brothers Records, and Livia Tortella, the label's co-president and chief operating officer, will report to Mr. Strang. The company did not say whether Mr. Moscowitz will be replaced.

Artists at Warner Brothers and its affiliated labels include stars like Green Day, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Josh Groban, but it has had few major new successes recently, while Warner's other group, Atlantic, has had a strong recent run of hits. Both label groups, however, had strong showings in the Grammy Award nominations this week: The band Fun., on Atlantic, and the Black Keys (and its member Dan Auerbach), under Warner Brothers, each had six nominations.

The Warner Music Group was sold for $3.3 billion last year to Access Industries, a holding company controlled by the Russian-born bi llionaire Len Blavatnik. Since then several top executives at the company have departed, including Lyor Cohen, the chief executive of its recorded music division, and Edgar M. Bronfman Jr., who stepped down as chairman but has a seat on the company's board.

The most prominent new executive at Warner, the publishing executive Jon Platt, who was the top urban music scout at EMI Music Publishing, was hired by Mr. Strang.

Ben Sisario writes about the music industry. Follow @sisario on Twitter.

Man Charged in Trayvon Martin\'s Death Sues NBC for Defamation

George Zimmerman, accused of second-degree murder in the shooting of Trayvon Martin earlier this year, filed suit against NBCUniversal on Thursday, alleging that the company's editing of his voice on a 911 tape constituted defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

The suit, filed in circuit court in Seminole County, Fla., asked for a jury trial. A spokeswoman for NBC News had no immediate comment.

The suit charges that journalists at NBC News intentionally edited Mr. Zimmerman's statements to make him appear to be a “racist, predatory villain.”

The edits of a 911 audio recording - which removed an intervening question from the operator directly asking Mr. Zimmerman what race Mr. Martin was - occurred three times on NBC's “Today” show, first on March 20 in a story by Lilia Luciano; on March 22 in another story by Ms. Luciano; and again on March 27 in a story by Ron Allen.

In Ms. Luciano's first report, Mr. Zimmerman's words to the 911 operator were: “This guy looks like he's up to no good or he's on drugs or something. He looks black.” In fact, Zimmerman told the operator: “This guy looks like he's up to no good or he's on drugs or something. It's raining and he's just walking around, looking about.” When the dispatcher said, “O.K., and this guy - is he white, black or Hispanic?” Zimmerman then said, “He looks black.”

Taking out the dispatcher's question took Mr. Zimmerman's mention of Mr. Martin's race out of context - a crucial omission given that the killing of Mr. Martin on the night of Feb. 26 in Sanford, Fla., spurred a national debate about self-defense, crime and race. When the omissions were noticed at the end of March, NBC News conducted an investigation and concluded that the edits were mistakes, not deliberate distorti ons. Ms. Luciano subsequently left the network, as did a producer who worked with her. Mr. Allen remains at the network.

Ms. Luciano and Mr. Allen were named as defendants in the lawsuit along with NBC on Thursday. The producer, whose name has not been divulged in news reports, was not named as a defendant.

There was also a fourth defendant, Jeff Burnside, who was a reporter for WTVJ, the NBC-owned station in Miami. Mr. Burnside's story on WTVJ on March 19 was the first to take Mr. Zimmerman's words out of context.

The suit filed on Thursday called the edits a case of “media arson,” intended to keep viewers tuned “by menacing them with a reprehensible series of imaginary and exaggerated racist claims.”

“Due to the defendants' journalistic crimes,” the suit charged, “Zimmerman has been transformed into one of the most hated men in America.”

The criminal trial against Mr. Zimmerman, who faces second-degree murder charges, is schedu led to begin in June.

Brian Stelter writes about television and digital media. Follow @brianstelter on Twitter and facebook.com/brianstelter on Facebook.

Spotify Event Tries to Bury the Old Feuds Between Artists and Napster

Spencer Platt/Getty Images At a Spotify event in New York Thursday, Lars Ulrich, right, the drummer for Metallica, buried the hatchet with Sean Parker, an investor in Spotify, who was a co-founder of Napster.

Could a single bro-hug symbolize healing for the music industry after a decade of digital strife?

That was the inevitable question at a Spotify news conference on Thursday, when Lars Ulrich of Metallica embraced Sean Parker, one of the company's investors. Back in 1999, Mr. Parker became an instant bogeyman for the music business as a co-founder of Napster, the file-sharing system that helped usher in an era of destabilization that the the industry is still recovering from. (He is also a former president of Facebook, as portrayed by Justin Timberlake in the movie “The Social Network.”)

Metallica sued Napster in 2000, and by 2002 the service had collapsed under the weight of copyright-infringement litigation from the major record companies. On Thursday, however, as Spotify announced that it had made a deal with Metallica finally adding the band's music to its service, the two men publicly made peace, insisting that their earlier encounter had been “misunderstood.”

“This was never about money,” Mr. Ulrich said. “It was just about control.”

Last week, Metallica took possession of its recordings after nearly three decades with the Warner Music Group. Daniel Ek, Spotify's co-founder, said the deal was cut with the band's own new label, Blackened Recordings.

Spotify, which began in Sweden in 2008 and arrived in the United States a year and a half ago, has become one of the fastest-growing forces in digital music. For many in the industry, Spotify has come to represent the future, as consumer behavior evolves.

The company's news conference, which featured a performance by the R & B singer Frank Ocean, was suffused with Spotify's now-familiar level of tech glamour. It was held at a modern dance company's studio in Chelsea, with phalanxes of waiters serving treats like gourmet hamburgers and tiny grilled cheese sandwiches.

Last month, Spotify raised $100 million in new investment from Goldman Sachs and others at a valuation $3 billion, a sum that seemed both to validate the company and raise questions about whether it could live up to the hype.

At the conference, Mr. Ek, Spotify's co-founder and public face, updated its impressive user statistics and introduced a slew of new features.

Spotify now has 20 million users around the world, Mr. Ek said, with five million of them paying a monthly subscription fee. (Users of the free version must listen to advertising, but for $5 to $10 a month, listeners can eliminate those ads and get various other perks.) For the first time, Spotify gave specific information about the American market, saying it has one million paying users here.

The new features for Spotify include a more colorful home screen that constantly feeds its users recommendations for music based on their tastes. Local tour dates also pop up, along with some strikingly personal recommendations. “Do you remember this song from Kris Kross when you were 9?” was one example during the 29-year-old Mr. Ek's demonstration. (The song was 1992's inescapable “Jump.”)

The changes, Mr. Ek said, are meant “to bring the most relevant content to you in a useful way, with helpful context.”

Despite Metallica's change of heart, Spotify still has far to go to convince artists and record labels that it can provide substantial royalties. Mr. Ek said that Spotify had so far paid $500 million to “rights holders,” which generally refers to record companies and music publishers, who in turn pay artists. That sum, Mr. Ek said, has doubled over the last nine months.

Daniel Glass, the founder of the label Glassnote, whose artists include Mumford & Sons, said that Spotify usage did not cannibalize record sales for his artists. But the service still has many gaps, from acts big and small. Rihanna, for example, has withheld her latest album, “Unapologetic,” from Spotify.

And at the conference Mr. Ulrich sported a T-shirt for Budgie, a British metal band from the 1970s and '80s that was an influence on Metallica. Its albums are nowhere to be found on Spotify.

Ben Sisario writes about the music industry. Follow @sisario on Twitter.

At Random House, Employees Will Enjoy 5,000 Shades of Green

Random House had its corporate Christmas party last night in New York and word is that Santa likes bondage. A lot.

Markus Dohle, the chief executive of Random House, promised employees - from top editors to warehouse workers - a $5,000 annual bonus to celebrate a profitable year. The cheering went on for minutes, according to people in attendance.

Call it 5,000 shades of green.

This year, Random House has had the good fortune to publish E.L. James's “Fifty Shades of Grey,” about an inexperienced college student who falls in love with an older man with a taste for trying her up and whipping her among other delights. The book has topped The New York Times paperback best-seller list for 37 weeks and counting. The sequels “Fifty Shades Darker” and “Fifty Shades Freed” have been in the top five for a similar amount of time.

The e-books have been bestsellers even longer.

Also, Random House has also had other monster bestsellers including “Gone Girl,” a mystery by Gillian Flynn that has sold over one million copies; “Wild” by Cheryl Strayed; and John Grisham's latest “The Racketeer.”

The bonuses will go out in the next paycheck. To be eligible for the full bonus employees must have worked a full year at the company; everyone else will receive a pro-rated gift.

Stuart Applebaum, a spokesman for Random House, a division of the German conglomerate Bertelsmann, confirmed that several thousand American employees would be covered.

The first book in the “Grey” series was originally published by a small house in Australia, but was acquired by Vintage, a Random House division, in the beginning of the year and has been a publishing phenomenon almost ever since. According to Random House, the book has sold more than 35 million copies in the United States alone.

Leslie Kaufman writes about the publishing industry. Follow @leslieNYT on Twitter.

CBS Tweaks Its Lineup, Adding a Drama and Returning to \'Rules of Engagement\'

CBS will make its usual complement of modest changes to its prime-time schedule for the second half of the television season, adding one new series and bringing back an old reliable bench player.

The absence of surprise is underscored by the new show, “Golden Boy,” being yet another crime drama - the only kind of drama CBS now programs - and the returning comedy, “Rules of Engagement,” being inserted on Mondays at 8:30, where it was located in 2010, the only time CBS ordered a full season of the show.

Every other time, the network has used it as a situational replacement for a comedy it had hoped could do better than “Rules.” This time, “Rules,” now in its seventh season of production, will replace the comedy “Partners,” which failed quickly this fall.

“Golden Boy” is a cop show about a young officer and his meteoric rise to police commissioner of New York. It starts Theo James and Chi McBride. The drama will start for two weeks on Tuesdays at 10 (temporarily replacing the crime drama “Vegas”) on Feb. 26 and March 5. It will then move to its regular time period, Friday at 9, starting March 8.

The show that has resided there this season is “C.S.I.: NY,” which will have its last episode on Feb 22. That may be the last episode ever, considering the show has seen its ratings diminish for several season - or it may not.

CBS is only calling it the last episode of the season and the network is known for keeping its crime dramas going long after that popularity has faded - because they usually still make money by selling the episodes around the world.

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

Huffington Post Names New C.E.O.

The Huffington Post has a new day-to-day business boss.

Jimmy Maymann, who has run the news site's international expansion efforts, will become its chief executive officer, effective immediately, the Huffington Post Media Group announced on Thursday. He will report to Arianna Huffington, the site's namesake, who remains the editor in chief and will become the chairwoman of the media group, the parent company of the Web site.

“He brings a vibrant entrepreneurial spirit and an ability to scale a business, so he was the first person I turned to to be our C.E.O.,” Ms. Huffington said in a statement.

Mr. Maymann will have responsibility for increasing traffic and revenue. The company said he would work closely with the publisher of the site, Janet Balis.

Mr. Maymann's appointment is the latest indication that The Huffington Post is setting up its own leadership structure, separate from AOL, which acquired the site last year.

Last spring, Ms. Huffington said she had taken several of its business functions out of AOL and under her control, stoking talk about the possibility that the site could become fully independent again in the future.

Last month, Mr. Maymann told PaidContent that AOL was “not shopping” the site, but that there “has been a lot of interest.”

He continued: “It's not on the cards. AOL is the owner. But I cannot stand here and say, some day, ‘AOL will not sell it if the price is high enough or there is a better owner.' But, right now, AOL is a good owner for Huffington Post and we'll keep it.”

Brian Stelter writes about television and digital media. Follow @brianstelter on Twitt er and facebook.com/brianstelter on Facebook.

The Breakfast Meeting: British Newspapers\' Regulation Plan; and Brubeck, Jazz Popularizer

Britain's main national newspapers on Wednesday agreed to the establishment of an independent newspaper regulator with far greater powers than the current, much-criticized regulation system, John F. Burns reports. The agreement came after pressure from Prime Minister David Cameron, who has agreed with the publishers that any change in regulation should be voluntary, and not be written into law, as was recommended by the Leveson inquiry, which investigated press abuses in Britain. Mr. Burns writes:

The new regulator would have a much larger budget, a strong investigative staff, and the power to order errant newspapers to publish prominent apologies and pay fines up to £1 million, or $1.6 million, or 1 percent of a publication's annual revenue, whichever is less.

The Grammy nominati ons were announced on Wednesday, with a several artists collecting six nominations each, including fun., Mumford & Sons, Frank Ocean, Jay-Z and Kanye West, James C. McKinley Jr. writes. The rock trio fun. was nominated in all four of the most prestigious categories - album, song and record (that is, single) of the year, as well as for best new artist; Frank Ocean was not far behind, with nominations in best new artist, record of the year and album of the year for his critically acclaimed debut “Channel Orange.”

Dave Brubeck, the pianist and composer whose “Time Out” - with the hit single “Take Five” - was the first jazz album to sell a million copies, died on Wednesday. He would have turned 92 on Thursday. Ben Ratliff writes in an obituary: “In a long and successful career, Mr. Brubeck brought a distinctive mixture of experimentation and accessibility that won over listeners who had been trained to the sonic dimensions of the three-minute pop single.”

Dave Brubeck could win his FIRST Grammy this year.

-mdash; Ben Sisario (@sisario) December 6, 2012

Dame Elisabeth Murdoch, the mother of the media tycoon Rupert Murdoch and one of Australia's most noted philanthropists, died on Wednesday at her estate near Melbourne, Robert D. McFadden writes. She was 103, and accor ding to a Murdoch-owned paper, The Courier-Mail of Brisbane, said she is survived by 77 direct descendants. Mr. McFadden writes of her child-raising philosophy:

She reared them with what she called ‘loving discipline,' to discourage materialism, especially in the headstrong Rupert. She sent him for eight years to Geelong Grammar, a boarding school near Melbourne that imposed a military regimen and canings. He was bullied and teased and became decidedly unhappy, but his mother was firm.

Nickelodeon is remaking Beatrix Potter's Peter Rabbit books as an animated series, Amy Chozick writes, offering an intriguing challenge for a modern, American TV channel. The death of Peter's father in a hot pie - something that Potter's publisher considered too gruesome to illustrate - will not be shown to Nickelodeon's audiences, either. But the predicament it left Peter's family in is something that resonates today: “Here's a single mom raising four bunnies,” said Teri Weiss, executive vice president of production and development for Nickelodeon preschool. “That's an important element we thought kids could connect with.”

Noam Cohen edits and writes for the Media Decoder blog. Follow @noamcohen on Twitter.

New eBay Product Aims to Harness User Data to Aid Auto Marketers

EBay is joining the growing hordes of companies that are offering even more data to advertisers to help them better reach intended customers, in this instance companies that sell cars, trucks, motorcycles and R.V.'s and run digital ads on ebay.com.

The company is to announce on Thursday morning that it is introducing a digital-advertising product by the name of eBay Direct Connect, meant to help those companies reach the estimated 10 million active eBay shoppers - out of the total of 108 million - who are in the market for new vehicles. The goal is to stimulate sales at brick-and-mortar dealer showrooms as well as on ebay.com.

What is spurring the introduction is that many automakers are talking about shifting ad dollars to digital media from traditional media, or adding money to the digital portions of their ad budgets while maintaining their spending in traditional media. “Automotive advertising is getting increasingly di gital,” said Stephen Howard-Sarin, head of North American advertising at eBay in San Jose, Calif.

Adding additional data to digital advertising is like “two great tastes that taste great together,” he said, laughing as he invoked the vintage Reese's Peanut Butter Cups commercials.

To produce eBay Direct Connect, eBay will for the first time obtain data about car and truck shoppers from R.L. Polk & Company and combine it with eBay's own aggregate data about how its users behave and shop. EBay and Polk have signed a multiyear agreement; terms are not being disclosed.

The combined data streams will enable marketers that sell cars, trucks, motorcycles and RV's - and advertisers in related categories like auto parts and accessories - to aim their ads on eBay and the eBay Motors section of the Web site much more precisely. EBay Motors has 14 million unique visitors each month, as estimated by comScore.

EBay Direct Connect will also provide marketers with more detailed measurements of how their digital ads on ebay.com and ebay.com/motors perform. “Part of what Direct Connect allows you to do is close the loop,” Mr. Howard-Sarin said, by answering the question, “Did people who saw my ad buy my car?”

“We match up with what Polk knows,” he added, to make the ads “more personal, more targeted and, ideally, more relevant.”

Mr. Howard-Sarin and Mitch Gross, senior manager for automotive display advertising at eBay, emphasized that the eBay data being used for Direct Connect was aggregated and complied with eBay's privacy policy and industry standards on consumer privacy protection.

Mr. Gross said there had been “great conversations” about eBay Direct Connect with marketers and agencies. To stimulate those discussions, eBay shared some results of combining data from Polk about owners of Ford F-150 trucks and “eBay shopping behavior across aggregate groups,” he added.

For instance, Mr. Gross said, the male owners of the trucks, ages 25 to 34, shopped on eBay for products like clothing and electronics, while men ages 35 to 44 shopped for products like home and garden items and sporting goods.

That suggests digital ads for F-150 trucks could be placed on pages in eBay categories like fashion; home, outdoors and décor; and sporting goods, along with pages in the eBay Motors category.

Ebay estimates that about $60 billion worth of goods are sold on ebay.com each year. In the third quarter, according to eBay, its sales of vehicles worldwide represented about $2 billion in gross merchandise volume, a term that online retailers use in place of revenue or sales.

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