Advertising: A Cook-Off Among Chefs to Join Delta’s Kitchen

A Cook-Off Among Chefs to Join Delta’s Kitchen

From left, Brent Herrig, Justin Fox Burks, Galdones Photography, Heather Anne Thomas

Contestants in the Cabin Pressure Cook-Off will be, from left, Hugh Acheson, of Empire State South in Atlanta; Kelly English, of Restaurant Iris in Memphis; George Mendes, of Aldea in New York; and Linton Hopkins, of Restaurant Eugene in Atlanta.

DELTA AIR LINES and Food & Wine have joined forces to create a cooking contest to identify the next chef on Delta’s culinary team.

The contest, which will be called the Cabin Pressure Cook-Off, will be announced on Monday and will feature four chefs cited in Food & Wine’s annual best new chefs program. They will compete in three challenges that will be filmed in New York in late July and early August, and distributed this fall by Delta and Food & Wine on their Web sites and social media channels.

Henry Harteveldt, an analyst for Hudson Crossing, a travel consulting company, said it was not a coincidence that Delta and Food & Wine were collaborating, since Food & Wine is published by American Express Publishing, a subsidiary of the credit card company.

American Express and Delta have offered credit cards with both brands since 1996, and now offer four cards together, making American Express one of Delta’s “key strategic business partners,” Mr. Harteveldt said. American Express is the only credit card company Delta collaborates with on marketing activities in the United States. It also works with American Express overseas, and with Visa and MasterCard.

The new contest will feature Hugh Acheson, chef of Empire State South in Atlanta and 5 & 10 and the National in Athens, Ga.; Linton Hopkins, of Restaurant Eugene and Holeman & Finch Public House in Atlanta; Kelly English, of Restaurant Iris and the Second Line in Memphis and Kelly English Steakhouse in St. Louis; and George Mendes, of Aldea in New York. Mr. Acheson was named one of Food & Wine’s “best new chefs” in 2002, Mr. Mendes in 2011, and Mr. Hopkins and Mr. English in 2009.

The challenges will be filmed as three episodes, while a fourth episode will feature the winning chef visiting Delta’s test kitchen in Atlanta. The winning chef will join Delta’s culinary team: Michelle Bernstein of Michy’s in Miami; Michael Chiarello of Bottega in Napa Valley and Coqueta in San Francisco; and Andrea Robinson, a master sommelier. The three help Delta create food and wine offerings for long-haul business-class passengers on select routes, such as transcontinental flights and service to Latin America and Japan. Joanne Smith, Delta’s senior vice president for in-flight service, said the winning chef could design menus for business-class passengers on trans-Atlantic flights.

The cook-off is not the first collaboration between Food & Wine and Delta. In addition to buying advertising space in Food & Wine for the last decade, Delta has sponsored the magazine’s Food & Wine Classic annual food festival in Aspen, Colo., several times since 2007. Delta also has sponsored Food & Wine’s best new chefs program â€" celebrating its 25th anniversary this year â€" and held events for its top customers catered by some of these chefs.

Delta also is running a four-page spread in the July issue of Food & Wine, which covers the 2013 best new chefs. One page promotes Delta’s “economy comfort” service, while others congratulate the latest best new chefs and discuss the airline’s culinary team. Delta also advertises in American Express Publishing’s Travel & Leisure and Departures magazines, while its Delta Private Jets subsidiary advertises in Departures.

Starting in October, videos of the chefs’ cook-off will be shown on the Web sites of Food & Wine and Delta’s in-flight magazine and as part of the in-flight entertainment on Delta. The videos also will be promoted through social media channels of Food & Wine and Delta, and in issues of Sky, the airline’s in-flight magazine, and of Food & Wine.

Christina Grdovic, Food & Wine senior vice president and publisher, said magazine and airline officials jointly concluded that a cooking contest to identify the latest member of Delta’s culinary team “makes sense for Delta because its tagline is, ‘Keep climbing.’ ”

Ms. Grdovic added, “They’re committed to having a really good culinary program in the air.”

She said the promotion also would provide “really, really good exposure” for the magazine. Delta, one of five airlines that advertise in Food & Wine, is buying a total of 11 pages of advertising in six issues of Food & Wine in 2013, and space on the magazine’s Web site, Ms. Grdovic said.

Ms. Smith said the contest was part of an effort by Delta to improve its in-flight dining experience for business-class passengers, who she said “spend a lot of money flying Delta around the world and expect a fine-dining experience,” a top priority, with a good night’s sleep.

Neither she nor Ms. Grdovic would discuss expenditures by Delta for the cook-off promotion. According to Kantar Media, Delta’s recent annual advertising spending ranged from a low of $33 million in 2009 to a high of $65.2 million in 2008. Kantar also estimated that Delta spent $11.2 million on magazine advertising in 2009 and $15.7 million in 2008.

Rick Smilow, president and chief executive of the Institute of Culinary Education in New York, predicted that the videos could help Delta put “some pizazz and energy behind the underdeveloped concept of its culinary team.”

Louise Kramer, communications director of the Specialty Food Association, called the promotion a “nice way for Food & Wine to get brand recognition for their 25-year-old best new chefs program.” Because Food & Wine is owned by American Express, “it’s a way to get their brand out there, too,” Ms. Kramer said.

She also said there was a “thirst” among the public for cooking contests and competitions, and that it was smart for Delta and Food & Wine to “play off this popularity.”

Mr. Harteveldt warned that, “Ultimately what matters is whether Delta provides the levels of budget necessary to deliver good-quality, premium cabin meals. If all they do is hire a chef and limit the chef from the budget standpoint, nobody wins.”

A version of this article appeared in print on July 22, 2013, on page B5 of the New York edition with the headline: A Cook-Off Among Chefs to Join Delta’s Kitchen .

Clones Rule as Hollywood Beats Drum at Comic-Con

SAN DIEGO â€" Legendary Entertainment came to Comic-Con last year promoting “Pacific Rim” with all the attending buzz, hype and chatter. Then, a week and a half ago, came the release.

Thud.

On Saturday, Legendary was back here promoting another world-in-ruins monster movie, “Godzilla.” Sneak-peek footage drew cheers (and its monstrous thumps shook much of the vast convention center). But the elaborate presentation â€" along with similar ones made by studios like Sony and 20th Century Fox â€" also raised a question that has been lingering in movie theaters all summer: Does serving up more of the same still deliver the same punch?

Comic-Con, a pop culture convention that drew roughly 140,000 fans to this breezy city over the last four days, has for years been seen as a read of the mass marketplace, even as many here seemed to be more interested in the convention’s less mainstream offerings. What entertainment genres are on the rise? Which new movies are in trouble?

There were certainly some surprises. The 6,500 people who packed the San Diego Convention Center’s cavernous Hall H on Saturday, for instance, reacted with euphoria for “Gravity,” a science-fiction thriller starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney as astronauts adrift in space. To simulate weightlessness, Warner Brothers mounted cameras on specially developed robotic arms.

“Totally original and different,” Ms. Bullock said, as fans nodded in agreement.

But “Gravity” was one of the few films pushing originality claims that seemed to actually deliver. Indeed, throughout Comic-Con, there was a sameness to the films, both to one another and to movies like “Pacific Rim” that have come before and failed.

The studio presentations for “Divergent” and “The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones” were virtually interchangeable, with a female novelist and a young Everywoman star talking about bravery while flanked by a phalanx of young hunks sporting varying degrees of sensitivity and Commonwealth accents.

Change the names and faces, and they might have been selling “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire.” Jennifer Lawrence, who stars in that dystopian series, appeared in Hall H twice on Saturday, returning for “X-Men: Days of Future Past,” the seventh installment of that superhero franchise, scheduled for 2014.

Studios also showcased another “Amazing Spider-Man,” another “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs,” another “Avengers,” another “Thor” and another “Captain America.” Warner at least spiced up its announcement of another “Man of Steel” by adding a new co-star: Batman.

In addition to “Godzilla,” remakes teased here in recent days included “RoboCop,” coming in February from Sony, and “Riddick,” a Universal Pictures continuation of Vin Diesel’s “Chronicles of Riddick” franchise.

Even many of the original movies introduced at Comic-Con this year had a been-there-done-that feeling to them, notably Legendary’s sword-and-sorcery picture “Seventh Son,” which co-stars Jeff Bridges, Julianne Moore and Ben Barnes. In thundering snippets of footage shown on Saturday, the movie at times resembled “Clash of the Titans,” “Snow White and the Huntsman” and “The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian,” which also starred Mr. Barnes.

Some of these films â€" however derivative of what has come before â€" will undoubtedly become global hits, showering studios and the media conglomerates that own them with profits. The first “Avengers” took in more than $1.5 billion at the box office and generated hundreds of millions in DVD and toy revenue.

Indeed, the potential returns are promising enough that several studio moguls personally came to Comic-Con to assess the fan reaction: Jim Gianopulos, Fox’s film chairman, turned up in dark 3-D glasses, while Kevin Tsujihara, Warner’s new chief executive, tried to blend in by wearing an untucked button-down shirt. Rob Friedman, co-chairman of Lionsgate’s motion picture group and in the running for the presidency of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in its election on July 30, mixed with the fans at his Summit label’s Thursday presentation.

But even as studios came to the bubble of Comic-Con to unveil their megamovies â€" all will have budgets of $100 million or more, and sometimes much more â€" real-world ticket buyers were showing increasing fatigue with the same old, same old.

“Pacific Rim,” which cost Legendary and Warner at least $180 million to make and about $150 million to market globally, has taken in about $178.5 million, roughly half of which goes to theater owners. But it is not alone: six big-budget movies have crash-landed since May 1, including “White House Down,” “The Lone Ranger” and â€" over the weekend â€" “Turbo” and “R.I.P.D.,” which cost Universal Pictures $130 million to make and took in about $12.8 million.

“R.I.P.D.” also starred Mr. Bridges, who made no mention of its failure on Saturday in Hall H. But the actor did work hard to make “Seventh Son” sound intriguing, telling attendees that the film, set for release in January, is “chock-full o’ myths and magic and all kinds of things like that.” He even threw in a quote from the Russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

But Mr. Bridges’s assurances did not quite seem to convince the crowd, whose response to the “Seventh Son” panel was more polite than thrilled. (Legendary’s chief executive, Thomas Tull, declined an interview request.)

The people who swarm Comic-Con generally have an insatiable appetite for films in the superhero, fantasy, science-fiction and animation genres. At a couple of moments over the weekend, however, even attendees seemed to be growing frustrated with the sameness of the films Hollywood is giving them.

At one point during a question-and-answer session for “The Lego Movie,” a coming animated picture, a young boy came to the microphone and pressed panelists to say what in the film had “never been done before.”

Asked what he would hope to see, the boy, about 10 years old, said, “a little bit of CG, but not too much,” referring to computer graphics. The crowd cheered.

“You’re going to love the movie,” one of the film’s directors, Phil Lord, promised. “This is the weirdest kids’ film, I’m pretty sure, that has ever been committed to celluloid,” he added.

The boy flatly responded, “I hope so,” and turned heel.

A version of this article appeared in print on July 22, 2013, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Clones Rule As Hollywood Beats Drum At Comic-Con .

Aereo as Bargaining Chip in Broadcast Fees Battle

As another television programming blackout looms, this time because of a high-stakes negotiation between the CBS Corporation and Time Warner Cable, there is a new wrinkle, courtesy of Aereo, the start-up that streams broadcast TV via the Internet.

Les Moonves of CBS, which has helped lead the charge against the TV streaming service Aereo in the courts.

The contract dispute between CBS and Time Warner Cable is the first to unfold in the New York metropolitan area since Aereo came to market there last year. Last week, the companies warned that if the dispute was not resolved by Wednesday, CBS could be taken away from three million of Time Warner Cable’s 12 million subscribers.

Enter Aereo. The service, backed by Barry Diller and a number of other venture capitalists, uses giant arrays of antennas to pick up freely available television signals and stream them to the phones, computers and other screens of paying subscribers. By relying on the antennas, Aereo avoids paying the kinds of retransmission feeds that distributors like Time Warner Cable pay to broadcasters like CBS â€" an approach that Aereo says is legal, but that the broadcasters say is not.

Analysts have theorized that distributors could exploit Aereo, or a service like it, to avoid paying increasingly steep retransmission fees. Such fees are at the heart of the current fight with CBS.

While Time Warner Cable does not seem ready or willing to deploy Aereo-like technology, a spokeswoman, Maureen Huff, said Sunday that it would recommend Aereo to its New York subscribers if CBS was blacked out. The distributor may also underline the fact that Aereo, which normally costs $8 a month, offers a 30-day free trial. (Ms. Huff also pointed out that many CBS shows are available online on a delayed basis, and that “all of CBS’s broadcast TV programming is available free over-the-air,” so subscribers can use antennas.)

Time Warner Cable is treading carefully because Aereo is the subject of several lawsuits filed by major media companies. In this case, its invocation of Aereo might be particularly corrosive because CBS has helped lead the charge against Aereo in the courts.

To date, the service has been upheld by the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York; last week, in its third victory there, the appeals court declined to hear the broadcasters’ appeal.

Emboldened by the rulings, Aereo recently expanded to Boston and Atlanta; its next market is Chicago, it says, with many more to come. But it has not announced any plans in the West Coast markets covered by the Ninth Circuit Court, where a service similar to Aereo was rejected in December. Given the uncertain state of play, Aereo is of limited use to Time Warner Cable currently; along with New York, the fight with CBS affects subscribers in Los Angeles, Dallas and several smaller markets.

David Bank, a media analyst for RBC Capital Markets, said he would not be shocked if the distributor somehow used Aereo to skirt the blackout, or encouraged subscribers to do so. But he wrote in an e-mail message: “I think it would be more of ‘negotiating tactic’ than a real business solution.”

A CBS spokesman declined to comment. In a statement last week about the potential blackout, the company, whose broadcast network is the highest-rated network in the United States, said it “remains committed to working towards a mutually agreeable contract.”

“This conflict just further highlights the importance of having alternatives in the marketplace,” Chet Kanojia, the chief of Aereo, said in a statement. “It’s also a great reminder that consumers have the right to watch over-the-air television using an antenna. Whether they use Aereo or some other type of antenna, it’s their choice. That’s the beauty of having alternatives.”

Embracing Tablets, Comic Book Publishers Cash In on a Digital Revolution

SAN DIEGO â€" The comic book industry, after years of struggling to bolster sales, appears to have found a way to draw new readers, thanks in part to its push into the digital realm.

“Batman: Earth One,” a comic book for the iPad. Digital comic sales hit $70 million last year, up from $25 million in 2011.

At Comic-Con International, the annual comic book convention here last week, publishers embraced tablets and e-readers to show off their wares, and companies like comiXology demonstrated technological innovations to better distribute those offerings.

ComiXology, which has become one of the biggest distributors of digital comic books, hit a milestone in June when it reached 180 million unique comic book downloads since it started business in 2009, said David Steinberger, the company’s chief executive, and a co-founder. Of those downloads, 80 million were in the last six months.

The company’s success mirrors a surge in digital sales, which reached $70 million last year, up from $25 million in 2011, according to a report released July 15 by ICv2, an online trade publication that covers pop culture. Digital sales made up 19 percent of the total North American market, which rose 13 percent to $750 million in 2012, up from $665 million the year before.

At the comiXology booth at Comic-Con, fans swiped their fingers across a variety of tablets to view the offerings as comiXology employees explained how the system worked.

“Amazing!” said Chris W. Palmenberg, a visitor from Tucson, Ariz., as he gave the comiXology team a thumbs-up. “When I first saw the iPad, I knew this would be great for comics,” he said. A longtime reader of print comic books, Mr. Palmenberg made the switch to comiXology’s platform two years ago for the ease of portability.

“I think that we contributed to the revolution in digital comics,” Mr. Steinberger said. Supported by in-app purchases, comiXology was No. 3 on Apple’s list of top 10 apps in 2012. Its business model helped persuade DC and Marvel to sign deals to distribute their comic books digitally through comiXology the same day they are released in print.

Working with partners like comiXology on distribution allows DC to better focus on producing good stories, said Jim Lee, the co-publisher of DC Entertainment, adding, “The Holy Grail was the distribution issue.”

For years, comic book publishers faced a problem of poor distribution. In the 1960s and ’70s, comic books were sold at newsstands and bookstores. As they migrated to specialty shops, publishers broadened their offerings and aimed at a niche audience, fueling a speculation boom among collectors in the 1980s. After an eventual bust a decade later, the number of specialty shops shrank. By this time, distribution had become too focused on existing readers and had failed to attract new ones.

But with the digital revolution, publishers seem to have overcome their distribution woes. Through computers and mobile devices, they can now reach readers anywhere in the world.

DC said it had been able to take advantage of the new distribution model to reach new readers. Thirty percent of readers of Injustice, a book based on a video game, were new to comic books, Mr. Lee said.

Not only does technology promote innovation, it lowers barriers to the market, allowing new publishers to enter.

After taking two years to develop its technology to create motion books, Madefire, based in Berkeley, Calif., opened for business last year. Its initial strategy was to focus on original content with features like animation, sound and music and deliver it through its own app. Madefire also has a Web distribution deal with DeviantArt.

“We’ve optimized for a digital-first reading experience,” said Ben Wolstenholme, a co-founder and the chief executive of Madefire.

To broaden its audience, Madefire started working with small publishers like Top Cow and Boom Studios. It recently announced a deal with IDW to create motion books for Star Trek, My Little Pony and Transformers. Now, Madefire has to balance its original content with licensed properties, but Mr. Wolstenholme said the strategy was to reach a more mainstream audience.

Lion Forge Comics, a start-up based in St. Louis, is also taking a similar approach. This was its first year at Comic-Con, but it has already announced a deal to publish comic books based on old NBC shows like “Knight Rider” and “Punky Brewster.”

“I think it’s a good time for new companies,” said David Steward II, managing partner and creative director at Lion Forge. “You can do new things in different ways, versus changing direction, which the more established companies can’t.”