BUT IT WAS AN AD, WASN'T IT?

Pull quotes from the NYT story "Brands Produce Their Own Shows:" 1) "Before a Unilever-produced show called “The Gamekillers” was shown on MTV last spring, the network promoted it as a TV show and Unilever held off running ads related to the show. Only after the show ran were characters from it included in ads for Unilever’s Axe deodorant, said John Shea, executive vice president for integrated marketing and brand partnerships at MTV. “The last thing anyone of us wanted was for the show to feel that it was, in fact, an ad,” Mr. Shea said." 2) “We are living in a world now where it’s harder and harder to capture somebody’s undivided attention,” said Linda Kaplan Thaler, chief executive for Kaplan Thaler Group. Ms. Kaplan Thaler recently created a campaign for Dawn that included online shows, traditional commercials, a contest, and Ellen DeGeneres as a celebrity spokeswoman. She said advertisers had to do it all these days. “Ubiquity is the new exclusivity,” she said. This is why I hate advertising.