know | Future

Media Daily News reports that a report released Monday night by TNS Media Intelligence shows that the average program now carries an average of four minutes and twenty-five seconds of product mentions or branded placement of products. Understandably most of the shows with heavy handed branded content were the reality shows, but even scripted shows such as CBS’ “King of Queens” carried an average of 18 minutes and 13 seconds of branded content per hour equivalent. In fact, the same show only carried 16 minutes and 49 seconds of commercials.

I for one, think that product placement and branded entertainment may be on the verge of jumping the shark…once you reach almost 20% of total TV communication message carried by program content, things may very well start to backlash.

Mass High Tech reports today that Tom Tom Go has inked a deal with iconic Dunkin’ Donuts to integrate their store locations into their products navigational database. This is a great example of how to get past the clutter and deliver the most relevant sort of advertising to drive traffic to your store and as far as I know, the first example of such an explicit deal.

A study reported today on Media News Daily quantifies and sheds some light on the lack of success of Video On Demand services from cable operators.  It is clearly a vote against a pay per view model and pro traditionally advertising supported content.  Not surprisingly, respondents are annoyed at the meager selection available, specially when compared to the programmability potential of DVRs

There are a number of reports (here, here and here) about the Belgian newspaper De Tijd planning a pilot project of about two hundred subscribers for an electronic handheld newspaper. At A4 size (metric for 8 1/2″ x 11″) devices built by Phillips around MIT MediaLab spinoff E-Ink, will be the largest product of its kind, almost double the size of the pictured Sony Librie, and promises to be the closest experience yet to a real newspaper. Subscribers will be able to update them at special stations or at home over high speed Internet. The paper plans on offering different advertising at different times of day, and though they will not do so for this trial, they have the ability to refresh the content throughout the day. The big difference between this and reading a web based newspaper on your laptop is that E-Ink technology only uses power when changing the screen contents and hence has a very long battery life.

Via Adverlab

Though most cell phones nowadays have GPS capabilities, very few systems beyond some commercial fleet software and the occassional track-your-kids applications have popped up.  The promised land of passerby targeted advertising has so far gone unfullfilled.  Transit TV is bringing location triggered advertising to a bus or train near you.  Though they are currently missing the most important public transit market in the country, NY, they do have a presence in Chicago.  Servers in transit stations refresh the video screens in the buses and trains with video content delivered via the Internet.  GPS receivers in the vehicles can also trigger special content based on location.

Studio folk tend to be passionate about whether they are a Suitcase wielder or a Font Reservist, so there was some trepidation from both camps when Font Reserve was acquired by Extensis. Fear not though, CreativePro is carrying a detailed review today of the new Extensis Fusion font manager product that combines the old rivals Suitcase and Font Reserve. The product had already been given Best of Show of Macworld 2006 so it is not a surprise that Creative Pro likes it very much indeed, so you can all breate a collective side on both sides of the trenches.

Macworld Online reports today that in a recent poll it conducted users cited Desktop Publishing/Photography apps as those most critical before they will switch to Intel based Macs.  Though this may be obvious for all of us in the graphics industrial complex, the article goes on to compare Adobe’s versus Quark’s approaches this time around.  Quark, as I reported earlier, is promising that they will be releasing a universal binary version of their current public beta, but they are already late.  You may also want to check out an early review of the beta by Macworld