Ice cream chain was the last client of iconic agency Cliff Freeman and Partners

(ADWEEK) Four agencies have emerged as contenders for creative chores on Baskin-Robbins’ ad account.

Pitching the business are MDC’s Kirshenbaum Bond Senecal + Partners, WPP’s Ogilvy & Mather and Omnicom’s Merkley + Partners, all in New York, and 22Squared, an independent agency in Atlanta.

Pile + Co., the Boston-based consultancy overseeing the process, confirmed that list of contenders today.

Canton, Mass.-based Baskin spent $14 million in domestic measured media last year, and about $12 million through the first two-thirds of 2008, per Nielsen.

The ice cream chain was the last client handled by Cliff Freeman and Partners in New York. That iconic agency closed its doors in late October.

In May, CFP rolled out a major campaign that played up the chain’s long-standing major point of differentiation: it’s selection of flavors. An initial ad showed kids bombarding a white ice cream truck with colorful explosions. The tagline was: “Don’t be so vanilla.” The effort also included an iPhone app that helped consumers locate Baskin scoop shops.

(Examiner) Late last week news leaked that Google was in the advanced stage of negotiating a deal with local business review site Yelp for a sum rumored to be in the $550 million range. Today TechCrunch reported Yelp has walked away from the negotiations. While there is widespread speculation as to why Yelp decided to stay independent (including rumors of competing deals from Apple or Microsoft/Yahoo!) one thing is clear – it’s not the end of the story. There was a lot more to this deal than just acquiring Yelp’s traffic (9 million monthly unique visitors according to Comscore) and passionate community.

Yelp has been successful at doing what Internet Yellow Pages(IYP’s), and the major search engines are still trying to achieve – combining an engaged community with selling local business advertising to make a profitable online business model. TechCrunch on Thursday reported “Yelp has whispered that 2009 revenues will be around $30 million and are expecting $50 million or so in 2010.”

The keys to Yelp’s success have been their ability to build a vibrant, engaged community that posts reviews of local businesses, creating content that generates traffic to their site and loyalty amongst users. Yelp combined that rich content and traffic with an advertising sales force (both telephone and feet-on-the-street) to take advantage of a market with no strong leader. While IYP’s were focusing on driving revenue through their local sales forces, Google and Yahoo! were building online advertising platforms and huge databases of content. As a little start-up, Yelp was nimble enough to do both and embrace the social media trend of creating online communities. Yelp also capitalized on the growth of smartphones and mobile search to increase traffic and the number of reviews. Continue reading →

Retailer uses niche clips — including one that shows a skateboarding dog — for ad targeting

(ADWEEK) One of YouTube’s greatest challenges with advertisers has been the notion that it’s a repository for clips of dogs riding skateboards. But one marketer, at least, sees this as a plus.

American Apparel has been targeting ads to over 100 videos of pets, including a clip of a skateboarding canine, to promote its line of dog clothing. The Los Angeles-based brand chose the videos based on suggestions from employees.

“It would be hard to do an advertisement on the back page of LA Weekly or a fashion magazine for the dog T-shirt,” noted Ryan Holiday, a Web marketing executive at American Apparel.

YouTube hopes more advertisers will follow American Apparel’s lead.

The venue has little problem drumming up interest in its front-page and marquee placements, but it needs to entice advertisers deeper into the site to pair their brands with long-tail content. Knowing some companies are still uncomfortable with category-wide targeting — YouTube has a pets and animals channel, for example — the Google-owned property began offering specific video targeting earlier this month. The initiative lets advertisers build custom video lists from among the clips entered in YouTube’s partner program. Continue reading →

(ADWEEK) The National Hockey League has pulled back the curtains on a new video player, replete with more original content and more sharing features designed to further infiltrate the Web’s top social networks.

The new NHL VideoCenter product, developed by the IPTV tech provider NeuLion, essentially replaces NHL Network Online, NHL.com’s original video platform.

Besides game highlights and interviews, VideoCenter offers fans three new channels: NHL Shootout Channel, which deliver full-length coverage of games that end with shootouts; NHL Press Room, for live press conferences; and NHL Library, an archive of clips.

VideoCenter also promises a larger video screen, faster loading times and more useful search, according to league officials.

Besides serving as a destination, the NHL sees VideoCenter as a way to enhance its presence on social media, clearly a league priority. The new player allows fans to share video clips with friends on Facebook, Twitter and Digg. The NHL already maintains channels on the top video sites YouTube and Hulu, and continues to create original video series for advertisers like Timberland and EA.

“NHL.com is the first place fans look to see the best game highlights; live and feature videos; and original programming focused on the NHL,” said NHL svp of creative Andre Mika. “NHL VideoCenter expands the volume of video content offered on NHL.com and greatly enhances and streamlines the user interface, creating the Web’s best destination for NHL video.”

Before controversy engulfed Tiger Woods, big brands built buzz by putting the iconic golfer in their ads. Today, some marketers are getting positive responses from consumers by cutting their ties to the troubled sports legend as the media firestorm over his personal conduct continues to rage.

So says the Brandweek Buzz Report by market research firm YouGov. The weekly consumer survey analyzes the most talked about brands based on buzz: If you’ve heard anything about the brand in the last two weeks, was it positive or negative?; and reputation: Would you be proud or embarrassed to work for this brand?

YouGov interviews 5,000 people each weekday from a representative U.S. population sample. Respondents are drawn from an online panel of 1.5 million individuals. A score can range from 100 to -100 and is compiled by subtracting negative feedback from positive. A zero score means equal positive and negative feedback. Continue reading →

Users have value, but the more active and engaged they are the more valuable they are to services like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and others, according to “Viral Loop” author Adam Penenberg. Stacey Delo reports.

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Apple (AAPL) is on track to launch a much-anticipated, tablet-sized computing device early next year, according to brokerage reports this week. The end-of-the year business period has become known as the “iPod quarter” for Apple, due to the historically strong sales of the company’s digital-media players. But with iPod sales showing signs of leveling off, Apple is believed to be working on a new, tablet-style device that will help the company continue with its multiyear streak of hit products. Read more about Apple’s potential plans .

By: Stephen Kindel

When you look at an advertisement for a new job, do you really know what you are looking at? In a shrinking economy, where companies struggle to maintain market share, let alone grow it, many jobs are what a friend of mine describes as “know who” jobs. That is, the condition of your employment is based upon the size and number of accounts you can bring with you, or take away from a competitor, usually the company you worked at before. Your potential new employer is not interested in you or your skills per se, but rather, in whom you can bring along with you as clients or customers. Almost all sales jobs today are know-who jobs, as are many positions in law (try getting a job at a new law firm without the ability to bring along former clients), and particularly, in the financial services industry. The ability to bring along your “book” of business is what is likeliest to land you a position, and not your knowledge of the industry. Continue reading →

At Monday’s Pixar Animation Studios Case Study at the Content Theater, the company focused on stereoscopic production and presentation.

The packed event, sponsored by Sony and RealD’s 4K 3D projection system, offered glimpses of Pixar’s first experiments with 3D, included re-created scenes from “Toy Story” and “Ratatouille,” adding new 3D effects as well as extended sequences from Pixar’s upcoming stereoscopic release, “Up.”

Bob Whitehill, stereoscopic supervisor, and Josh Hollander, director of stereoscopic production, shared some of preparation for the May 29 release of “Up” and the Oct. 2 premiere of the stereoscopic versions of “Toy Story” and “Toy Story 2.”

In re-creating the “Toy Story” films, Hollander said, Director John Lasseter worked with the stereoscopic team on creative and technical issues that arose when taking a show designed for 2D projection and adapting it to 3D.

Significant technical consideration arise from the need to render images for the left and right “eye” simultaneously because of the damage to the stereoscopic effect that could result from even extremely minute changes at the pixel level if the two perspectives are rendered separately.

Looking at the stereoscopic world from an artistic perspective, Whitehill noted that Pixar’s initial testing helped Pixar filmmakers define a stereoscopic aesthetic using concepts such as “point of interest” and its relation to the “point of conversion” and “depth budget” that became integral to the decisions made by co-directors Pete Doctor and Bob Peterson when creating “Up.”