Looks like NBC wants to get into the admaking biz, too. From Businessweek:
NBC Universal: ad agency. Or it will be, sort of. Its new digital czar, Beth Comstock, and her staffers are approaching key advertisers with a simple yet far-reaching proposition: Let our digital studios create some advertising for you. In other words, although NBC executives chafe at this characterization, join with us to demolish long-standing notions of what separates media companies from ad agencies. “The next natural place to use the talents of the studio is with marketers and advertisers,” says George Kliavkoff, NBC Universal’s chief digital officer. As Comstock conceded at a recent international TV conference, everyone must “get used to the idea that the media marketplace will be full of contradictions and tensions.”
While it’s a first for a Big Three network, NBC’s move to produce advertising is not entirely unique. This spring, Viacom’s Nick@Nite, Procter & Gamble’s deodorizer Febreze, and agency Starcom MediaVest teamed up to produce 90-second sitcoms–including an extremely miniaturized commercial break–featuring talking dogs called The Poocharellis. These aired for nine weeks at precisely 9:57 p.m. eastern time. But Viacom does not own anything like NBC, nor is Viacom’s institutional gravitas anchored by a news department that must maintain an ironclad divide between ads and programming.
