"Do you want to work in advertising because of Mad Men?"

The answer, quite simply is “yes, yes I do”. Not for the hard liquor and the fabulous frocks but for the way the industry reacts the television events that shows like Mad Men create. In honour of the new series airing now, on a network that carries commercials, Sky Atlantic’s special “double bill Season Premiere” a couple of weeks ago was accompanied by specially supplied retro commercials. Amazing to think that 50 years on Have a Break, Have a KitKat is still at the heart of it’s communication strategy.

A cynic might say, with an average audience of 72,000 (BARB) across the two launch episodes, that it’s a lot of effort to reach a fraction of the number people that a show like Corrie gets on a regular basis. It also raises questions as to why Sky, who’s revenue comes predominately from subscribers rather than advertising revenue, would go to lengths to source the ads. As a planner this is exactly the kind of creative thinking that makes a brand come to life, even the most iconic brands can’t help but benefit from the additional standout that a stunt like this affords. 

            

I’m not sure if this is the first time sky have adopted it but I also noticed that they are now putting the Man Men title screen before the Blackberry sponsorship bumpers.

I wondered if this might have something to do with the way that viewers are using sponsorship bumpers as navigation points when they fast-forward through the commercial breaks (why would anyone want to do such a thing?). Thinkbox have done some quite interesting work on Digital TV Recorder (DTR’s) users using on screen visuals as markers for when to restart watching and I thought that this might be an attempt at a new navigation point- a little nudge to get viewers to pause before the sponsorship bumper so that they watch all of it.  

Right, now I’m off for an Old Fashioned and a power lunch.