Advertising

Today's Wall Street Journal reports on a new advertising trend: "The most obvious alternative to TV clutter, placing products within shows, is generating some backlash among viewers. Marketers and media buyers see the 'situ-mercial' as a promising alternative." What is a situ-mercial? It's a commercial designed to look, sound and feel just like the show it's interrupting. For example, a car insurance commercial set in a jail cell is airing during court shows and dramas.

"Pharmaceutical makers have already found a major loophole in the Food and Drug Administration's new draft guidelines for direct-to-consumer advertising," reports Advertising Age. The guidelines were meant to clarify risk information and increase "disease awareness" spots, those not touting any particular drug.

"Same Medicare. More Benefits." is the theme of a publicly-funded $12.6 million advertising effort promoting the new Medicare law. Critics of the ad campaign include Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy and the conservative National Taxpayers Union, who called it "an election-year ploy." The Wall Street Journal reports that National Media, a firm already working for the Bush/Cheney campaign, is getting a piece of the new ad campaign pie.

The U.S. has indicted executives from Ogilvy and Mather, a PR and advertising agency, for participating in an "extensive scheme to defraud the U.S. Government by falsely and fraudulently inflating the labor costs that Ogilvy incurred" for its work on a media campaign for the Office of National Drug Control Policy. According to O'Dwyer's PR Daily, O&M's anti-drug media campaign work was part of a five-year $684 million dollar project. The government claims it was overcharged by O&M from May 1999 to April 2000.