That collective sigh of relief you heard recently came from Academy Award television advertisers. They were glad to see that their commitment of some $1.8 million on average for a :30 time slot during ABC’s Oscar telecast on Sunday (2/24) could prove to be a worthwhile investment after all thanks to the end of the Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike earlier this month.
Sans picket lines, the Academy Awards event will be back to its star-studded norm, drawing a mega-sized primetime audience and again justifying its claim to being the Super Bowl of advertising for the female demographic.
Among the most relieved is Unilever which will air user-generated spots for its Dove Cream Body Wash. Dove conducted an online contest asking women to upload their own body-wash product commercials at dovecreamoil.com. The competition drew some 3,500 entries, which public online voting culled down to the two spots which will air on the Oscars this Sunday.
Other advertisers slated for Oscar include: General Motors which is the sole auto sponsor of ABC-TV’s broadcast; Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, American Express, JCPenney, Bertolli frozen dinners (another Unilever product), L’Oreal, Mars, McDonald’s and MasterCard.
Though the writers’ strike dashed the television ad hopes of the Golden Globes telecast on NBC (which was reduced to a press conference) and the People’s Choice Awards on CBS, interest in these events has heightened as of late in the marketing community, primarily because they tend to get audiences watching live television as opposed to spot-skipping DVR recordings. The Super Bowl and the Oscars are at the pinnacle of must-see live TV, carrying the guarantee of mass viewership in an age of otherwise often fragmented audiences.
And with primetime TV in a reruns morass due to the WGA strike, the appeal of original content like the Academy Awards ceremony has grown that much stronger.
The aforementioned $1.8 million average per :30 slot represents about a seven percent increase over last year’s price tag.
“Atropia” and “Twinless” Win Marquee Prizes At Sundance Film Festival
The war satire “Atropia,” about actors in a military role-playing facility, won the grand jury prize in the Sundance Film Festival’s U.S. dramatic competition, while the Dylan O’Brien movie “Twinless” got the coveted audience award.
Juries and programmers for the 41st edition of the independent film festival announced the major prizewinners Friday in Park City, Utah.
Other grand jury winners included the documentaries “Seeds,” about farmers in rural Georgia and “Cutting Through the Rocks,” about the first elected councilwoman in an Iranian village. The Indian drama “Sabar Bonda (Cactus Pears),” about a city dweller mourning his father in the western Indian countryside, won the top prize in the world cinema competition.
“It’s for my dad,” said writer and director Rohan Parashuram Kanawade. His late father, he said, was the one who encouraged him to pursue filmmaking.
Audiences also get to vote on their own awards, where James Sweeney’s “Twinless,” about the bromance between two men who meet in a twin bereavement support group, triumphed in the U.S. dramatic category. O’Brien also won a special jury award for his acting.
The U.S. documentary audience award went to “André is an Idiot,” a life-affirming film about dying of colon cancer. Other audience picks were “Prime Minister,” about former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, and “DJ Ahmet,” a coming-of-age film about a 15-year-old boy in North Macedonia.
Mstyslav Chernov, the Oscar-winning Associated Press journalist, won the world cinema documentary directing award for his latest dispatch from Ukraine, “2000 Meters to Andriivka,” a joint production between the AP and PBS Frontline.
“Here’s to all... Read More