Coke, P&G, American Express, Dove, JCPenney, G.M. Among Those Slated For Oscar Spots
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.
First-Time Feature Directors Make Major Splash At AFI Fest, Generate Oscar Buzz
Two first-time feature directors who are generating Oscar buzz this awards season were front and center this past weekend at AFI Fest in Hollywood. Rachel Morrison, who made history as the first woman nominated for a Best Cinematography Oscar---on the strength of Mudbound in 2018--brought her feature directorial debut, The Fire Inside (Amazon MGM Studios), to the festival on Sunday (10/27), and shared insights into the film during a conversation session immediately following the screening. This came a day after William Goldenberg, an Oscar-winning editor for Argo in 2013, had his initial foray into feature directing, Unstoppable (Amazon MGM Studios), showcased at the AFI proceedings. He too spoke after the screening during a panel discussion. The Fire Inside--which made its world premiere at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival--tells the story of Claressa “T-Rex” Shields (portrayed by Ryan Destiny), a Black boxer from Flint, Mich., who trained to become the first woman in U.S. history to win an Olympic Gold Medal in the sport. She achieved this feat--with the help of coach Jason Crutchfield (Brian Tyree Henry)--only to find that her victory at the Summer Games came with relatively little fanfare and no endorsement deals. So much for the hope that the historic accomplishment would be a ticket out of socioeconomic purgatory for Shields and her family. It seemed like yet another setback in a cycle of adversity throughout Shields’ life but she persevered, going on to win her second Gold Medal at the next Olympics and becoming a champion for gender equality and equitable pay for women in sports. Shields has served as a source of inspiration for woman athletes worldwide--as well as to the community of... Read More