Before NBC’s The Office hit the airwaves nine seasons ago, the folks of Scranton, Penn., were a little weary about a sitcom calling the coal-mining town home. After all, as the Scranton Times Tribune points out, the city had been the butt of jokes on All in the Family, Friends, and The Sopranos. The Championship Season, the 1973 Pulitzer winner for Drama about a high school championship team in Scranton that gets together 20 years later, doesn’t exactly leave theatergoers feeling like they want to rush off to visit the place.

Now, the series that focuses on the employees of the Dunder Mifflin paper company is coming to a close and Scrantonites seem to be pleased with how the series gave “a steady supply of residual pop culture cachet.” That cachet won’t come to an end when the series airs its final episode on May 16. It’ll fade with time, but Office love is probably at its peak in Scranton right about now, especially after the show’s cast members, writers and creative team paid a visit this past weekend as part of a big “Wrap Party,” Entertainment Weekly reports.

Along with them came about 10,000 fans who wanted to celebrate the legacy of the sitcom. The stars of the show were paraded through town, signed autographs with fans, sang old tunes to the adoring masses and sat through an extended Q&A.Continue reading...

Some 30-second blocks of Super Bowl airtime are being sold for as high as $4 million — a $500,000 increase from the top seller in last year's telecast, according to USA Today.

The research firm Kantar Media notes that the increase means that the price “is growing at three to five times the rate it did just a decade ago.” 

"No one is holding a gun to the heads of these advertisers," Jon Swallen, chief research officer at Kantar, told USA Today. "Clearly, these are price increases the market is willing to bear." Swallen said he thinks the first 30-seconds-for-$5 million Super Bowl deal could air in 2016.

Those tuning in for the cola giants and other brand marketers suiting up for Game Day are in luck: The number of in-game ads has been going up, Swallen said.

One of the brands shelling out that kind of dough is M&M's, which had a much-heralded spot in the last year’s Super Bowl. M&M's won’t release its commercial or details of the ad in advance, according to a press release. However, the ad is tied to a new "Better With M" spot and social campaign that launched this week.Continue reading...

Fans of the American version of The Office can now host their own Office Olympics with official Dunder Mifflin boxes of paper.

While the fictional paper company Dunder Mifflin on the NBC TV series is struggling to compete with real-life office-supply chains like Staples, an online outlet owned by Staples (Quill.com) has licensed the Dunder Mifflin name from NBC's Universal Television in a bid to — wait for it — sell more copy paper. It's a deal that David Brent and Michael Scott would be proud to take credit for.Continue reading...

Fun stuff: New Era baseball caps (which given its sport, doesn't need salary caps) taps a raft of celebs in its new campaign.

In the first spot, fellow NBC stars Alec Baldwin of 30 Rock and John Krasinski (The Office) trash-talk each other's beloved Yankees and Red Sox, in keeping with baseball's humorous marketing this season. Fans are invited to pick their fave of the rival teams on New Era's Facebook page.

Future spots will include Conan O'Brien, Ellen DeGeneres, Jerry Seinfeld, Tina Fey, Martin Scorsese and Justin Bieber.

So you think that Doug, Ford’s orange puppet, is an irredeemably chauvinistic piece of felt who can only get laughs in the brand’s social-media campaign by offending female sensibilities?

Guess again. Doug – the just-introduced online-video “spokesman” for Ford’s new 2012 Focus – will evolve. Ford digital marketing manager Jon Beebe tells brandchannel that Ford anticipated criticism of the rakish personality of its new puppet, which some would say borders on misogyny.Continue reading...

Last June, Jason Bateman and Will Arnett introduced DumbDumb, a production company backed by Ben Silverman's Electus to create original web comedies for brands, starting with Orbit gum.

Add Denny's to that roster with Always Open with David Koechner, a new web series that reinforces its "America's Diner is Always Open" campaign. It stars Koechner — who you may recognize from his recurring role on NBC's The Office — chatting with a cast of fellow comics that includes Bateman and Arnett, plus Kristen Bell, Sarah Silverman, Amy Poehler, and Will Forte.

Watch the trailer above, and the first episode below.Continue reading...

Due Date may not have been the number one film this past weekend, but it still opened big. And in product placement terms it had far more to note than did Megamind (even if Megamind's product placement was more groundbreaking).

Due Date has iPhones and Macbooks and Blackberries and Range Rovers, Even Dunkin' Donuts – which is having a heck of a year after appearing in Kick-Ass, Paranormal Activity 2, Iron Man 2, The Town and Wall Street 2, – notches up a placement.Continue reading...

You might call it a lesson in stick-to-itiveness. The 3M Post-it Note brand is turning 30 this year, but it wouldn't even be a product if not for the company's resilience. Find out how the brand is celebrating after the jump.Continue reading...