If you don’t know them already, you will now, as Rhett & Link, seen above, take on their latest starring role as judges in the celebration of low-budget, local commercials in IFC’s launch of its first LoCos awards.

Voters are eligible for a $250 cash prize for casting ballots for the greatest stars, jingles, taglines, mascots, special effects and more, as the LoCos join a tradition of local advertising built on the shoulders of off-beat characters including New York’s hi-fi king Crazy Eddie, ice cream magnate Tom Carvel, and LA’s car painting pitchman Earl Scheib.

And then there are the ads themselves.Continue reading...

Heineken's first worldwide campaign, dubbed "Legends," centered on YouTube, where the brand's first spot, "The Entrance," scored more than 3 million views globally in the first three weeks of its release in December.

The eagerly-awaited second instalment in the creative brand campaign, "The Date," premiered on Heineken's YouTube channel late last month, and zoomed to more than 4 million hits.

Fast forward to today, when Heineken and YouTube parent Google announced a multi-year global agreement that continues leveraging YouTube and expands to mobile.Continue reading...

Punxsatawney Phil and his Groundhog’s Day celebration on Gobbler’s Knob in Western Pennsylvania have had a following of sorts for many years.

The 1993 romantic comedy, Groundhog Day, starring Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell, upped the town’s annual event and profile significantly.

Today, mobile-phone users can sign up and receive texts to find out if Phil has predicted six more weeks of winter or an early spring.

Phil and the top-hatted local officials who carry him around on Groundhog Day have become so recognizable that a cable network's use of him in a Super Bowl TV commercial — without asking permission — revealed just how much Phil means to the good people of of Punxsatawney, PA.Continue reading...

Simon Cowell is arguably the king of creating entertainment brands, particularly when it comes to packaging pop stars.

Cowell has made a very lucrative business for himself out of creating British game shows and exporting them successfully to America. He has the added joy of being known as an overly confident, brash, opinionated guy who wasn’t afraid to say some blunt and nasty remarks to the brave soul who've come before him for juding in a variety of talent shows.

As his X Factor talent show prepares to jump the pond from the UK to the US, he's not ignoring X Factor UK — far from it.Continue reading...

There’s been a lot of talk about product placement on TNT’s popular series, Men of a Certain Age – including an exclusive interview by brandchannel’s Abe Sauer with series co-creator Mike Royce — who defended the fact that much of the show is set in a Chevrolet dealership as well as the latest twist, that the wife of the dealer character, Melissa, just got a job as an Amazon product reviewer.

The product placements in the series continue. Perhaps ironically for a series about men, two of the most egregious, in last week’s episode (called "A League of Their Owen"), were for brands favored by women.Continue reading...

Say goodbye to the remote control fumble. Better yet, don't just say it — show it, too.

Today at the Cannes International Advertising Festival, Microsoft unveiled NUads, short for natural user interface ads, as a way for marketers and advertisers to bake voice and gesture-based response mechanisms into television ads seen by Xbox Kinect users.

The new advertising platform enables consumers to share content on Twitter, "like" and post on Facebook, and interact with branded content on their mobile phones, all in a quest to engage Xbox users more successfully than traditional TV advertising.Continue reading...

On June 3, New York Magazine's Vulture blog took TNT's series Men of a Certain Age to task for upping "the Product-Placement Ante." Men of a Certain Age, Vulture wrote, is "getting cocky" because "in the new episodes, they've found a brand-new way to sell an infinite number of new products."

On Twitter, Mike Royce, the series' co-creator and showrunner, took umbrage and tweeted back at Vulture, "We did almost no placement RT @christinadowney: Brilliant or Blatant" and "Hey @vulture FYI only 1 yes ONE of those products was product placement. Can you guess which?"

Royce filled us in for an exclusive interview.Continue reading...

Julius the monkey is an unparalleled soccer player, (as seen above) and like others in his league, is now preparing for his Hollywood debut.

Saban Brands, the Haim Saban business that last year bought Julius and his creator, Paul Frank Industries, has begun pre-production on a Christmas television special for 2012, featuring Julius and his buddies. Touted as combining the heart of Modern Family with the spirit of The Simpsons, the holiday special is being produced by Mike Reiss, Emmy-winning producer of The Simpsons.

Since Los Angeles billionaire and entertainment mogul Saban bought Paul Frank Industries last year for $50 million, the quirky, wide-mouthed sock monkey’s star has been steadily rising.Continue reading...