Out-Of-House Ads
In recent years, luxury car and fashion brands like Aston Martin, Fendi and Bulgari have licensed their brand to apartment and resort complexes. They get a cut of those sales and the inherent marketing (e.g., the “Aston Martin Residences” in Miami and “Armani Beach Residences” in Dubai).
But Fiat is taking it to the next level with a new branded apartment complex in Fort Lee, New Jersey, reports The Wall Street Journal.
It will be a 309-unit apartment complex dubbed the Fiat House.
Fiat was forced to get creative with its, well, creative, after its parent company Stellantis stopped actively promoting the brand in the US in 2019, says Aamir Ahmed, the head of brand in North America.
Fiat has some serious luxury auto sister brands, including Maserati and Alfa Romeo, but the Fiat House is the home brand taking a more pedestrian marketing approach. Literally.
“Millions of commuters see Fiat’s name on the complex every time they cross the George Washington Bridge” going from Manhattan to New Jersey, writes the Journal. Residents can also rent Fiat’s new electric sedan by the mile.
Illegal Ads?
New FCC Chair Brendan Carr is launching an investigation into NPR and PBS to determine whether the publicly funded broadcasters’ underwriting sponsorships violate federal law, The New York Times reports.
The FCC licenses NPR and PBS as noncommercial educational broadcast stations (NCEs). Under the Communications Act, NCEs are not authorized to advertise on behalf of for-profit companies.
However, NCEs are allowed to run underwriting sponsorships, in which the broadcasters can mention sponsors by name but must not promote any of their products or services or distribute calls to action on their behalf.
Carr writes that he’s concerned NPR’s and PBS’s underwriting sponsorships “cross the line into prohibited commercial advertisements.”
In response to Carr, NPR and PBS say they comply with underwriting standards.
Republicans have long pushed to defund PBS and, in particular, NPR over alleged anti-Republican bias. Last year, President Trump blasted NPR as a “LIBERAL DISINFORMATION MACHINE” after one of its editors accused the network of liberal bias.
And in 2023, Trump surrogate Elon Musk branded NPR as government-funded media on his social platform, X.
At the time, NPR claimed to receive just 1% of its annual budget from the federal government. So attacking its underwriting business may be a more effective way to defund the network.
Split 50 Ways
Google is showing off the main benefits of its AI marketing products in 50 different regional Super Bowl commercials this year, one for each state.
It’s common for Super Bowl advertisers to highlight a few small businesses that benefited from the product or service. What Google’s doing is promoting small businesses (that use Google’s generative creative solutions) within the viewer’s state, Ad Age reports.
Rather than a small ecommerce merchant in Arizona, or whatever, people will see a small biz from their own state.
It doesn’t sound groundbreaking, but the killer application for generative AI creative right now is small local businesses with search and social business accounts, but which are boxed out of streaming TV. Now, a company can start to whip together a viable CTV ad without paying for production. That makes streaming media a viable option, since the platforms also reduced their minimums for CTV campaigns.
Being the ad default ad platform for millions of small American businesses is an important part of Google’s and Meta’s separation from the rest of the ad platform pack. And Google wants that dynamic for CTV, whereas a powerhouse like NBCUniversal counts only a few thousand total advertisers.
But Wait! There’s More
Federal judge denies Google’s motion to dismiss its ad tech antitrust trial and will make a determination on a likely June or July trial date “soon,” probably by next week. [post] (h/t Vidushi Dyall)
Marketers are preparing for a fragmented search ad landscape where dollars will be divided across multiple platforms. [Digiday]
CHEQ acquires Deduce, expanding the go-to-market security platform with its identity graph. [release]
What advertisers need to know about Netflix’s upcoming slate. [Adweek]
You’re Hired
Jill Kelly joins Stagwell agency Assembly to lead as CEO. [Ad Age]
Limelight names Russell Pegrum as global sales director. [release]
