Over time and with greater attention to the media, picking up on this starts to become a sort of PR sixth sense. Tune in to FOX News and you can’t go five minutes without starting to get the itch.

In more respectable outlets and across different types of paid and unpaid media, however, it’s a bit harder to notice. Throw in a mixture of distractions like photos or slick graphic design to woo your eyes over and it’s even harder to notice what’s not there.

That’s what happened this weekend when we glazed over XM’s full page ad in the NYT.

The piece was an open letter in the front section touting some XM customer promises. They included:

• You’ll continue to get great programming – and the choice to get it from Sirius too.
• Existing programming won’t be interrupted.
• You can expect to receive the same service you’ve been getting.

While media idols like Mel Karmazin battle it out with the FCC to try and convince the committee that the satellite brothers complete with terrestrial radio, customers are more concerned about whether or not their subscription fees are going to go up. Not whether or not we’re going to loose Oprah & Friends in the deal.

Unfortunately the advertorial team at XM didn’t think it was worth mentioning or committing to in this bit of information in the piece. That’s okay, later in the Times was an editorial piece that touched on just that.

As far as price is concerned, Mr. Karmazin made it plain to the House committee that he would be willing to agree to a price cap for the combined service to seal the deal. The pitch is that raising prices isn’t really feasible anyway because most of what satellite radio is competing with out there is free — particularly on the radio.

ONCE more, this seems slightly at odds with statements that Mr. Karmazin made only a few months ago, Jonathan A. Jacoby, a Banc of America Securities analyst, wrote last week in a report. At an investor conference in December, Mr. Jacoby said, Mr. Karmazin talked up the potential for raising prices beyond the $12.95 a month most people pay now.

A click over to Sirius shows that they’re more interested in helping customers understand that their current radio will not become obsolete when and if the merger goes through.

While this is more-or-less an advertorial and Web communications example, the same holds true for pure editorials produced as a result of media relations.

Keep an eye out for what’s not there – it’s often the most important part of the story.

For some, it’s all about the game. For most, it’s all about the ads.

Today, we get a glimpse of how the big game’s ads fared. USA Today had a rank that put Budweiser (and Bud Light) spots in 7 out of the top 10.

This year was the first that big companies and organizations turned to people like you and me to pitch concepts and make ads based on the best.

Of these, Doritos made a couple, with our favorite being the checkout lady:

Then there’s our buddy Gino Bona from Garrand. The poor guy just had a new kid, was starting his MBA, and then he wins the NFL’s Superad contest. He’s been subjected to the media gauntlet of FOX News reporters, a hard-hitting interview with Katie Couric, and pesky cameras following him around everywhere he went for the last few weeks. He recently wrote this piece for Adweek about the whole shabang. Here’s his ad (and was produced with the help of Joe Pytka).

User-gen meets mainstream – it looks like the official knighting has just occurred.

Turner broadcasting, which owns the Cartoon Network, admitted responsibility in today’s quagmire that brought Boston to a standstill. Guerrilla marketers had hit the streets and placed several magnetic lit versions of the character Err shown pointing toward the sky with its middle finger. They kind of looked like possessed Lite-Brites.

(Epa Photo)

Apparently they’ve been up for a couple of weeks and were placed in other cities such as “New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, Seattle, Portland, Austin, San Francisco, and Philadelphia.” But it didn’t do much until today when commuters phoned-in reporting the figures as possibly being bombs. Emergency procedures ensued and now Mayor Menino is threatening up to two years in prison for each offense.

You may be thinking that it’s “mission accomplished” for the marketers. After all, the entirety New England’s media is buzzing with headlines and live spots from the day’s activities. On the other hand, there are a lot of pissed off Bostonians (including those within the target demo) who either missed their class, meeting, or work all together today because of the madness that ensued.

This is also another blow to the industry as today’s stunt gone bad is already being labeled as a “PR Explosion.” This is not what we have in our book as the definition of public relations. It’s immature and insensitve guerrilla tactics gone awry.

One has to wonder how this stunt was allowed to see the light. At a minimum, the character is flicking off everyone who sees it. While that may make sense to those who recognize the character and understand the brash nature of the show, it is just plain stupid for everyone else to have to endure. Just imagine if “The Office” did a similar promotion and showed Dwight flicking commuters off on their way to work. While that could be within the bounds of his character, it’d do more harm than good.

Turner did respond with a statement:

“We regret that they were mistakenly thought to pose any danger.”

Unfortunately it’s too little, too late. While there’s certainly more awareness with the show’s existence, today’s stunt isn’t making anyone in Boston want to watch it more. In fact, they’re probably hoping that somebody over there at Turner pays big time so that the taxpayers don’t have to fund today’s extravaganza.

We’re looking forward to hearing all about Turner’s reformed marketing policies, proactive measures to prevent such future occurrences, donations to the Boston Bomb Squad, etc…

Via Boston.com

Nielsen, the big name in audience ratings and other media metrics, will soon be adjusting its numbers for TV viewership to account for students while they’re at school.

This is a big deal for programs such as Comedy Central’s Drawn Together, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and The Colbert Report, which will all see a boost in ratings as their audiences tend to attract the late night procrastinators in dorms across the country.

The news is also a reminder of how much emphasis advertisers put on TV and these ratings here in the U.S. That emphasis is dying, however, as more and more organizations turn their heads toward the Web. In doesn’t end there, though…

“The holy grail here is how to measure consumers as they go from TV to iPod to cellphone and back,” said Alan Wurtzel, president of research for NBC Universal.

But the first step — measuring students’ viewing of television — comes with its own pitfalls. College students still watch a significant amount of television, spending three and a half hours a day tuned in on average, about an hour less than all people on average, according to Nielsen.

Via The New York Times.

We have a problem with the latest DIRECTV ad that features Christopher Lloyd in updated Back to the Future scenes.

The main point of the ad, which was produced by Deutsch Inc., is that DIRECTV supposedly has a greater long-term capacity for HD channels versus standard cable.

The question is: Do new HDTV set owners really care? Most cable systems in the U.S. today offer an HD version of programming that provides 10-15 HD channels plus on-demand offerings. This – for the most part – is more than enough outlets for the quantity of HD programming that exists today. In fact, many of these channels only broadcast HD programming for certain shows and revert to letterboxing SD content most of the time.

DIRECTV, through this ad, is saying that the system has the ability to provide up to 150 HD channels of programming. Great, but no one cares right now because the programming content simply doesn’t exist.

Slickly produced ads like this only work when what the company is trying to communicate is relevant to where the marketplace is and what consumers’ expectations are. No one should be fooled into thinking that by switching to DIRECTV that they’ll suddenly be able to swim among 150 channels of HD programming. If they are, they’re not going to be a happy customer.

We’re surprised that Mr. Deutsch let this one slide. This post over at BTTF.com completely misses the point too.

A couple of years ago, we attended a meet-and-greet with a communications exec from Kodak up at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. Turns out that Kodak gets royalties for most every digital camera that’s sold based on patented technology inside.

Via Engadget.

Too bad Wal-Mart just flipped this one upside down.

Via adfreak.

It’s firing Friday for Wal-Mart’s top marketing exec Julie Roehm, and subordinate Sean Womack who allegedly were engaged in personal relationship.

Other allegations for Roehm included inappropriately accepting gifts from vendors and showing favoritism.

The big news though, is that Wal-Mart overturned it’s previous commitment to Draft FCB, which PRpulp commented on back in November.

Here’s The New York Times:

And she attended a September dinner given by Draft FCB at the Manhattan hot spot Nobu, during which she lavishly praised the ad agency and appeared to suggest it had the upper hand in the contest more than a month before an official announcement of the winner was due.

At the dinner, Ms. Roehm spoke about how Draft FCB, formed this year by the merger of the Draft and Foote Cone & Belding agencies, might be the model of the ad agency of the future, said one attendee, Linda Fidelman, president of Advice and Advisors in New York, a consulting company that helps marketers search for advertising agencies.

Companies and large non-profits regularly engage in agency reviews. They’re often structured by executives who have previous relationships with an agency or its partners that can get questionably close to be considered appropriate and non-biased. The question is: where’s the line? Is the client who accepts a dinner or a drink too far over the line? Joy riding in fancy cars apparently is…

How does Draft feel?

Draft FCB was in the early stages of hiring as many as 200 additional employees at its Chicago headquarters to handle the Wal-Mart account. Philippe Krakowsky, an executive vice president at Interpublic, said, “We were disappointed to hear of Wal-Mart’s decision.”

There’s some new talk on the ad block these days. The thing is, it’s nothing new.

Since the first banner ad was uploaded to a Web page, there’s been a raging debate about what’s effective and what’s not. We’ve lived through ridiculously annoying pop-ups and SPAM beyond belief. We continue to deal with sounds blurting our unexpectedly and interactive display ads that seem to conquer content in spite of tastefulness.

There seems to be a shift starting to take place, however, that could transform the baseline metric by which advertisers buy and pay for ads. Instead of pay-per-click, interactive media buyers have their eyes set on paying only when there’s a quantifiable action that takes place.

This is an evolutionary concept that extends beyond the original metric created in Internet infancy: pay-per-impression. With this, the advertiser would pay, say, $100 for every 100k times a banner ad is shown on a site – regardless of whether or not there was any proof whatsoever that the visitor even saw it.

That concept evolved into pay-per-click, which is the predominant standard for advertising online today. With this model, conversion starts to creep into the picture. For example, for every 100k visitors, 100 clicked on the ad, establishing a conversion rate of .1%. It is a slightly more intelligent metric that surely fuels the most elegant of Power Point slides in marketing meetings – but marketer’s eyes are starting to become more aligned on the granddaddy of metrics: pay-per-action, which is circled back and internalized as cost-per-action.

This concept builds upon everything that’s great with pay-per-click, but adds a new layer that requires a specific action by a consumer in order for the original advertiser to be compensated for displaying the ad. It’s a big step because it requires the advertiser to step up to the plate and really understand what the client is trying to accomplish. If they’re good, they’ll realigning the ad strategy to not just maximize exposure (which is all good for awareness sake), but to maximize valuable actions by prospective customers by identifying the best place and time to display the ad – right down to the minute.

Pay-per-action also requires that there be an accurate means by which that action process can be tracked: from inception at the original advertiser all the way to the end result of someone completing a task. So while eyes have been set on the concept for years, the Web technology is only now starting to support a feasible practice in a significant way.

What are some of these actions? Here are some common ones that require people to:

• Sign up for a newsletter
• Configure a custom product (such as a car) and provide his/her contact information to a dealer
• Complete a survey
• Download a product catalog
• Buy a product

There are many factors that will determine the success of the action you’re trying to encourage. And, in essence, the level of difficulty of getting someone to complete the action starts to get factored-in to the rates you may end up paying to an advertiser. To some degree, there starts to become a new distribution of power back to the advertiser, which invites them to participate in the overall marketing campaign and fully understand what everyone’s trying to accomplish.

It’s an interesting concept that for some time will likely only be executed well by those who plan for and fully embrace the concept when developing new online marketing campaigns.

The New York Times ran a story on the subject of pay-per-action earlier in the week, which may be of interest. It runs through a case study of trying to buy an iPod from various sites – some that utilize pay-per-click and others that employ pay-per-action. Jellyfish.com was the site cited, which splits the commission with the buyer and ultimately landed the customer the best deal – by $.40.

Source: The New York Times

Here’s Newsdesigner.com:

The move to a 12-inch-wide front page brings the Journal in line with most American broadsheets (except The New York Times, which makes the switch next August) and is expected to save Dow Jones $18 million a year.

Executives and advertisers are happy, but some Journal journalists aren’t. “Lopping a column off the paper is not a quality move,” reporter E. S. Browning told The New York Times. “It will be harder to do long-form journalism when there is less space on Page One.” Editors say to compensate for the lost space, the number of pages will be increased, some statistical information will be cut, and the paper will be more tightly edited.

Via Newsdesigner.com and NYT.