How did we miss this? There's a senior account manager from the Orlando based Knight Agency on The Bachelor? No shit. Maybe we missed it because The Bachelor, despite rolling into its 12th season with unusually high ratings, has never appealed to us.

Nonetheless, the 27-year old Amanda Rantuccio, was recently cut from the shows girly line-up and we missed it. She made it to the final three before being cut. The final episode of the show is set to air on May 12th.

"She made a guest appearance last week on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, but don't look for more TV in Rantuccio's future. She is back to advertising.

She had her boss' support: Together, they weighed the pros and cons before she went on the show. She has no regrets about the experience."

Guess her boss thought it would be great PR for the agency. Um, so... why don't you guys have a web page that can be reasonably found in less than fifteen minutes? Seriously. Ad agencies have got to get better about using search engines. Good luck to Amanda (she really liked the dude) and good luck to the little agency that should have... Sheesh.

A UK-targeted Kellogg's ad, created by Leo Burnett London, has been cleared of making light of the sexual abuse of young people.

The ad for a Nutri-Grain cereal bar was set in a doctor’s examination room, with a young man complaining of hunger pangs.

An older man, a baker posing as a doctor, hands the younger man a cereal bar and asked him to take his trousers off.

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), the UK regulating board for advertising, said 42 complaints were received from viewers who thought the ad was suggestive of sexual abuse, and was not suitable to be broadcast to children.

However, the ASA said that the ad was unlikely to cause serious or widespread offence. Leo Burnett said they'd replace the offensive line for future broadcasts of the ad.

Kudos to the kids at Leo Burnett for creating the controversy -- taking the ad standard practice of "sex sells" to a whole new level.

Catch this - soon, there will be a brand spanking new premium movie channel. Viacom, Paramount Pictures, MGM Studios, and Lionsgate have announced a partnership that will launch in 2009. This yet-to-be-named station may put Showtime out of business. As the wonderful website Ars Technica points out, Showtime has contracts with all of these studios, which are about to expire. Doh!

Why do I mention this? Because, naturally, there's going to be an online arm to this baby and I'm fascinated by the the struggle content providers face to deliver their goods direct to an evolving consumer. Who isn't?

Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman has said the site would be "oriented toward the consumer." He did not go in details but did say that there might be fewer restrictions in delivery since the studios actually own the content outright. Is this the new Movielink, which was an abysmal failure? True, it was early days with that site launched and the DRM issues, as well as its PCs only format certainly held it back.

This new venture is a chance for the movie studios to get it right with completely on-demand content, streaming ads and hopefully, international access. We shall see.

I wasn't going to post this, but seriously... what the hell is wrong with the CW Network? The finally have a hit in Gossip Girl. Finally. And yet, because more consumers are watching the show online, they've yanked the streams in an attempt to force viewers to watch it in real time.

Sorry, sorry, but is it 2002? Have networks gleaned nothing about the future of on-demand content? Plus, what about the strong evidence that shows that making programs available on the Web increases exposure which, in turn, builds an audience for broadcast episodes, thus increasing the network's ability to charge more dollars for advertising? Idiots.

CW is backass backwards. It's the little network that should be following the lead of smarter players such as NBC. In the face of CW pulling the streams, I'm going to go back to downloading full episodes from P2P networks where there are no commercials at all.

Nielsen is getting ready to acquire IAG Research for $225 million. According to Adweek, IAG is a privately held firm that measures consumer engagement with television programs, national commercials and product placements. Meanwhile, AdAge recently asked the question: Can "TV-ratings kingpin Nielsen maintain its dominance as the gold standard by which video advertising is priced?" Competitors abound and the first to provide marketers with real time data will win the rat race.

Tracey Scheppach, senior VP-video innovations director at Starcom USA, pointed out the obvious: "It's hard for a monopoly to be the force of innovation."

Big companies lumber along. They can be unwieldy and slow to make changes. Although, Nielsen is looking pretty nimble these days (the company has snapped up Telephia, Audience Analytics and Buzz Metrics, too) they can't buy the whole lot of 'em including Rentrak, TNS and the pugilistic Group M's Irwin Gottlieb and his mafia.

Alan Wurtzel, NBC Universal's president-research, said:

"The digital world has taught us that there can be a couple of guys in a garage somewhere that can topple mighty corporate entities, because some of it is just new ways of thinking and just figuring out a better mousetrap."

Nielsen is going to fight to the death and our bet is that they hang in their better than anyone is predicting. The entire piece is worth a read, outlining various threats, dilemmas and offering an interview with Susan Whiting (pictured left), Nielsen exec VP who oversees development and sales. Grab your lunch and get to it.

On March 20th, CandyIndustry.com reported that Ferrero, the makers of the greatest thing ever to come in a jar (sorry, Vaseline), would have to change a TV spot they made.

The British Advertising Standards Authority didn't have a problem with the creative, so much as the messaging. They believed the spot to break TV advertising standards code rules, calling it both misleading and inaccurate.

According to Ferrero, Nutella is a "part of a balanced breakfast."

The British ASA says the smooth, creamy orgasm-in-a-plastic-canister is too full of fat and sugar to be even remotely healthy-ish.

The ASA was quoted:

...We considered that the ad misleadingly implied the spread made a more significant nutritional contribution to a balanced breakfast than was the case...

Back to the voiceover studio. Would it be so bad to just say, "part of this delicious breakfast" or "part of this breakfast that maybe you should only have on weekends"?

My advice to Ferrero: don't try to make it sound healthier. If you suddenly tell people it's balanced/healthy/etc, they might think you've changed the product... The only balance people are interested in is your ratio of chocolate to hazelnuts.

Remember we mentioned that Dove was going to be doing something with MTV and Alicia Keyes in an effort to get a little younger, get the hip ladies using social media? Here's the spot for their seemingly episodic show, "Fresh Takes," that takes a jab at the Lipstick Jungle's of the world.

Unilever owns Dove and Axe. The latter brand had a huge success with the Game Killers via BBH. Makes sense that strategy would filter across agencies and brands beneath the banner.

Everything is going to be on-demand sooner or later and recently, there's been a lot of chatter about how to best make that work out when it comes to television. As we suspected, according to a new survey, consumers are willing to sit through ads if it means they can watch what they wan, when they want. Entertainment Media Research's 2008 Digital Entertainment Survey, which surveyed 1,608 consumers in the UK between the ages of 15 and 54 found that:

- 70% of those surveyed said that they would prefer free, ad-supported on-demand services if given the option knowing they wouldn't be able to skip the ads

- When forced to choose between two different types of paid models—pay-per-view and monthly subscriptions for unlimited content—consumers favored PPV slightly (57 percent), and EMR believes that both models can "find their own market as long as the payment terms and content on offer are sufficiently attractive."

- 46% said that they fast forward or skip past ads "all of the time," with another 33 percent saying "most of the time." Another 15 percent said they would skip ads "some of the time" and only six percent choosing rarely or never.

- 63% said that they "actively try to avoid as many television ads as possible." A note on that, yes, this is the same group that said they would trade watching ads for on demand services.

What have we learned? On demand television would make consumers happy, which could lead to more eyeballs per program. Hell, we'd watch Project Runway if we could watch it whenever we wanted. Consumers recognize that there is a price to be paid for such a service. That leaves it up to the industry to figure out how to create ads that are non-skippable in order to lock in as many eyeballs as possible. It's not a bad place to be in all considered, no?

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