Battle of the Brands

It’s just one more stroke of genius for the empire that Steve Jobs built. Despite having more cash on hand than any of its competitors, Apple never has to pay for Hollywood to place its products in film and TV shows.

Per an article in Bloomberg Businessweek by San Francisco-based Peter Burroughs and LA-located Andy Fixmer, this no-cost sideline is booming:

The company’s gadgets were discussed or shown 891 times on TV in 2011, up from 613 in 2009, according to researcher Nielsen (NLSN). In the same year, iDevices appeared in more than 40 percent of the movies that topped the weekly box office, according to Brandchannel, which tracks product appearances. That’s nearly twice the penetration of the next most common brands in Hollywood—Dell (DELL), Chevy (GM), and Ford (F).

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Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews.

In honor of this weekend’s premiere of the fifth season of Mad Men, the folks at nostalgia magazine Reminisce have racked up a very tasty slide show.

Various now politically incorrect print ads from the 1960s have been dug up and married with some right-margin, Don Draper-worthy patter. There are sixteen slides in all, including a trio of anachronistic cigarette pitches.

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The name of LA’s latest health and wellness beverage, Mr. Pink Ginseng Drink, has a certain retro-ring. That’s because long before Boardwalk Empire, actor Steve Buscemi was of course Mr. Pink in Quentin Tarantino‘s feature debut Reservoir Dogs. “Why am I Mr. Pink? Why can’t we pick our own colors?” he complained in the film.

At the other end of the mental trigger scale for this new product is, less fortunately, porn website MrPink.com. But… in today’s mainstreamed society of titillation, it could be argued that any associative publicity is good associative publicity.

Further compounding the circa-1992 flavor is the last name of one of the drink company execs. Seriously, if you’re a hardcore QT fan, this may have to be your spring 2012 beverage of choice:

“We are happy to offer Mr. Pink to discerning Hollywood consumers,” says Marty Brown, COO of Mr. Pink Beverages. “Its ginseng-based formula is designed to support healthy, pure vitality and does more than simply energize – it promotes well-being.”

Previously on FishbowlLA:
Jason Reitman’s Reservoir Dogs Rocks the LACMA House

We never get tired of reading about Jonathan Goldsmith, the now 73-year-old actor who portrays the “Most Interesting Man in the World” in those Dos Equis beer ads.

The latest reporter to chime in with what is actually one of the best pieces yet is Ad Age‘s E.J. Schultz. The impact Goldsmith’s Fernando Lamas-inspired character has made on U.S. sales of the double-X brew is truly remarkable. One of the best things about this particular article are the details about the actor’s early days. After being thrown off a horse on the set of Gunsmoke, Goldsmith eventually found his stride in 1960s-70s TV shows, leading to an encounter with The Most Iconic Movie Star in the World:

He was maimed by the best, as in the 1976 movie The Shootist, with John Wayne firing at his head. Mr. Goldsmith was pelted repeatedly with so many blood capsules that the director spurred him on with, “Everybody who got shot in the head by Wayne made it big-time,” Mr. Goldsmith recalled. Laughing about it now, he added, “40 years later, here comes Dos Equis.”

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When James Cameron sang the praises of his Chevy Volt on a recent episode of Nightline, it seemed like the kind of celebrity PR that would be hard for GM to beat. But as of this week, the Detroit auto maker has a brand new EV benchmark–Jay Leno on half a tank of gas.

In conjunction with the Los Angeles Auto Show, which opens to the public Friday, Leno has been giving interviews about his love of the electric car and participated in a special preview event yesterday. He told the New York Times that the Volt has become his daily commute car of choice, quite a statement when you consider the talk show host has about 300 gassed up vehicles to choose from:

The comedian said he had put about 11,000 miles on his Chevrolet Volt in the last 11 months. “They gave it to me with a full tank of gas,” he said. The tank, by the way, holds 9.3 gallons. “I’ve used less than half of that…”

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A lesser known piece of reality TV kingpin Mark Burnett‘s empire is the Van Nuys located VIMBY, which stands for Video In My BackYard. With local crews in about three dozen American cities, the company has provided customized video content for a whole range of clients including Macy’s, Mazda and Red Bull.

Now, together with LA’s ChannelPort Communications, KABC and BBC America, VIMBY is getting ready to turn on arguably its biggest showcase yet. Per an LA Times report by Joe Flint and Greg Braxton, the in-restaurant McDonald’s TV channel is being officially served up after beta runs in LA, San Diego and Las Vegas:

The McDonald’s channel is being rolled out slowly during the next few months and will soon be up in 800 McDonald’s restaurants in Southern and Central California…

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Last night’s Bill Weir interview with James Cameron on Nightline wasn’t just the first on-camera look at the filmmaker’s 100-acre off-the-grid oceanfront compound north of Santa Barbara. It was also a fantastic commercial for the Chevy Volt, albeit engineered from a much broader initial segment blueprint.

“ABC News approached us a couple of months ago with the idea that they wanted to do a story on electric vehicles,” explains Rob Peterson, a spokesperson for Chevrolet Volt, on the phone with FishbowlLA from Detroit. “They asked us if there was a high-profile Volt owner we could recommend.”

“Mr. Cameron has been an advocate of plug-in hybrid vehicles for many years,” he continues. “We knew that he could be the right person for the story. We had a contact in California who could reach out to him and find out it was alright to put ABC News in touch. From that point forward, it was between Nightline and Cameron.”

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Since perception in LA is everything, FishbowlLA imagines that some readers will adjust their EV habits so as to be seen at one of the three area locations included on Ford’s list of the 20 Cool Places to Charge Your Electric Vehicle. But not us.

We don’t care that Ford thinks it’s niftier to juice back up at the LA Convention Center, Fashion Island in Newport Beach or the Malibu Country Mart. No, as long as the contraption works, we’re fine if it’s at the back of a Boyle Heights 7/11, next to the broken restroom. Per the release:

Each [top 20] location was evaluated based on a variety of factors including proximity to a view or landmark or dining and shopping opportunities. Ford is tracking more than 3,000 public charge stations in 2011, and expects that figure to quadruple by the end of 2013, indicating that this is an exciting and dynamic time for electric vehicle infrastructure.

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The August 31 LA Groupon deal dangles a $940 discount for a trio of “Venus Freeze skin tightening treatments.” Each procedure requires between 25 and 40 minutes at the Beverly Hills offices of Advance Lipo.

And just in case an 84% reduction in price is not enough to entice email deal subscribers, the folks at Groupon have stirred the cosmetic pot with a bizarre analogy. They compare the potential discounted end results not to a Kardashian or an Arabian stallion, but rather a non-descript automobile:

Much like an automobile, the human body requires proper care to stay healthy and good-looking for calendar photos. Maintain your natural mode of transportation with today’s offer… Firmer body bark emerges… Touting minimal side effects such as redness, heat, and temporary flame tattoos around treated areas, patients are free to return to their regularly scheduled lives soon after the treatment.

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The copywriters at Deutsch/LA who operate the Twitter account of fake Sony PlayStation vice president Kevin Butler capped off the end of another workweek on Friday with this surprise tweet:

This left TFTS.com blogger Kevin Schram trying to figure out whether Butler’s new job title(s) at a Foster City, CA flooring company–president, shag division; president, laminate laminating—signal the end of the TV ad campaign starring actor Jerry Lambert and associated social media imprint.

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