Morning Bulletin: Stella synaesthesia, licence plate ‘boom’ & Guardian's time-based ads
This Monday morning gets underway with a novel Stella Artois mash-up which invites drinkers to match their beer with a customised music video designed to enhance their taste. We also look at the growing appeal of licensed number plates which have become a licence to print money for the Treasury and a Guardian experiment in time-based advertising.
Ad Week raises a glass to a new music video by the Roots which is said to enhance the taste of a glass of Stella Artois by recording specific sounds which aficionados associate with particular flavours in their beer, with higher pitches used to communicate sweeter flavours and lower pitches corresponding with sour tastes.
Liverpool FC have become the latest western takeover target for the Chinese according to Business Insider, with reports suggesting that the Premier League club is the target of a $1bn takeover bid by the Chinese government.
The Guardian becomes the news at Ad Exchanger as the website reports the launch of a time-based online advertising campaign in which marketers can purchase slots of up to 30 seconds duration as an alternative to the industry standard cost per thousand views, which has long been criticised as an opaque metric.
Red-faced Olympian Ryan Lochte has become ‘radioactive’ for sponsors Speedo and Ralph Lauren as the gold medalist's financial backers watch to see if a weekend apology will put a line under a Games tarnished by the swimmer's lie about being victim of an armed robbery.
Campaign opens with a story of diverging TV viewing in Britain with commercial stations on the rise as the BBC’s own viewership declines, albeit by a relatively meagre one minute per day year on year attributed largely to the migration of BBC Three online.
A personalised number plate ‘boom’ catches the eye of the Times which says that the Treasury raised a record £102m last year from ‘motoring show offs’ keen to flaunt their distinctiveness. During this time some 335,000 registrations were sold, more than four times the comparable figure in the mid 1990’s.
Retail Week advises that JD Sports is considering a takeover of Go Outdoors in an effort to turbocharge its ambitious growth plans.
Reuters meanwhile reports that Samsung is to embark on a refurbished smartphone programme which, as the name suggests, will see it re-sell second hand phones as soon as next year. The move is being interpreted as a means to sustain mobile profits by selling each handset more than once.
The Guardian picks up on a decision by the BBC to sell the music rights to the likes of Luther, Wolf Hall and Doctor Who to publisher BMG, which has now obtained the rights to more than 1,000 theme tunes, background tracks and incidental tunes which it can now license to advertisers, studios and others.