And the Oscar Winner Is Big-Event Television

AND THE OSCAR WINNER IS BIG-EVENT TELEVISION
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Stuart Elliott]
The Super Bowl and Grammy Awards are barely memories, but Madison Avenue is already beating the drum for the next big live television event, the Oscars. For the Feb. 25 broadcast of the 79th annual Academy Awards ceremony, ABC, the longtime Oscar network, has already sold all the commercials it plans to run during the show. The buyers are a score of blue-chip marketers that include AT&T, Bank of America, Coca-Cola, Eastman Kodak, General Motors, Mars, MasterCard, McDonald’s, Microsoft, J. C. Penney and Unilever. Some of those advertisers — among them, AT&T, Coca-Coca, G.M. and Kodak — are doubling down, sponsoring awards coverage on an official Web site, oscar.com, along with the show. And in another indication of the growing importance of the new media, ABC is for the first time talking to marketers about buying mobile ads that would accompany content for cellphone users. The sold-out sign for the broadcast went up a bit earlier than last year, despite slightly higher prices. ABC, part of the Walt Disney Company, is charging an estimated $1.7 million for each 30 seconds of commercial time during the show, compared with around $1.65 million last year and $1.6 million in 2005.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/16/business/media/16adco.html
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