I have seen a handful of great commercials this past week. A lot of that has to do with the the BCS bowl games and NFL playoffs which give advertisers a great incentive to roll out new ad campaigns to start the new year. However I am going to go with the Viacom commercial below.
The back story for the ad is that the existing contract between Time Warner cable and Viacom was set to expire at the start of the new year. Viacom whose portfolio of cable channels include MTV, VH1, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, and many others wanted an increased carriage rate from Time Warner. Time Warner thought the % was a little steep and took a hard line. These type of negotiations are very common and deadline deals are nothing new. The key here is that a deal was 99.9% going to get done no matter what. The issue is who can move the other party down more from their number as the deadline approaches. The cable company always paints the media companies as greedy unreasonable people and that they are looking out for subscribers and rising costs. Its not that hard for media companies to win this PR image contest as cable companies are some of the worst run Fortune 100 companies in America. The Viacom commercial utilizes the many faces of their diverse content to tell the story of the fictitiously pending doom on the horizon. At the end of the day, America isn’t going to side with a cable provider (always known for bad customer service) over the entertainment that they have become addicted to. The utilization of characters such as Cartman, Stephen Colbert, LC, and Dora the Explorer was a nice touch as its showcased the diversity that Viacom’s fleet of channels brings to the table.
