GM's New Commercial Spot

I guess desperate times call for desperate measures because General Motors is measuring their new commercial spot with some new methods. Years ago (yes, back when the economy was good....) an automakers commercial would have been measured by weekend sales and foot traffic to the dealership. Not today, it's measured by positive feedback from bloggers and analysts.

The spot features Chairman/CEO Ed Whitacre walking through a dealership and speaking to you, the buyer.

AdAge.com wrote this article earlier in the week and I'm stunned by the fact that GM actually is speaking on how successful the spot was from a consumer and blogger point of view, as opposed to the fact that it actually moved units!

Click here to read the article.

Couric Isn't Leaving CBS Anytime Soon...

Early Morning television was designed for someone like Katie Couric, not hard hitting headline news. While I do think she has some talent and her one on one interviews are often great, the headline news crowd is not one for Katie Couric.

TVWeek is reporting that she is staying through the end of her contract which is over in 2011. I don't expect that to happen though as we typically see networks get antsy months in advance.

I think it's safe to say that the experiment hasn't worked out so well....

Will We See More Talk Shows in Prime?

The big debate started last week on whether Jay Leno's new 10pm time slot would be successful. Many within the industry believe it will either make NBC look brilliant, or it will absolutely bomb and people can say, "told you so!"

Advertising Age brings up a good point though, no matter what it does, the Jay Leno show is cheap and it replaces 5 hours of programming that would otherwise be expensive. So while some call the move cheap, the other big 3 will be copying it very quickly if Leno turns out to be a hit in that time period.