NY Post: Jarrod Moses Discusses The NBA Lockout's Effect On Advertising

United Entertainment Group CEO, Jarrod Moses, was quoted in the New York Post this morning to shed light on the way the NBA is approaching advertisers post-lockout.  Full article below:

The NBA and its TV partners are scrambling to make ufor 16 missed games and an estimated $100 million in lost ad revenue as a result of the league’s 149-day lockout.

Rival networks that don’t air NBA games were able to poach advertisers that normally would buy time on nets that do carry the NBA, including Time Warner’s TNT/TBS, Disney’s ESPN and ABC, Madison Square Garden and the YES Network.

Now the league’s broadcasting partners are trying to woo back advertisers, including offering them attractive rates if they buy ad packages for the remainder of this season and into next year, ad executives said.

“They’re scrambling, but they’re also being humble,” said Jarrod Moses, the CEO of United Entertainment Group, which reps NBA advertisers. “They’re being apologetic and asking for forgiveness as they’re asking for the check.”

Moses said the NBA’s broadcast partners are dangling “futures” deals to some advertisers who commit to buying time during this season and the 2012-13 season. “There’ll be significant effort to create local promotions and on-site activations to make up for the . . . loss of income,” he said.

Still, the nets that carry the NBA may be hard pressed to entice advertisers who got sweetheart deals from rivals, especially young-male-skewed networks like Spike and MTV, he said.

While live sports is a strong corner of the TV ad market, the fourth-quarter scatter market — or ad time sold closer to the actual air date — has been weak, making it more difficult for NBA partners to pin down whatever money is still in play.

Although the first game will be played Dec. 25 at Madison Square Garden, broadcasters are still waiting for word on the NBA’s revised 2011-12 schedule, which likely won’t be released until next week at the earliest.

“Fourth quarter, there is not a lot of inventory, there’s not a lot of games,” Turner Sports President David Levy told The Post. “We’re focusing on first-quarter scatter, and we already have a strong base of NBA corporate advertisers.”

Advertisers spent some $805 million last season on TV ads during NBA games, according to Kantar Media. Some $103 million was spent during November and December alone across the big three ad partners — ABC, ESPN and TNT/TBS — according to Sports Business Journal.

Of course, some advertisers are eager to get back into the NBA game. One big sports marketer said her firm was pitched hard by rival sports programmers, including the National Hockey League, Major League Baseball and Major League Soccer, to replace canceled NBA games. The marketer said she switched NBA ad dollars to network TV and digital alternatives on a week-to-week basis while she waited for the lockout to end.

NBA officials didn’t immediately comment.

The Cool Kids Sat in the Back

UEG's VP of Brand Strategy, Chris Ebbesen, attended Y Combinator's (YC) first ever Ad Innovation Conference in Mountain View, CA.

The conference promised to introduce the advertising and marketing community to 15 or so YC backed early stage companies that offer the promise of what is to come as advertising and technology become more and more entertwined.

Read more about the companies and what happened at the conference at iMediaConnection, where Chris has written about his experience.

Mean Stinks: Secret Deodorant Sees Engagement (and Sales) Rise

AdAge:

Racking up six- and seven-figure fan counts on Facebook is remarkably commonplace (with more than 100 brands now at a million or more fans and more than 500 with 100,000 so far). Getting fans to ever engage with a brand page again after falling in like with it is much less common.

But Procter & Gamble Co.'s Secret deodorant appears to be having unusual success generating engagement around a "Mean Stinks" program that combats bullying -- one that also appears to be helping brand sales.

Since launching the "Mean Stinks" program, which has also included a publicity tie-in with "Glee's" Amber Riley and an iAd campaign launched last month, Secret's already strong sales growth kicked up a notch. The brand had momentum anyway, with a current streak of 17 consecutive quarters of share growth, according to P&G. Sales are up 8% to around $250 million in channels tracked by SymphonyIRI for the 52 weeks ended July 10, but they're up an even faster 9% for the 26 weeks ended June 26, a period affected by the "Mean Stinks" campaign that launched in January on Facebook. Secret, already the leading U.S. deodorant, saw its share rise 0.6 points for the past 52 weeks and 0.7 points for the first half of 2011.

Agencies working on the campaign include Leo Burnett Co. for advertising, IMC2 for Digital, Marina Maher Communications for PR, UEG for entertainment and iProspect for search.

Read more at AdAge.com