This Month’s Philly Ad News features this article written by me.

It talks all about how advertisers can work activate their TV advertising campaigns with Online, SMS, and 1-800# data capture to create event-level marketing.  Now, even though the applications for these programs are easily seen with live TV events like Sports and News, that they can be just as effective with scripted programming like repeats of dramas, comedies, and classic movies.

Let’s use L&O. Tough on dirt BrandX cleaner wants to sponsor a “Best of Lenny Briscoe” week and creates a web site for the two or three weeks before that asks people to choose their favorite Lenny moments, participate in polls about characters, and enter a sweepstakes for a trip to NYC. People can enter on the site, or via SMS or 1-800-number. During the broadcasts, sponsored bumps can ask special questions that can be only be answered during that broadcast, and a discrete bug can show those results [“Would you have married Lenny?” “Who’s your favorite partner?”] and the next commercial break could show a breakdown of that market with those answers, same as the online site. You could even take comments from the site or Tweets from the #<3Lenny tag [that have been cleared by an admin, of course] and let them scroll across the screen.

It could be a one week event for a syndicated schedule, an on-going program for a weekly program, or a one night event like the National Report Card. By packaging the TV, the online, the SMS, and the 1-800-number, you have multiple media channels covered and provide multiple places for advertising insertions and conversion. Want to add radio? Sure. Outdoor? Of course. Each point just adds a new method of reaching people where they already are. You are reaching them where they are, how they are consuming your media. More importantly, you are making your consumers part of the media, part of the content that they love and respond to increasing their awareness of it.

I would love to see a brand take on the 8/pm showing of TBS’s ‘A Christmas Story’ and take 2 weeks to build up excitement online and through social media asking questions and creating polls leading up to a special annotated fan edition of the program.  Without breaking the story, and utilizing limited commercial interruptions, the brand could engage a fan base that already knows every word of the script by heart to sing along, make up new words, help define their favorite fake curse words, pick their favorite character or worst Christmas present ever, or back up Christmas dinner.  In living rooms, in bar rooms, in bed rooms, all over America people would be interacting with each other and the content they love, and seeing themselves reflecting back on the big shiny box.

Or for Star Wars, Or the Wizard Oz, Or Legally Blonde, Or Tuesday Night repeats of Tough Love, Or the Treehouse of Horrors week on the Simpsons…

To download a pdf of the article, please click here.

See RTM’s Case Study on the CNN National Report Card, the Second 200 Days.

Yes, I love Law & Order.