DETROIT (AdAge.com) — Honda is feeling the love these days. American Honda Motor Co.’s vehicle line is in the midst of what it deems a very successful social-marketing blitz that the marketer has dubbed the “Social Experiment.”

Honda’s ‘Everybody Knows Somebody Who Loves a Honda’ Facebook page

In August, Honda quietly launched an official Facebook page, themed “Everybody Knows Somebody Who Loves a Honda,” to recruit fans of the brand. Owners are encouraged to join as overall Honda fans as well as fans of a specific model, and to learn how they are connected to friends, family members and other owners around the world. Visitors can upload photos of their cars or link up to owners of their favorite old Honda.

Honda initially supported the site with a sprinkling of ads on Facebook. “It wasn’t a big media buy, but it got a lot of attention,” said Tom Peyton, senior manager-national advertising. Earlier this month, TV was added to the mix, with 15- and 30-second spots featuring actual owners. The commercials were created by Honda’s longtime agency, independent RPA, Santa Monica, which developed the concept. The buy, also handled by RPA, encompasses prime-time programming such as “30 Rock,” “How I Met Your Mother,” “Dancing With the Stars” and NFL football.

The campaign got a huge boost after a one-day targeted homepage takeover Oct. 19 on high-reach sites, including ESPN.com, CNN.com and SportsYahoo.com. That more than doubled the number of Facebook fans into the range of 1.7 million. (As of press time Oct. 22, the number had topped 2 million).

The results thus far have blown away Mr. Peyton, who felt at the campaign’s onset that “If we got a million connections, that would be cool.” He called the push “a pretty powerful piece of advertising because people are buying into it and we aren’t giving anything away.”

Following football
This week, Honda added a new online hub for the brand campaign at love.honda.com. The site links to the Facebook page and contains all three TV spots, along with interviews of the 20-plus owners in the commercials. Visitors can also get more information about specific Honda models.

Mr. Peyton called the blitz “pretty viral, with only a little advertising,” and said he can track which ad mediums are generating spikes of Facebook log-ins. A TV spot on MTV might generate a few hundred people joining the experiment the day after, but 50,000 people would sign up the day after a TV ad during an NFL game. “So,” he said, “TV isn’t dead,” but rather an adjunct to community-based marketing. Still, he called word-of-mouth the “oldest and arguably the most potent advertising you can do.”

The marketer spent nearly $565 million in U.S. measured media last year, an 8.5% drop from 2007, according to TNS Media Intelligence.

Honda isn’t using the exercise as a way to expand its database of prospects. “We aren’t collecting names and e-mails, and we are not going to hound these people,” Mr. Peyton said. “We are learning, like everyone else, what we are permitted to do with these kinds of things.”

So Honda is connecting a community, but will the campaign, due to run until late in the year, sell cars? “That’s what I’m going to try to figure out,” Mr. Peyton said. “At the end of the day, I am putting some pennies back into my brand piggy bank.”

In 2004, the automaker tried something similar on Honda.com, encouraging owners to post photos of their own faces and match them with a Honda model. That effort, also developed by RPA, was themed “Love” and included related TV spots. But Mr. Peyton said there were no mega social-networking sites back then, so that push “wasn’t as developed” as this one.

The Honda brand’s U.S. new-vehicle sales slid by 24% in the first nine months of the year to 805,508 units as compared to the same year-ago period.

Microsoft planned to announce Wednesday that it had fully integrated posts from Twitter into the search results of Bing, according to people with knowledge of the company’s plans. The company also planned to announce that it had integrated Facebook status updates into Bing, according to a person with knowledge of the plans.

The announcement will be made by Qi Lu, president of Microsoft’s online services division, during a presentation at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco beginning at 11:30 local time. Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president for Microsoft’s online audience business group, will conduct a demo of the service.

Representatives for Microsoft and Twitter declined to comment. A Facebook spokesman, Larry Yu, said the the company doesn’t comment on speculation.

The deal with Twitter, which was expected to be nonexclusive, had been in the works for several weeks, and Microsoft engineers had already integrated Tweets into Bing. The terms of the deal are not likely to be disclosed, but a person familiar with the negotiations said it involved a payment from Microsoft to Twitter.

It is unclear how much progress Bing has made integrating Facebook updates. But Microsoft and Facebook have been allies since October 2007, when Microsoft paid $240 million for a stake.

The deals are something of a coup for Microsoft. Both Microsoft and Google have talked with Twitter about getting access to the company’s real-time stream of conversations. In June, Bing made a first stab at offering real-time search results from Twitter, integrating tweets from some select users into its search service.

The deals will further since Microsoft unveiled the revamped search service in May.

News of the deals with Twitter and Facebook were first reported by AllThingsD, an industry blog.

LOS ANGELES (AdAge.com) — Just how tough has the media space become? The nation’s top 100 media companies eked out 0.8% revenue growth in 2008 — and the reported revenue for top media firms in the first half of this year fell 4.3% from a year ago, according to Ad Age’s analysis.

So not only was last year’s Media 100 revenue growth the lowest since 1991, this year it’s on track to show the first decline since Ad Age began ranking top media firms in 1981.

Remarkably, 11 of last year’s Media 100 firms have plunged into bankruptcy reorganization, overwhelmed in most cases by shrinking revenue and debt loads taken on during the blind optimism of the boom. Print media dominate the bankruptcy list: six newspaper companies, two magazine publishers and two yellow-pages publishers.

That points to the momentum going toward digital-media firms, right? Not so fast. Interactive is a mixed bag of hype and hope, with media revenue surging in 2008 at Google (up 23.2%) and flagging at Microsoft Corp. And when it comes to revenue, Facebook and Twitter aren’t worth Twittering about at this stage.

Instead, media’s hottest spots are cable networks, cable systems and satellite TV. U.S. media revenue in those sectors climbed 7.4% in 2008, making them the Media 100’s standout performers.

Worse and worse
In fact, if you factor out cable systems/satellite TV, Media 100 revenue in 2008 shows a decline of 2.2%. Numbers in 2009 are far worse: Reported revenue for major media companies through the first half of 2009, excluding cable systems/satellite TV, was down 8.3% from a year ago, according to the Ad Age DataCenter.

Ad Age’s 100 Leading Media Companies report offers a bottom-up view of the media business, tallying revenue from an array of products and services. Revenue sources include advertising, subscriptions, sales of movie tickets and DVDs, and fees from TV production/licensing.

Taking all that into account, the top 100’s U.S. media revenue last year totaled $301.5 billion, surpassing $300 billion for the first time. Spending growth (0.8%) essentially paralleled growth in U.S. gross domestic product (0.4%) in 2008, the first year of the recession.

It’s no surprise that ad spending is severely depressed: U.S. measured-media ad spending fell 4.1% in 2008 and then plunged 14.3% in the first half of 2009, according to WPP’s TNS Media Intelligence.

Media 100 revenue is holding up better because of the diversity of revenue sources. Subscription and fee revenues, for example, are faring better than ad revenue.

Comcast on top
Time Warner said ad revenue fell 15% in the first half of 2009, but subscription revenue slipped only 2%. Comcast Corp., the nation’s largest cable-systems operator, saw cable revenue — mainly subscriptions to cable services — grow 8% in 2008 (on a pro forma basis, adjusting for acquisitions and dispositions) and 5.1% in the first half of 2009.

Comcast displaced Time Warner as the nation’s largest media company in this report after Time Warner in March completed a spinoff of Time Warner Cable as a standalone company. Comcast’s 2008 media revenue ($29 billion) is just below the U.S. media revenue ($29.5 billion) of the entire top 100 in Ad Age’s first report, published in 1981.

Time Warner had held the No. 1 spot since 1995. It is on track to rank No. 3 (behind Walt Disney Co.) in next fall’s Media 100 report after its planned spinoff of AOL as a separate public company later this year.

Five of the 10 largest media firms are cable/satellite players: Comcast, DirecTV Group, Time Warner Cable, Cox Enterprises and Dish Network. In 2008, the sector accounted for one-third of media revenue for the Media 100.

Not all cable companies fared well. Charter Communications, a debt-laden cable service, filed for bankruptcy, making it the 11th big media firm in Chapter 11.

Newspapers on bottom
Sector performance varies widely in the Media 100. The biggest losers are no surprise: newspapers, where revenue plunged 13.5% in 2008. Magazines did better, with revenue falling 6.9%. Revenue for broadcast TV (including networks and local stations) dropped 4.6%.

Revenue for the Media 100’s digital sector rose 3.6% last year. Digital was held in check by declines in media revenue at AOL, EarthLink and Microsoft.

Media 100 digital-revenue breakouts aren’t all-inclusive; many companies report digital revenue as part of their mainstay divisions (newspapers, magazines or TV, for example).

Cable networks’ revenue rose a robust 7.4% in 2008. That sector has outperformed network TV in ad-revenue growth. Cable networks also get the benefit of fee revenue, effectively paid by consumers to cable systems and passed on to cable networks.

What about all those media bankruptcies? Chapter 11 is not the final chapter. Newspapers, magazines and cable systems continue to operate while media companies work to slash crippling debt. The media industry’s financial restructuring is costly for lenders and private-equity firms that placed bad bets in the boom. But the media industry is poised to emerge with less debt and stronger balance sheets.

Companies in declining categories such as newspapers can emerge from Chapter 11, but that hardly resolves more basic issues. They still must grapple with a consumer media market in flux, shrinking revenue, weak ad spending and little upside offered by a tepid economic recovery. The next chapter has yet to be written.

The AMC TV series “Mad Men” is becoming known for the care its makers take to insure that everything viewers see reflects the period in which the show is set. This season, it’s 1963, and in the episode that was shown on Sunday, it was early July when two mainstay characters, the adman Don Draper (Jon Hamm) and the now-former office manager Joan Holloway (Christina Hendricks) found themselves in a waiting room in a hospital sharing Dr Peppers from a vending machine.

The brand’s presence in the scene took one viewer who grew up in New York City by surprise. Sure, the verisimilitude was perfect: the machine vended bottles of Dr Pepper, not cans (for 10 cents each!).

And the period ad slogan of Dr Pepper was prominent: “10, 2, 4,” conveying that Dr Pepper was good to drink at 10, 2 or 4 or any other time of the day or night.

No, the viewer was surprised because he has a hard time remembering seeing much of Dr Pepper in the New York of the 1960s. It was not until years later that Dr Pepper found widespread distribution in the city after the Coca-Cola Bottling Company of New York agreed to sell it. Before then, he recalls, it could be found in candy stores and groceries here and there — but vending machines were not exactly commonplace.

And if the hospital Joan and Don were visiting was in Manhattan, where the make-believe ad agency Sterling Cooper is located, the Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola vending machines far outnumbered the Dr Pepper machines in July 1963.

(Not to give away too much of the plot of the episode, but it would seem for certain reasons that the hospital had to be as close to the Sterling Cooper office as possible.)

So what’s the deal? It turns out that Dr Pepper’s role in the scene was part reality, part branded entertainment.

According to Greg Artkop, a spokesman for the Dr Pepper Snapple Group, which now owns Dr Pepper, the request for the vending machine “came from set decoration” on behalf of the “Mad Men” production team and “we put them in touch with the Dr Pepper Museum for bottles and the appropriate imagery.”

Another brand sold by Dr Pepper Snapple is Canada Dry, which has a season-long partnership with “Mad Men” for the current season. The agreement includes a “custom heritage vignette” developed by AMC, Mr. Artkop said, recalling past Canada Dry advertising; it runs during episodes of the series along with regular, current commercials.

There are also slide cards onscreen before the Canada Dry spots come on, recounting facts about the brand. And Canada Dry will sponsor the season finale of “Mad Men,” Mr. Artkop said, with a 60-second version of the vignette to appear in that episode.

As for Dr Pepper’s presence in New York City in 1963, “it was distributed by independent bottlers in the area,” he added, and according to information in the archives, the top bottlers in New York included two located in the boroughs of the Bronx and Brooklyn.

The top bottlers in New Jersey, the archives show, were in Elizabeth and Union City, both near New York City.

So would a real-life Joan and Don have been drinking Dr Pepper in the waiting room? Again, not to give away too much of the plot, but certainly any such qualms are minor compared with what the folks who sell John Deere riding mowers must be thinking.

CNBC’s Advertising Week summit on how marketers connect to consumers could have been called “No, really, we love TV!” The discussion was intended to be a free-roaming exploration about consumer passion, authenticity, and marketing challenges in a world that has little trust for business. But the gravitational pull of Facebook (whose COO Sheryl Sandberg was, appropriately enough, seated dead center) kept the conversation on social media.

The apparent subtext that TV might need to get its affairs in order wasn’t lost on host Becky Quick, co-host of CNBC’s “Squawk Box” show, who rhetorically asked more than once whether she would have a job next year.

“Television is still important,” said Dan Rosensweig, president and CEO of Guitar Hero. “People have to re-think how they advertise. At Guitar Hero we took 40% of our budget that used to be on TV and it moved to the Internet. Television is wonderful, but when you have incredible sites like Facebook, you have to be smart with what you do, where your consumer is and how to reach them all the time.”

He said the change was hard to sell to a skeptical employee base at first. “Guitar Hero was very successful, so I had to sit there and make the case. But if you look at Guitar Hero 5, we have nearly a million fans on Facebook. Where else can you find a million people who say, ‘I love your product — please communicate with me?’”

Pam El, VP marketing at State Farm, was candid about her product’s lack of luster compared to, well, Guitar Hero. “[Rosensweig] has the coolest product on the planet; Sheryl [Sandberg] has the coolest way for people to talk to each other, and David [Jones, global CEO of Havas Worldwide, also on the panel] is just cool. But here at State Farm, we sell insurance. It’s not cool.”

She said that while the company uses Facebook to generate some emotional energy with consumers, “more importantly, we are moving into the community, so you will see us in high school and sports arenas — so we are not only shifting media out of TV but out of the traditional media period into grassroots sponsorships.”

On TV, El said, State Farm is doing fewer 30-second ads and more product placement and integration. Online, she says, the real competition is not other insurance companies, but companies like Guitar Hero.

“Now we are going after younger adults and Hispanics, which makes it that much more challenging. We are using Lebron James in a lot of our commercials,” she said, adding that the latest campaign directed at the Hispanic market centers on telenovelas, with branded integration with “Entertainment Tonight.” El said State Farm is also doing a marketing campaign that centers around the theme of “being there,” starring the likes of Denzel Washington talking about what it means to “be there” for his wife and kids.

David Jones, global CEO of Havas, said the holding company did a survey 18 months ago, wherein 86% of respondents felt companies should stand for more than profit. “One thing that will change post-Madoff and post-economic crisis is — consumers are going to be passionate about businesses that are socially responsible,” he said, adding that 80% of respondents to the company’s 2008 survey said consumers should censure unethical companies.

NEW YORK Social media has gained significant traction this year as a marketing tool, according to a new survey from the Association of National Advertisers, BtoB Magazine and marketing services firm Mktg.

The study found that 66 percent of marketers have used social media in 2009, compared to 20 percent in 2007. Fifty percent have employed viral videos so far this year, up from only 25 percent in 2007.

The survey was conducted online in June and is based on responses from 172 client-side marketers.

Facebook was the most popular venue, with 74 percent of respondents saying they used the site for marketing purposes. YouTube and Twitter followed with 65 percent each, and LinkedIn tallied 60 percent, according to the study.

Search engine marketing was cited as the most effective new-media platform by 65 percent of respondents, while 59 percent cited their own Web sites. Search engine optimization was selected by 55 percent, while 45 percent chose e-mail marketing. Company-owned Web sites will get most of the money earmarked for new-media platforms, according to 26 percent of the respondents, while 19 percent said search-engine marketing would get the biggest share and 17 percent said it would go to online advertising.

More than half of the respondents (55 percent) said they shifted funds from traditional media budgets to execute social media campaigns, while 48 percent said they took money from marketing communications budgets. Twenty-six percent said they created an incremental budget.

The top concerns for marketers when considering newer media platforms are the inability to prove ROI (45 percent) and a lack of metrics to properly allocate the mix of traditional and digital media (43 percent).

Commenting on the results in a statement, ANA president and CEO Bob Liodice said: “As more media platforms become available, it is imperative that all marketers continue to assess their capabilities and select the platforms that are best suited to help them meet their brand’s goals and objectives. With this proliferation of media, marketers must work harder, survey the entire landscape available to them and create their brand’s most optimal media mix.”

The study also revealed differences in the ways business-to-business and business-to-consumer marketers use new media platforms. While mobile is used by 32 percent of overall marketers, it is three times more likely to be used by b-to-c marketers. LinkedIn rates first with b-to-b marketers while Facebook is top among b-to-c marketers.

Twitter is used more by b-to-b marketers (70 percent) than b-to-c marketers (46 percent). B-to-c marketers see more effectiveness from SEM (76 percent) than b-to-b marketers (48 percent).

In the next year, blogs are expected to be the hottest new marketing channel, according to 34 percent of the respondents not already using the platform, while 28 percent cited mobile and 23 percent cited social media.