Advanced Advertising 2.0: Lessons From CMO Kevin George

Kevin George brought belief in interactive-TV marketing from Unilever
to the parent company of Jim Beam, and wants marketers to bring him
more ideas.

"Push us," the global
chief marketing officer at Beam Global Spirits & Wine told
marketers at the Advanced Advertising 2.0 conference in New York Monday,
organized by Multichannel News and Broadcasting &
Cable
magazines.

At Unilever, where he last was head of the deodorant and health care
business lines, George worked on about two dozen ITV campaigns. For Axe
body spray, a customized video-on-demand sponsorship on Adult Swim
drew created with Brightline
iTV drew so many viewers, it was the fifth-highest rated program
(out of 75) on that Cartoon Network late-night block. That was in 2005. The
video was about a fictional Alaska town called Ravenstoke that
doused itself in Axe to attract women, who came by the hundreds. (Watch the clip here.)

"If you're a 16-year-old boy, you love that," George said. Unilever
learned from that effort that "cleverly and thoughtfully placed content
in a digital VOD environment could get people to opt in -- we saw it in
far greater numbers than we saw online," he said.

Click here for the full article on Multichannel.com.

Kent Gibbons

Kent has been a journalist, writer and editor at Multichannel News since 1994 and with Broadcasting+Cable since 2010. He is a good point of contact for anything editorial at the publications and for Nexttv.com. Before joining Multichannel News he had been a newspaper reporter with publications including The Washington Times, The Poughkeepsie (N.Y.) Journal and North County News.