A Mist-Takes Spot

Sierra Mist, which has put comedians at the forefront of its marketing strategy since the brand launched in 2001, is planning to expand the theme with an online contest for animated shorts and a multi-episode TV series based on its “Stand Up or Sit Down” comedy competition.

Last year’s “Stand Up” challenge delivered 5 billion impressions on MySpace and resulted in a one-hour TBS special, writes the Hollywood Reporter. This year, Mist will run another online search, this time for the best animated content. Last year’s winner, Steve Byrne, was selected by a panel of judges and MySpace users out of a pool of over 700. Byrne won a $50,000 development deal with TBS and a comedy tour with the Improv chain.

Mist’s entire ad budget is dedicated to comedic spots with its Mist-takes improv group; it also devotes the bulk of its marketing to the development and sponsorship of comedic talent via content and live comedy festivals, a strategy aimed at the brand’s core demo of 20-29-year-olds.

With the fastest growing segment of its sales coming from Latino customers, Sierra Mist is also planning its first search for a Latino comedian. The brand has extended its comedy ad campaign into Spanish-language territory with a separate comedy troupe and ads on Univision and Telemundo.

The practice of buying a competitor’s trademarked terms as a keyword via Google’s AdWords has long been a source of controversy - Google and Rescuecom have been litigating the issue since September 2004 - but Google wants advertisers to be able to do exactly that, writes InformationWeek.

Google has laid out its argument for a federal judge, saying it does not infringe on the trademark of a company when it allows the company’s competitors to buy that trademarked term as a keyword. Google points out that the trademarked term is not used in the ad creative that the user sees, and that it’s used solely in the system’s background to trigger the ad’s appearance.

The brief filed by Google points to offline advertising and marketing practices, such as the display of competing products next to each other on supermarket shelves or coupons in a newspaper. Such placements are paid for and are part of a strategy to lure the attention of consumers from one brand to the other, in essence playing off the trademark of one company to bolster the image of a competitor. Such placements do not misrepresent the competitive product in question, and the situation is analogous to a keyword buy, Google says.

In its counter-argument, Rescuecom says consumers may be used to such real-world practices, but they cannot make such differentiations online. It says when a user submits a search based on a particular keyword, such as a trademarked name or term, the user expects both organic and paid results to be directly relevant to that search term.

Google’s YouTube and a company called Live Digital have complied with subpoenas to turn over the identities of their users who illegally uploaded episodes of Fox series 24 and The Simpsons, Internet News reports.

“We intend to use the information provided to pursue all available legal remedies against those who infringed our copyrights,” said 20th Century Fox Television Vice-President of Media Relations Chris Alexander.

Fox says it found four episodes of the series 24 on YouTube before the episodes debuted on the network. Episodes of The Simpsons also appeared on YouTube; 12 episodes were uploaded by the YouTube-user named “ECOTotal.” Episodes of the Fox shows were placed on Live Digital by user “Jorge Romero.”

The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on Jan. 18 granted the identical subpoenas, which were based on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act; L.A. law firm Loeb & Loeb filed them on behalf of Fox. The subpoenas were served on Jan. 24, ordering Google and Live Digital to produce the identifying information.