Y & R; Debuts New Lincoln Campaign; Tickets.com Retains 24/7
RiechesBaird Advertising in Irvine has landed an additional $3.5 million in billings.
The OC agency recently was tapped to handle the creative account for Irvine-based The Return Exchange, a year-old company that uses online auctions to help retailers minimize losses from returned merchandise.
“It’s a business-to-business market leader of brand new technology that will change how retailers do business,” says Ray Baird, an agency partner. “It fits us perfectly. It’s all about business-to-business.”
RiechesBaird, which focuses on business-to-business advertising, competed with three undisclosed agencies in a competitive review that opened in October. The agency will handle The Return Exchange’s creative, media buying, direct mail (online and traditional), Web development and public relations.
The win pushes RiechesBaird’s capitalized billings to about $35 million. The agency is OC’s 15th largest ad agency according to the Business Journal’s annual list.
Y & R; Touts Lincoln’s Luxury
Young & Rubicam’s Irvine office, with help from its colleagues in New York, broke a new campaign for Lincoln during the “GQ Men of the Year Awards” Dec. 9 on Fox.
The ad shop developed one exclusive spot for the GQ program, of which Lincoln was the official sponsor, and two other spots, which broke during the program and will continue to air on cable and network programming.
The spots stress,what else?,style and luxury.
In the spot created for the awards broadcast, for example, swanky horns toot as stylishly dressed people step out of the GQ show and into waiting Lincolns.
The new Tier 1 Luxury commercials also focus on imagery and scenic driving in the Lincoln LS and Navigator. The award-winning director known as Tarsem, who recently released his debut feature film, “The Cell,” with Jennifer Lopez, was hired to oversee the spots.
Meanwhile, the TierII/Regional commercials focus on all Lincoln vehicles, including the Town Car and Continental.
Y & R; also has created a new print campaign,emphasizing “luxury without rules”,for its biggest client. Those ads will run in national business, consumer and lifestyle publications and will compliment the TV commercials.
Tickets.com Hires 24/7 Media
Costa Mesa-based Tickets.com, a business-to-business provider of ticketing solutions, has tapped 24/7 Media Inc., a New York-based interactive marketing agency, to sell and power advertising on its Web site.
Tickets.com opened a competitive review about three months ago to four agencies: 24/7 Media; the incumbent, LA-based Latitude 90; and two other undisclosed agencies.
“We were looking for a partner that had a very sophisticated set of tools for selling advertising on our site and our clients’ sites,” said Kiliaen Van Rensselaer, vice president of marketing for Tickets.com. “We came across 24/7 Media and they’re definitely on the cutting edge.”
Van Rensselaer said the agency goes beyond standard banners to offer targeted e-mail marketing, power ads, a customer-reward program and anonymous profiling.
“24/7 offers a lot of terrific ways to develop more of a premium for an advertiser, and gives them the ability to target much more specifically,” he explained.
Plus, 24/7 Media has system stability, which at times has been a challenge for Tickets.com. For instance, Van Rensselaer said, in the past some ads have interfered with consumers’ browsers and caused a page not to load.
“Advertising is a very small, ancillary revenue stream compared to our core business, which is ticketing transactions,” Van Rensselaer said, noting that ad revenue totals less than 5% of Tickets.com’s total revenue.
Under the new partnership, 24/7 Media also will be available to handle advertising for clients of Tickets.com who have tapped the online company to build them a private-label site (powered by Tickets.com’s ticketing software technology) where they can sell tickets online.
“In many cases, a venue that’s new to this online game is not going to understand this whole process of generating an incremental revenue stream from selling ads,” Van Rensselaer said. “We bring in 24/7 Media and offer that as a service to our new clients so they can roll right into sophisticated ad-serving and generate more ad revenue.”
The new partnership is part of Ticket.com’s overall push to profitability.
The company reported a net loss of about $15.4 million on total revenue of $14.5 million for the third quarter ended Sept. 30, compared with a net loss of $14.8 million on total revenue of $13.8 million in the third quarter of 1999.
Bits and Pieces:
Chinese anyone? San Clemente-based Pick Up Stix was voted “Best Chinese Food”,for the fourth consecutive year,by the Orange County Register’s Reader’s Poll 2000. Phoenix, Az.-based P.F. Chang’s China Bistro Irvine and Newport Beach locations came in second, with China Palace in Newport Beach and Yen Ching in Orange tying for third DB & R;, a marketing communication firm in Westlake Village, was recently tapped by New York-based Cushman & Wakefield, an international real estate services firm, to handle public relations and marketing for its Irvine office, as well as five other Southern California locations.
