MAM
US ad spend rises by 6.3 per cent : Nielsen
MUMBAI: Advertising spending for 2004 in the US rose by 6.3 per cent over the same period last year. This has been attributed to gains across major media.
Nielsen Monitor-Plus, the advertising intelligence service of Nielsen Media Research has released preliminary figures. Nielsen Monitor-Plus MD Jeff King elaborated on the findings by saying, “Ad spending was effectively spread evenly across the year. The strongest quarter was the third. That period received an additional boost from the Summer Olympics and political advertising
“The Summer Olympics, with total spending reaching over $1.8 billion, contributed to much of Network and Cable’s increase. After several years of slow growth, Syndicated TV advertising rose by 13.7 per cent. Automotive advertising experienced the largest dollar increase, with the prescription drug and credit card services categories following. These three categories contributed to an overall increase of $2 billion compared to the same period last year.”
The top advertisers: Procter & Gamble topped the list of advertisers by sinking in $3,030 million. This marked an increase of 9.5 per cent. General Motors spent $2,581 an increase of 19.2 per cent. DaimlerChrysler AG spent $1,800 a healthy increase of 34.6 per cent.
Time Warner spent $1,511 which marked an increase of just 0.6 per cent. Disney spent less on advertising itself. It spent $1,352 million which marked a reduction of 2.1 per cent. Ad spend for the top 10 companies grew to $16.6 billion, up 11.1 per cent from last year. Auto advertisers increased budgets for many of their vans and SUVs.
Product placement is on the rise: Nielsen’s product placement tracking service has noted continued growth in the integration of product occurrences in primetime network programming. with the Top 10 brands in the product placement category totaling 9,334 occurrences last year.
The top 10 programmes that featured product placements accounted for 23,526 brand occurrences. The number one brand, Coca-Cola Classic, was seen mainly on American Idol. NetZero enjoyed many occurrences on NBC’s reality show Fear Factor. On the other hand, Nike and Ford were well represented on many different programmes.
The busines based reality show The Apprentice had 4,262 product placement occurences. Fox’s American Idol had 3,065 occurences. The Amazing Race on CBS had 2,004 occurences while Fear Factor had 1,963 occurences.
Brands
IICT partners with Gativedhi to bring studio production tools to students
New MoU lets students explore AI-driven production pipelines for AVGC-XR
MUMBAI: The Indian Institute of Creative Technologies (IICT) has teamed up with Gativedhi Technologies to give students a front-row seat to modern studio production. The collaboration will integrate Gativedhi’s AI-powered production intelligence platform, Shotrack, into academic programmes, letting students experience the workflow systems used by animation, VFX and gaming studios.
Under the MoU, faculty, students and researchers will get hands-on access to Shotrack through beta programmes, pilot deployments and academic evaluations. This will allow them to explore simulated production pipelines, understand asset management, track tasks and monitor schedules, essentially seeing how complex projects come together behind the scenes.
Shotrack is designed to tackle a key industry challenge: when multiple studios work on the same project, differing internal systems often create bottlenecks, slow approvals and complicate version control. The platform provides a unified production environment, enabling smoother collaboration across distributed teams while generating operational insights and predictive analytics to optimise crew allocation, forecast schedule risks and manage costs.
The collaboration also opens doors to Gativedhi’s wider ecosystem. Upcoming tools include StudioTrack, for studio operations management covering budgeting, recruitment and IT infrastructure, and WorkTrack, which measures workflow efficiency and team productivity across industries.
IICT plans to embed these tools into programmes covering animation pipelines, VFX workflows, gaming production and media project management. Students will also benefit from guest lectures, masterclasses, workshops, internships and research projects that connect academic learning with real-world studio practices.
IICT CEO Vishwas Deoskar, said the partnership provides “An environment where production pipeline tools can be explored, tested and refined while students gain insight into how large-scale productions are organised.”
Gativedhi Technologies founder & CEO Senthil Kumar added, “This collaboration introduces students to real-world studio management tools and helps us improve our platform with academic feedback.”
With Shotrack in classrooms, India’s future animators, VFX artists and gaming producers will get a taste of studio life long before they step into one.
