"Retaility" TV

Coming soon to a cable channel near you: "Unwrapping Macy's", a reality show starring, well, Macy's. The show will follow employees' lives as well as the procedures that go into creating the retail environment in America's largest department store chain. Eight episodes are scheduled to air on WE beginning September 30.

This blog was created to follow retailers' forays into media, but never had we expected something this meta.

Have a Coke and an SMS

Coca-Cola, always intrigued by pocket technology, is poised to deliver branded content to cell phones. Ringtones, animations and wallpapers will be among the items created by a licensee. The key, according to a Coke spokesman? "Brand extension."

Moi

New from Lancome: Moi, "True beauty at its best." The website is a page-by-page image dump of the magazine, which is available at Lancome counters nationwide. The content is one long advertorial, explaining how to get the most out of Lancome's product line.

The genius of the website is discovered a few pages in: "content" comes complete with integrated shopping and hard-to-miss "add to bag" functionality at the bottom of the page. Read, like, buy: a true realization of the sales world's concept of ecommerce.

A little less multi

Reverse spin: Yahoo has announced that it is backing away from producing original content, TV-style. In addition to being a bit of a dressing-down for Lloyd Braun, who was brought in specifically for this expertise, it throws a raised eyebrow on retail media producers. If a company committed to multimedia entertainment has slowed down some of its content production, is it because plenty of content exists already that can be repurposed, as Yahoo suggests? Or is there simply enough content out there right now that the company wisely realized this is not the time to be adding to the total?

Infiniti's feature-length ad

Infiniti's New 30-Minute Ad Is Not An Infomercial, says Infiniti, at least. It's a design piece with philosophical thought from leading African-American creative talents that ends with a focuts on its automobiles. What made this interesting: the program ran on BET twice during Black History Month, and the program will receive follow-up advertising support in March.

Somehow, BET found it appropriate not to label the piece as paid programming, even though it is. The fact that it's not a "hard sell" allowed the automaker to get away with a half-hour of advertorial that does not alert the viewer to its nature. Expect to see more permutations of this if Infiniti sees positive results.