Finnish telecommunications giant Nokia has placed its most important call in to Hollywood, establishing a state-of-the-art research and development center last week in Santa Monica.
The Nokia Research Center at 3000 Olympic Blvd. is gearing up to design and develop new forms of mobile communications and entertainment that is expected to affect the way people communicate, setting the stage for the future of branded advertising models.
With DVRs threatening the future of traditional television advertising, Madison Avenue has been scrambling to find a way to get their clients’ message across to consumers via other media, including the Internet and mobile devices. A heavy emphasis is on product placement within a sitcom, drama or comedic spoof.
Those at Nokia, among others, believe that the future branding techniques will exist somewhere between the virtual and the real worlds meaning that they want to bring the two together using traditional cell phones, iPhones and BlackBerrys.
The center’s first project is a scavenger hunt game that combines elements of the virtual and real worlds.
“This simple example of melding virtual space with real space has infinite potential well beyond a high-tech scavenger hunt,” said Rebecca Allen, director of the Nokia Research Center and a founding director of the UCLA School of Design.
Allen, who holds a master’s degree from MIT, also has been charged with recruiting the best and the brightest from Southern California’s universities and colleges of design and engineering during the next few months for the center.
Nokia Research Center has been created to expand the company’s existing business of mobile phone technologies and explore new physical-digital connections. “We want to connect the two worlds,” said Allen.
Big Bad Bug
After recently securing a $200 million line of credit from a consortium of banks led by J.P. Morgan, Bug Music/Windswept Holdings Inc. has acquired Selectracks, a production studio with operations in Baltimore and Los Angeles.
The acquisition gives L.A.-based Bug Music a catalog with more than 250,000 song titles, including classics such as “What a Wonderful World,” “I Walk the Line” and “Stormy Weather.”
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Bug Music is expected to produce additional original music for a variety of endeavors under the company’s music umbrella, including custom re-recordings of songs from its expanded catalogue.
Bug Music/Windswept Holdings Inc. most recently ranked seventh among the world’s music publishers, capturing nearly 2 percent of the global music publishing market.
Legal Matter
An El Monte-based furniture and appliance retailer is claiming that the Los Angeles Times advertising department promised one thing but delivered another.
A lawsuit recently filed by furniture retailer George Liberman Enterprises Inc. in Los Angeles Superior Court claims that a Times ad sales representative promised to mail a circular out to a specific audience advertising Liberman’s wares as part of a larger long-term agreement for print and circular advertising that ranged between $41.60 to $84.50 per thousand.
The Times put inserts into its Spanish-language publication Hoy instead, the suit claims.
His Santa Ana-based attorneys are seeking a jury trial and unspecified compensation, fees and damages that may run into hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions, according to one source.
Liberman’s furniture business generated more than $9 million in gross sales last year, alone.
Neither executives at Los Angeles Times nor Liberman’s attorneys would comment on the suit.
Tractor Pull
In a move to make its service more accessible to Web-shy consumers, West Hollywood-based Ticketmaster Entertainment Inc. is moving manned kiosks into grocery stores in middle America, recently opening five new Ticket Center locations in Publix Super Markets in Georgia.
While company officials have been mum about future plans, industry analysts believe that this is the first in a series of tests to see if the company can grow sales among older consumers in more rural areas of the nation.
Branching Out
Concert promoter Live Nation Inc. appointed Six Flags Inc. Chief Executive Mark Shapiro as a new board member. Shapiro has worked for the amusement park operator since December 2005 and previously spent 12 years at ESPN. The addition of Shapiro brings Live Nation’s board to 10 members.
Hollywood’s Top Power Couple
Music apparently is still big money for a select few: Rapper Jay-Z and his singer wife Beyonce Knowles earned a total of $162 million from June 1, 2007 to June 1, 2008, placing them atop Forbes magazine’s top 20 earning entertainment couples, followed by Keith Urban and Nicole Kidman, David and Victoria Beckham, and Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, among others.
Staff Reporter Brett Sporich can be reached at [email protected], or at (323) 549-5225, ext. 226.
