AMC, Jack Daniel’s Toast Product-Integration Deal
Tennessee Whiskey to Be Featured During Mad Men
By Mike Reynolds -- Multichannel News, 6/16/2007 5:38:00 AM
Jack Daniel’s may be the first sponsor to sign a product-integration deal with AMC's upcoming original series, Mad Men, but if Arlene Manos has her way, it won't be the last.
Manos, president of Rainbow National Network Advertising Sales unit of Rainbow Advertising Sales, said AMC is working on deals for two other such pacts. "We have to make something happen in the next couple of weeks," she said, declining to specify the sponsor categories in play. "The show is coming together rapidly."
Indeed, Matt Weiner, the show's creator, writer and executive producer, said shooting on the eighth episode of the 13-installment season of Mad Men -- a look at the professional and personal lives of men and women at Sterling Cooper, a fictitious ad agency in New York circa 1960 -- is scheduled to commence in Los Angeles this week. The pilot was filmed in New York, and the series debuts on AMC July 19.
As part of the deal AMC struck with media agency Universal McCann for Brown-Foreman's Jack Daniel’s, the Tennessee whiskey will be incorporated by name mention and product placements in the scripts of three Mad Men episodes this season, according to Manos.
Weiner -- whose resume includes credits as an executive producer and writer on The Sopranos and as a writer on Becker and The Naked Truth -- said he had "no problem" with Jack Daniel’s being part of Mad Men because drinking and smoking were very much a part of that world almost 50 years ago.
"The use of it gives the show real texture," he said during an interview after an AMC panel discussion about the series at Michael's, a Manhattan's media hot-spot restaurant, Thursday. "I'm OK with anything that gives the show texture, that authenticity."
The deal -- which was evident at the restaurant in the form of the Jack and Ginger suggestion on the luncheon menu's dessert listing -- was the first for Jack Daniel’s with AMC.
Manos said the package will also manifest in the form of a schedule, including sponsored vignettes and short interviews with "ad legends" talking about the business, past and present. The whiskey product will also serve as the sponsor of the Mad Men section on amctv.com and be part of print ads and other materials touting the show.
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