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Thursday, August 7, 2008
Presidential ads join Olympics on NBC
Major sponsors of NBC’s 17-day telecast of the Olympics include soft drinks, cars and … presidential candidates?
Yep, Democrat Barack Obama has snatched up $5 million in advertising during the Beijing Olympics, and Republican John McCain has forked over a cool $6 million in ad time.
According to Advertising Age, the president wannabes have bought spots throughout the day and prime-time coverage on NBC’s broadcast network and its cable siblings CNBC, MSNBC, USA, Oxygen and Telemundo. The magazine says this is the first major ad buy on national TV in a dozen years. Until now, the trend has been to target battleground states such as Ohio and Florida.
So while super-swimmer Michael Phelps is piling in gold medals, I guess we’ll get to see the candidates alternately touting their own personal charms and bashing each other. Can’t wait …
The new ‘CSI’ guy
It’s not John Malkovich or Kurt Russell. It’s almost definitely going to be Laurence Fishburne who replaces William Petersen midway through the upcoming season of “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.”
CBS entertainment chief Nina Tassler played coy on the topic at the TV critics press tour in Los Angeles last month, but she did tout Fishburne at a social function the network hosted. And she described the character that Fishburne will play:
New guy is going to be a doctor who joins the Las Vegas unit as an outsider and later becomes the boss, after Grissom (Petersen) departs after the 10th episode. As previously reported, the new character has the same genetic profile as the average serial killer and wrestles with the knowledge of his creepy DNA.
Grissom will not be killed off and likely will return for occasional guest appearances. Also returning will be Jorja Fox’s Sara Sidle, who departed last season but apparently had a change of heart.
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