Murray Calder from MediaCom Edinburgh takes a look at how ITV and other commercial broadcasters could attempt to recoup their losses from being unable to advertise during the forthcoming Royal Wedding...kind of.

Sponsorship
With no ad breaks to place bumpers in, this might on the face of it appear problematic. But Premium Wedding Package offers are rife in the wedding planning world so why should this one be any exception? Selling the whole ad break at each end of the wedding coverage (at a premium of course) would surely attract plenty of Brandzillas. After all, no-one likes to be upstaged in the competitive wedding stakes do they?

Product Placement
Technology has moved on somewhat since the last Royal Wedding and it’s now perfectly feasible to apply branding to digital broadcasts. Everyone’s seen the digitally applied on-pitch logos at major sporting events but it’s now possible to apply digital branding in post processing (see video from Mirriad.) Admittedly it a pretty steep technology curve for this to be applied to a live broadcast in time but your Brandzilla is worth it, isn’t she?

Advertiser Funded Programming
Not everyone’s a Monarchist so why not create your own alternative Royal Wedding Live on one of ITV’s alternative channels? Making an event of the Official Unofficial Royal Wedding might galvanise the apathetic and the anti-royal to tune in. The Comic Strip would have been perfect for this if they hadn’t all become so comfortably establishment.

Guerrilla Activity
There’s a long history of brands hi-jacking official events. With the Olympics now very down on this sort of thing the Royal Wedding is a good opportunity for advertisers to get into training for 2012. The Goodyear blimp is still famous and this is as good a year as any for it to make a return to our screens.

Video on Demand
There’s an obvious opportunity for ITV to sell the real estate on ITV.com surrounding their online broadcast of the event. However, not everyone will get time off to watch the wedding and many of those who do will be out of the country taking full advantage of the extra bank holiday weekend to sneak a weeks-worth of holidays for a couple of days annual leave. So there’s likely to be plenty of demand for repeat viewing of the event after the fact. Get in early with a package of pre-roll and event page takeover.