On various dates between now and Dec. 17, non-subscribers of WSJ.com and ESPN.com will be able to scale the garden wall courtesy of an intriguing campaign by Philips Electronics. AdAge describes it as the continuation of Philips’ “guerilla assault on media conventions.” What the company has been doing is cutting through the media muck to show how simple life can be when Philips is involved—from full-show sponsorship of “60 minutes” to paying for the subscription cards to be left out of mags and putting the table of contents at the front of Time to making content at ESPN.com and WSJ.com free to anyone willing to watch an interstitial. (It sounds like it could add layers to those of us who actually subscribe to the sites but maybe not.)
— For its $1.5 million, says AdAge, Philips gets all of WSJ. com on three Fridays, the WSJ home page alone on five Fridays, and ESPN’s Insider for full weekends. (We’ll update this if we can get exact dates.)
ESPN-WSJ Joint Project: It just so happens that this past weekend marked another connection for the Dow Jones and Disney units. The two joined together on a special “The Business of Sports” section (sub. req.) that appeared in the Weekend Journal; a version is in ESPN the Magazine.