S.C. women featured in TV advertisements

NEW YORK -- CONTEST WINNERS

S.C. women featured in TV advertisements

Two Mutual of Omaha national television advertisements featuring Altheia Anthony of Columbia and Carol Allen, owner of Laura's Tea Room in Ridgeway, and her mother, Eleanor Kneen, started airing this week.

In one ad, Anthony, who works at the S.C. Commission on Higher Education, talks about how she has been inspired by her mother being the first in her family to graduate from college. In the other ad, Allen talks about fulfilling her dream of opening the tea room and the joy of seeing customers bring in their mothers for special events.

They were selected as finalists after a nationwide search and chosen for the ads based on results of an online vote. The ads appear on "20/20," "The Biggest Loser" and "Dancing With The Stars."

EXCHANGES

Two firms to premiere box-office futures exchanges

Welcome to Hollywood's newest version of risky business: movie derivatives.

Two trading firms, one of them an established Wall Street player and the other a Midwest upstart, are each about to premiere a sophisticated new financial tool: a box-office futures exchange that would allow Hollywood studios and others to hedge against the box-office performance of movies, similar to the way farmers swap corn or wheat futures to protect themselves from crop failures.

The Cantor Exchange, formed by New York firm Cantor Fitzgerald and set to launch in April, recently demonstrated its system to 90 Hollywood executives in a packed Century City, Calif., hotel conference room. Amid a spirited trading-floor atmosphere, the participants shouted out guesses and made bets on how much "Alice in Wonderland" might rake in at the box office.

And Indiana company Veriana Networks, which says its management includes "veterans of the Chicago exchange community," unveiled the Trend Exchange, its own rival futures exchange for box-office receipts.