Podcasting has challenges to overcome before ad dollars begin pouring in, ClickZ reports. Among them are finding ways of measuring listening and creating a means of efficiently buying ads.
The RSS feeds podcasting uses for distribution puts tech companies like FeedBurner, which measures audience interaction with blogs, at the forefront of building the fragmented podcasting community into an industry with a monetizable business model.
AOL’s live streaming coverage of the world’s 10 Live 8 concerts on Saturday drew a larger audience than ABC’s two-hour primetime special that provided concert highlights, The Hollywood Reporter writes. ABC’s rockstar-laden highlights averaged just 2.9 million viewers and a 1.1 rating/5 share. AOL’s free, eight-hour stream brought in about 5 million users. AOL peaked at 175,000 concurrent video streams. Ratings for the London and Philadelphia concerts that aired on MTV and VH1 earlier in the day will be available Wednesday.
Starting in April 2006, the UK’s Royal Mail can vary bulk mail charges under new proposals from Postcomm, the postal industry’s independent regulator, DM News reports. Pricing for two services, Mailsort 1400 and Cleanmail, cannot be varied.
Currently, under Royal Mail’s universal service obligation, it has to charge a uniform rate for delivery to all parts of the UK. The proposal calls for removing the uniform rate for bulk mail products that target large mail users, including Mailsort 120, Mailsort 700, Walksort, Packetpost, Flatsort and Presstream.
According to an Arbitron study, 55 percent of shoppers recall in-store audio advertising heard while shopping and 57 percent think its an acceptable form of advertising, Brandweek reports.
Among the 46 percent of shoppers who recalled hearing a retail audio ad last time they visited a grocery store, more than 40 percent made an unexpected purchase and 36 percent purchased a different brand than they intended.
As Google, Feedster, Yahoo and Pheedo offer ad options in RSS, and companies like Verizon are testing the RSS waters, consumer use of the technology is growing, reports the New York Times.
Visitors to nytimes.com via its own feeds, for example, have soared from about 500,000 a month at the end of 2003 to 7.3 million last April, said Toby Usnik, the Company’s PR director. And Microsoft has announced that it will integrate RSS into its next operating system.
The increased demand for measuring campaign results and new technologies that create more natural test settings have prompted some ad agencies to again take a gander at a research discipline that’s been around a while: eye-tracking. AdAge writes (via MarketingVOX) that WPP Group’s OgilvyOne recently struck a deal with eye-tracking firm Eyetools to test email marketing for clients such as IBM, American Express and Cisco.
Preliminary results have held some “surprises”: the word “free” is often skipped, and the majority of readers see less than half of the email copy.
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Radio World reports that the Florida anti-pirate law that Governor Jeb Bush signed a year ago has had some positive effects, but not much of an overall change in what the Florida Association of Broadcasters (FAB) says is the state most afflicted with pirate radio stations. One station, WEXL, actually roves about sometimes with special triangulation equipment to help point out pirates to authorities, a practice that in Broward County “can be dangerous,” according to WEXL’s president. The FCC said that it shut down a dozen pirate stations in Florida so far in 2005. The new law allows for felony criminal charges and much stiffer fines.
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On the heels of a June announcement from Bristol-Myers Squibb that said it would not advertise directly to consumers for a drug in its first year on the market, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-TN, asked pharmaceutical companies to refrain from direct-to-consumer advertising for a drug’s initial two years.
Bristol-Myers Squibb, which according to Nielsen Monitor-Plus spent $140 million on paid media last year, will increase spending on Web sites and education for physicians instead of direct-to-consumer, reports DM News.
Pharmaceutical marketers are expected to release a self-regulatory code of advertising.
Softish demand for the higher priced media may be hurting publishers and other media companies - or at least slowing the growth seen in the past two years - but it’s not leading to much chagrin among the ad agency holding groups. MediaPost reports that some agency groups are seeing increased business in their media buying/planning operations.
IPG’s flagship shop Universal McCann last week, and ZenithOptimedia more recently, downgraded 2005 U.K. adspend estimates. But WPP’s chief noted that the media site of the business grew by more than a quarter, a faster growth rate than even its direct and new media departments.
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Google won its suit against an AdSense partner publisher that it had accused of deliberate click fraud. Two months ago, a California judge granted Google a $75,000 judgment against Auction Experts, a Texas firm, according to MediaPost. In its complaint, Google had alleged that Auction Experts had hired individuals to click on the ads that appeared on the firm’s sites, racking up advertiser costs of at least $50,000.
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The gap in viewers between top-rated “NBC Nightly News” and ABC’s “World News Tonight” has not changed significantly since Peter Jennings left the ABC show in April, reports the Los Angeles Times.
ABC, with 224,000 viewers in June, trails NBC’s 673,000, according to Nielsen Media Research. But in the last six weeks, ABC’s “World News Tonight” has won the lion’s share of the 25-54 demo - the most important group for news programs.
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As a group of Senators draft a bill to protect journalists from jail terms for not giving up names of anonymous sources, bloggers are being left out in the cold, writes Wired, because according to the language in the measure they don’t qualify as journalists - nor do freelance journalists “without contracts or those who publish solely on the web,” according to the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press.
Toyota launched several new 15-second spots yesterday for its gas/electric powertrain technology, Hybrid Synergy Drive, that powers the Prius and hybrid Highlander SUV, according to Brandweek.
The campaign, from Saatchi & Saatchi, adds on to Toyota’s “Moving Forward” campaign, launched last year.
In what may be an $80 million makeover, McDonald’s is in talks with hip-hop superstars P. Diddy and Russell Simmons to help overhaul uniforms and turn them into cool duds employees would be proud to wear while interacting with their peers, reports AdAge.
McDonald’s, rapidly becoming a lifestyle brand - particularly since the advent of the “I’m lovin’ it” campaign two years ago - hopes to make uniforms a way of life for its young adult employees.
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Satellite radio service XM said its net new subscriber growth amounted to 640,000 in the second quarter, hiking its total to 4.4 million. The increase is 100,000 more than the number seen in Q1 and 222,000 more than was seen in Q2 of last year.
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