Omniture has received $40 million in financing, bringing its total backing to more than $65 million, Adweek reports. The web analytics provider said the funding, led by BA Venture Partners, will be used to increase customer training programs, technology development and marketing.
Researchers from Stanford University say it’s easier to read one word at a time in the center of a cell phone screen for a fraction of a second before moving on to the next word, than several sentences of smaller text, CNET News reports. Now they’re trying to figure out how to commercialize it.
Gannett’s newspaper advertising rose 5.1 percent in the last quarter as the company’s US newspapers reported strong local and help-wanted classified ads, The New York Times reports.
But ad revenue declined 1.4 percent at Gannett’s flagship paper, USA Today, in the year-ago period while the number of paid ad pages fell six percent.
Continuity coffee seller Kraft Gevalia Kaffe has seen a 10 percent lift in response from a direct marketing campaign based on findings gleaned from appending attitude segmentation to its customer database, DM News reports.
Independent podcasts are being squeezed out of the online radio genre, as well as potential advertising dollars, as mainstream media companies flex their muscles and begin to dominate, USA Today reports.
Instead of alternative broadcasting, the kind of shows that launched podcasting, podcasts from ESPN, CNN, ABC News and the TV show Queer Eye are among the most popular this week on iTunes.
B-to-B media executives still believe ad revenues will increase this year and next - even in print advertising - but their optimism has become more realistic. David Greene, president, PostNewsweek Tech Media, has seen a pattern of dropoffs at the end of the quarter as customers try to make their quarterly numbers, he told BtoB. Because of this “wobbly” approach to booking advertising, Greene and other executives expect growth to be in the single digits through 2006.
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Australian broadcaster Ten Network has experimented with a 13-week trial of “seriously short” ad breaks during prime-time TV programming, The Sydney Morning Herald reports. New product ads or new TV commercials for existing brands showed much higher recall levels in the low-clutter environments than traditional-length commercial pods.
CBS yesterday introduced a revamped CBS News web site that greatly increases the amount of video available to advertisers, reports AdWeek (via MarketingVox). CBSNews.com now carries 25,000 video clips and will feature news videos throughout the day. CBS Digital will sell 30- and 15-second pre-roll video on the site. Advertisers include WalMart, Ford and Dell. A full-page “washover” rich media ad is shown when users first reach the site.
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With ad revenue sluggish, the newpaper industry is becoming more receptive to creative ideas, Editor and Publisher reports.
Before Memorial Day, page one of the Detroit Free Press and Detroit News became “false cover” ads for Marshall Field’s. The real page one followed on the next page. The Detroit papers sold the false pages because Marshall Fields asked for it.
While business print saw ad pages grow by 1.8 percent in June, the growth has been fleeting and largely localized to Business 2.0, according to Publishers Information Bureau. BtoB Online reports that the general trend for consumer business titles like Fortune, The Economist, BusinessWeek and Forbes is rather downward for the first half of 2005. Tech-oriented business books have also been hit, including Wired and PC Magazine.
The poor performance comes oddly in the face of a rapid upward trend in financial sector advertising, including insurance and brokerage advertisers, often the staple of the business books.
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Chevrolet, sponsor of Major League Baseball, promoted its lineup of vehicles with a massive outdoor presence in Detroit, on buildings and billboards throughout the city, to coincide with yesterday’s All-Star game at Comerica Park, according to Adweek.
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In a two-year deal reported to be worth about $10 million, Proctor & Gamble’s Prilosec OTC jumped onboard with the National Football League as a league sponsor, AdAge reports. Prilosec will receive full rights to use the NFL shield and Super Bowl logos in all marketing and advertising.
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NBC in primetime has the second-oldest viewers of any network, with a median age of 48 years, up 4.6 percent since last season, according to a Magna Global analysis of Nielsen data. CBS, the network with the oldest median age, saw that number fall by more than a year to 51.8, shrinking the gap between NBC and CBS to 3.8 years, Media Life reports. The median age of ABC’s viewers remained flat, at 45.3 years.
Fox’s audience has aged from 36.4 to 38.2 years — nearly equivalent to the median age of the overall population. The WB’s median age rose, as well. UPN’s median age went down, thanks in part to the show, America’s Next Top Model, which has one of network TV’s youngest audiences.
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While overall magazine ad pages in June were up 2.3 percent over last June, financial, insurance, and real estate advertisers grew 15.5 percent over the same month last year, according to Media Life. The statistic contrasts oddly with the poor sales performance of the popular business print titles, like Forbes and Fortune - normally the recipients of such advertiser largess.
Pages in women’s service category jumped 5.8 percent year-to-date. Redbook ad pages were up 19.9 percent, Oprah up 17.4 percent, More up 16.7 percent, and Real Simple up 12.3 percent. Notably, Martha Stewart Living’s ad pages jumped 27.3 percent over June 2004, following her release from prison, though year-to-date pages are still down six percent.
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Toth Brand Imaging resigned its work on Chaps Ralph Lauren in order to work on Tommy Hilfiger again. Toth, which helped launch Hilfiger into the national spotlight from 1991 to 1998, was given the account without a review, according to Adweek.
Last year, Hilfiger spent more than $35 million in paid media. So far this year, the company has spent only $3 million, per Nielsen Monitor-Plus.
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