A three-story perfume bottle in Times Square in which models and celebrities will live for two days will be unveiled in Times Square July 19, Adrants reports. The campaign, promoting Calvin Klein’s CK One fragrance, comes from buzz marketing firm Mixed Marketing - the firm that created “the world’s largest snow globe” for Yahoo Shopping - and Calvin Klein’s in-house agency, CRK Advertising.
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Carat beat out UK incumbent MediaCom for the Tourism Australia media account, and M&C Saatchi beat Saatchi & Saatchi and Clemenger BBDO for the £25.6m advertising account, according to Brand Republic. M&C Saatchi had been working with Tourism New Zealand - a £13.5m account and Tourism Australia’s rival. The agency has now resigned the Tourism New Zealand account, which it held for six years. Tourism New Zealand had already begun a review process for the account in May when it learned that M&C Saatchi had been shortlisted for Tourism Australia.
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The hugely visible “zipper” sign that wraps news headlines around a 22-story building in Manhattan’s Times Square will continue to be leased by Dow Jones for at least the next 10 years, B to B reports. Headlines will now be auto-published via news feeds from the Wall Street Journal Online, the Associated Press, and AccuWeather.com (recently partnered with MarketWatch Licensing Services to supply forecasts for the zipper). Dow Jones has leased the sign since 1995. The sign itself has been displaying news headlines since 1928.
Organized Christian retailers - like mom-and-pop stores in other categories - are bemoaning the decline in market share because of retail giants such as Target and Wal-Mart entering the category, at this week’s International Christian Retail Show in Denver. Their share of the $4.3 billion-a-year category, which includes everything from Bibles and jewelry to church furniture and religious-themed T-shirts, has dropped another four percentage points since 2002, to 53 percent, according to AdAge.
Google announced that it will start charging higher minimum bids for keywords for those advertisers whose placements prove less relevant to readers. A “Quality Score” will be associated with each ad, determined chiefly by performance, and the resulting minimum bid for a keyword may change over time. This means that different advertisers will have to pay a different amount at the low end of the keyword bid scale. This will allow Google to reap more ad revenue from advertisers it previously shunted aside in an effort to increase the general relevance of its ad panels.
A new law creates a statutory exemption for faxes to recipients that an organization has an existing business relationship with, DM News reports. The chance of legal action has been reduced, but not eliminated, for heavy fax advertisers such as trade publishers.
JUXT Interactive has created an absurdly interactive web environment for the new Nestea drink, Nestea Ice, geared to the 12- to 24-year-old male. The site incorporates original music videos, a design feature that allows visitors to create T-shirts, a short film, and other means of keeping visitors on the site as long as possible, writes MediaPost. Nestea is counting on the fact that the site will take advantage of the viral potential of the web.
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Gamevertising firm IGN Entertainment filed to conduct another initial public offering to raise up to $200 million. Of that, more than $119 million would go to retire debt and buy out preferred stock. Current executives and relations would cash out about $45 million. IGN reports it saw almost $10 of ad revenue in the first quarter of 2005 and a bit more than $4 million in subscriptions and services. The company went public in the bubbly year of 2000, but was later taken private by Great Hill Partners, an investor group. The company has not made a profit in the last three years, although its rate of loss slowed quite a bit in the first part of 2005.
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Knight Ridder Inc., Tribune Co. and The McClatchy Co. reported modest gains in advertising in the second quarter, Editor and Publisher reports. Knight Ridder’s advertising revenue rose 2.1 percent. Its papers in small and mid-size cities fared better than those in larger cities.
Tribune said newspaper advertising sales rose one percent in the quarter. Excluding Newsday, which has lowered its ad rates following a circulation misstatement scandal, advertising rose two percent. Advertising revenue at McClatchy’s newspapers rose 3.5 percent in the quarter, while circulation sales dipped 1.3 percent.
Audio Graphics points out that radio sales organization Regional Reps’ Summer 2005 Regional Report to its stations features opening remarks by company president Stuart Sharpe that include some interesting quotes from a letter an agency customer sent him. Try this one: “When we called some stations directly, we [were] given significantly better rates than those provided through rep firms.”
Washingtonpost.com is the first major news site to begin integrating advertising into its RSS feeds, marking the beginning of mainstream news organizations competing more directly with search engines and blogs for new media dollars, Ad Age reports. MSNBC TV’s The Situation with Tucker Carlson is the first advertiser.
Broadcast TV keeps losing audience, but ad rates keep increasing, Business Week reports. During the 1984-85 season, 38 million households tuned in to broadcast networks. In 2003-04, only 31 million did. Broadcast’s share of ad dollars has dropped 19 percent in that time, but magazines and newspapers have seen similar or worse declines in ad spending while having steadier audience numbers.
At a meeting yesterday between food executives, government officials, consumer advocates and academics to discuss marketing food to children, Senator Tom Harkin, a Democrat from Iowa, introduced a bill that would lift the ban on the FTC’s regulating of advertising aimed at children, according to the New York Times. The bill has yet to get much support from Congress; government bans on certain types of marketing to children is neither “wise nor viable,” said FTC chairwoman, Deborah Platt Majoras.
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Budweiser, which pays to place its beer in eight to 10 major studio films per year, is buying media to support a film promotion for the first time since it partnered with Ron Howard’s “Backdraft” in 1991, Reuters reports. The promotion, for the new film “Wedding Crashers,” includes two new TV spots which began airing last week. It will also include sponsorship of the film’s New York premiere and local screenings in 30 cities, painting on the Budweiser No. 8 car in two NASCAR races, and exclusive content on the Budweiser site.
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