Clear Channel’s strategy to reduce ad clutter, “Less is More,” has meant higher prices and a scarcity of inventory for some media buyers and advertisers, but it’s beginning to reduce total inventory at Clear Channel and its competitors, Media Life reports. Competitors that initially took advantage of “Less is More” by increasing their own inventory, are realizing that they can reduce ads and charge higher prices too.
PhRMA, The drug industry’s trade group, has given preliminary approval to a voluntary advertising code and its “guiding principles” that pharmaceutical companies should follow, Adweek reports. That code includes talking with doctors before launching a prescription drug ad campaign, promoting health awareness in ads and targeting messages to the appropriate age group.
But the threat of governemnt legislation still remains. Bills still pending in Congress include prohibiting broadcasting erectile dysfunction ads from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m., removing the tax deduction for the cost of preparing drug ads, and requiring that ads for drugs determined to impose an “unreasonable risk” must include a statement which says so.
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VeriSign says that the number of web sites opened just to publish PPC ad links is rocketing, Computer Business Review Online reports.
Every week, speculators are registering close to 250,000 domain names to “test” their traffic potential before being discarded a few days later.
If the names can generate more than the $6 or $7 registration fee per year, they’re kept. If they can’t, they’re returned within the five day grace period. The speculators put up collections of Google Adsense or Yahoo Overture text advertising links relevant to the URL.
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The Radio Advertising Bureau has reacted angrily to claims that online adspend in the UK has exceeded that of radio, saying the Internet Advertising Bureau’s (IAB) figures were distorted because they include “paid-for-search” and recruitment ads, Brand Republic reports.
The annual IAB and PricewaterhouseCoopers report puts 2004’s online spend at 653m pounds with a 3.9 percent share of the ad market. Radio holds a 3.8 percent share.
Credit card company Capital One is seeking a direct marketing agency to handle part of its 10 million pound DM business, BrandRepublic reports. The card has traditionally used high-volume direct mail as the mainstay of its below-the-line strategy. But the appointment of a new agency may signal a change in approach. Capital One recently restructured its global agency arrangements, taking its business from McCann Erickson to DDB.
The AAR, which is handling the pitch, is asking agencies to submit a brief. Capital One would not confirm the review is taking place, saying incumbent Boyden Carmichael Smith will remain so “until we can release a statement saying otherwise.”
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Madison Avenue has turned to “consumer engagement” as its new media planning metric - one that could replace “frequency” as the multiplier in most media plans, MediaPost reports.
Meeting at the Association of National Advertisers’ 2005 Marketing Accountability Forum, a committee composed of members of the Association of National Advertisers, American Association of Advertising Agencies and the Advertising Research Foundation agreed that engagement would likely complement audience reach and supplant frequency, or the number of times a consumer is exposed to an ad.
Supporters of recently-introduced legislation that would require TV ratings services to achieve Media Rating Council (MRC)accreditation before the services could be introduced as the market’s currency gained a powerful lobbying ally Wednesday in the National Association of Broadcasters, Mediaweek reports.
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Publishers of some of the 80+ magazines affected by Tuesday’s announcement from the Audit Bureau of Circulations that subscriptions from EBSCO and InFlight will no longer count in paid circulation figures will be offering rebates - or complimentary ad space in future magazines - to make up for the circulation shortfalls that may turn up in the audit reports, writes the New York Post.
Circulation consultant Stuart Jordan predicted that some of the magazines will be forced out of business; others will have to take major cuts in circulation - and thus ad rates.
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The adventures of five filmmakers in Europe, each equipped with a $50 a day budget, a Mini DV camera, laptop editing facilities, and training in video journalism, will be highlighted on the Travel Channel series 5 Takes Europe, which airs Saturday at 10 p.m. The show is airing less than a week after the five “VJ’s” began filming, allowing for timely travel coverage. Each filmmaker will create daily blogs and frequent vlogs (video logs), to be highlighted on the show and on the Travel Channel website. The locales visited will include Barcelona, Paris, Amsterdam, Prague, Venice, and Athens.
This is the second announcement this week telling of the dawning of the citizen journalist. Al Gore’s new cable channel, Current, will have 25 percent of its content contributed by viewers.
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Eyeblaster will soon offer support both for rich media and for traditional ad creation, placement, serving and reporting via AdVision, an ad management offering that would unify all digital marketing for Eyeblaster clients, reports ClickZ (via MarketingVox). Scheduled for release in October, the platform would come several months after aQuantive’s Atlas ad management unit introduced rich media campaign support, and two years after DoubleClick came out with its Motif product.
Eyeblaster President and CEO Gal Trifon in a statement said the offering is in part intended for advertisers that use rich media for most of their online campaigns and would like to consolidate non-rich banner campaigns.
Eight percent of small and medium business advertisers plan to spend more on advertising in Internet Yellow Pages this year, a fourfold increase from last year’s two percent, MediaPost reports.
A planned food magazine called Relish, from the Publishing Group of America, will sell brand mentions in recipes and product placement among staff-recommended kitchen and home gadgets, AdAge reports. With TV Guide’s Inside TV launched in April, Relish will be the second magazine to offer advertisers paid placement in editorial content.
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Las Vegas’s troubled monorail got a boost recently when BankWest of Nevada signed a three-year, $3-million deal to place ATMs at all seven monorail stations between the MGM Grand and Sahara hotels, and to advertise on one of the monorail’s nine trains, Brandweek reports.
Consumers spent slightly less time at e-commerce sites and search engines in June than they did in May, spending 4.3 percent of all online time on search as compared to 4.7 the previous month, according to the Online Publishers Association’s monthly Internet Activity Index released yesterday. Consumers spent 17.5 percent of their web time at e-commerce sites, down from 18.4 percent in May but up from 15.7 percent in June 2004, according to MediaPost.
Consumers are filling in that time with visits to content sites, the Online Publishers Association’s report says. Time spent at content sites represented 36.9 percent of all online time in June, up from 36 percent in May and 36.5 percent in June 2004.
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The London Times will launch its first international edition this month, edited for European readers, according to Media Life. The edition is primarily a reworking of the British edition and includes no fresh editorial. Rather, the front page will contain a different mix of stories, geared toward an international audience, and the paper will include features and puzzles that have not been in the edition sold overseas in the past. The Times currently has a circulation outside of Britain and the Republic of Ireland of just 30,000, most of it in Europe. This compares with the European circulations of 144,797 at the International Herald Tribune and 86,156 at The Wall Street Journal Europe.
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While media duties for Pfizer’s Lipitor are not in play, five agencies, including Hill, Holliday, Connors, Cosmopulos, are competing to handle creative duties for the estimated $60-$80 million drug account, Adweek reports.
Previously identified New York shops competing for the account were independent mcgarrybowen, JWT, The Kaplan Thaler Group, and incumbent Merkley + Partners. Merkley has been handling the account since 2001, but the account is said to be considering a change in strategic direction.
Contenders have been briefed; final presentations are slated for early August.
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News Broadcasting Japan - which operates the Fox and National Geographic Channels - has 4 million subscribers, Frank Foley, svp and general manager told Japan Today. The Fox channel pulls in mostly women aged 25-39, while National Geographic skews a bit older and is more male. But getting exact figures is difficult because a ratings system does not yet exist.
Japan is one of the biggest ad markets in the world, worth 6 trillion yen ($54 billion) a year. TV takes 35 percent of that. But pay TV doesn’t get its just share because there is no objective measurement, Foley says. Currently, pay TV gets just 0.5 percent of total TV ad expenditures. “Based on what we know about viewership in pay TV households, we estimate that we should be getting at least 5 times that.” In the U.S., pay TV channels have about 30 percent of TV ad expenditures.
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