Some clients are requiring approval at the CEO level before beginning discussions as to whether to buy advertising during the new Martha Stewart TV shows, according to AdAge. While Kraft’s coffee machine, Tassimo, and GE have signed on, Proctor & Gamble is still considering the pros and cons of a TV relationship with Martha - though they still support the magazine.
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Sony BMG Music Entertainment will pay $10 million and stop paying radio station employees to feature its artists to settle an investigation by the New York Attorney General, Brand Week reports.
A Sony spokesman said “pay for play” practices were “wrong and improper,” and that Sony “looks forward to defining a new, higher standard in radio promotion.” The company will hire a compliance officer to monitor promotion practices.
Direct mail volumes increased significantly in the financial cross-selling category from January 2004 through the first quarter of 2005, DM News reports.
Chase tops the top five cross-selling direct mail list for both mortgage and banking product categories, according to data released last week by Comperemedia.
Advertisers and marketers buy media to be associated with brands, context, audiences… and credibility. So what happens to media companies when advertisers like P& G and GM won’t do network buys unless a nice, deep, engaging website comes along? They engage in creating - or trying to create - nice, deep, engaging websites. But that means that media companies are moving far away from their comfort zones, ClickZ writes.
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Kimberly-Clark said it will boost ad spending $160 million or more a year by 2009 after announcing it is cutting 6,000 jobs and closing 20 plants, AdAge reports.
The increased spending would represent a 38 percent increase on the $421.3 Kimberly-Clark spent on advertising last year.
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Coca-Cola seeks a big idea for a global integrated campaign, asking eight agencies to contribute ideas that will work in multiple markets, AdAge reports. Global agency teams are being led by Ogilvy & Mather, Berlin Cameron/Red Cell, Publicis Worldwide, Mother, and Wieden & Kennedy. A spokesman confirmed that a global agency meeting was convened with Coca-Cola in Paris last week. Coke was originally planning to break some global spots at the end of June, but is still looking for the kind of “iconic” advertising that once defined the company, sources say.
Experts have been predicting the rise of local search engine marketing, and pay-per-click network operators have been working to create the means to support small-to-midsize companies that wish to enter the market - and now Verizon’s SuperPages.com is indicating that local search may have already arrived - ClickZ reports (via MarketingVox).
SuperPages.com’s local PPC advertisers have apparently increased their budgets so much that they can’t all be spent on the SuperPages network; and, instead of turning that local business away, the company is placing the campaigns on rival PPC networks - Yahoo and Google.
Religion and spirituality are slowly gaining a more mainstream popularity, and as a result, God is becoming less somber, more approachable - and even has a sense of humor, if the new billboards in the resurrected GodSpeaks campaign are to be believed.
The billboards (example: “Let’s meet at My house Sunday before the game. - God.”) originally launched as a national campaign of public service announcements sparked by an anonymous Forida donor. They caught the attention of the media and then the Outdoor Advertising Association of America (OAAA). The OAAA offered to use the sayings as their national public service campaign for 1999. The result was that GodSpeaks sayings appeared on some 10,000 billboards in 200 cities across America, free of charge. The donated billboard space was valued at $15 million.
RSS ad network and delivery platform Pheedo last week released the first in a series of “Pheed Read” reports providing a view into RSS usage patterns, based on the activity on its network of advertisers and publishers in June and July according to paidcontent (via MarketingVox).
Study findings include the following: Tuesday is the most active day in RSS readership, feed retrieval and click-throughs, and Saturday the least active; also, click-through rates (CTR) fluctuate significantly depending on the day, differing more than 70 percent from Tuesday to Saturday.
Collegiate Presswire has launched CampusAdTrader, a beta-mode online-auction marketplace for buying and selling display, online, and classified advertising space in U.S. college newspapers, according to AuctionBytes. Subscribing newspapers can sell ad space online, with a commission of 10 percent of sales going back to the service. Media buyers and ad professionals who wish to use the service to search and bid on advertising opportunities in campus newspapers pay a one-time $25 fee per user.
Media buyer membership fees are waived through the end of the year.
In-game ad developer Massive Inc. is launching its first full-motion video and audio ads in a major videogame release, MediaPost reports. “Anarchy Online’s” virtual world will be seeded with billboards and TV screens showing shortened versions of television spots for Panasonic and the UK premiere of the television series “Lost.”
Massive can collect data on the demographics and geographical distribution of all players who view the ads, how many times they viewed them, and for how long they saw each ad. Massive began serving ads into video games in March, starting with online role-playing game “Anarchy Online” and “Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory.”
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AP announced plans to launch an ad-supported online video network, for its more than 6,500 newspaper, TV, and radio web sites. The network will provide AP member web sites with a branded video player to display their video, along with access to its daily video news feed. The feeds would include 15- and 30-second pre-roll advertising; participating members will share in the advertising revenue for AP video watched on their sites, according to Mediaweek.
Members will collect also collect all revenue from advertising generated by their own video, writes MediaPost.
Advertiser interest in the kids online market has been slow to rise, failing to reflect the growth seen in other areas of online ad spending, but that may be about to change, according to Mediaweek. Two major moves by Nickelodeon - the purchase of virtual pet site Neopets by parent company Viacom followed by the launch of on-demand channel TurboNick - have swelled interest in the kids online space and are expected to spark advertiser interest. “A lot of advertisers are coming on that weren’t doing online in the past,” says Jonathan Graff, president of the Kaboose.com kids portal.
The pharmaceutical industry has released draft guidelines that endorse a waiting period between a drug’s release and the beginning of advertising, according to the New York Times. The guidelines say that, during the waiting period, drug makers should have conversations with physicians to help them understand the drugs before consumers start asking for them. Facing growing pressure from Capitol Hill and the American Medical Association, the issue of a mandatory waiting period has become a hot topic; last month, Bristol-Myers Squibb adopted its own voluntary 12-month wait between product debut and advertising.
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A new program on Public Radio International, Open Source from P.R.I., will pull “unfiltered” voices and opinions from blogs, as well as cultivate comments from listeners on its own blogs, to gather ideas for the program, reports the New York Times.
Listeners are invited to make suggestions on Open Source’s blog, where they are openly posted, along with ideas from the program’s five producers; the audience can watch the program come together over the course of a week or even a single afternoon. More than 700 users have registered on the program’s blog and the site receives upward of 12,000 page views daily.
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