A federal jury has awarded about $14 million to three small billboard companies that claim Viacom Outdoor cheated them out of premium billboard sites, the Associated Press reports (via The Miami Herald). Viacom and its CEO Wally Kelly and SVP Harold Gustin have been found liable for federal racketeering violations.
Revenue growth across JCDecaux’s UK billboard and France operations has been cut by almost one percent in the second quarter of 2005 to five percent, with half-year growth for 2005 reaching 5.5 percent, Mediaweek UK reports. The group’s overall billboard business saw a decrease of 2.8 percent in the second quarter of 2005 over the same period in 2004.
Other areas of the company, street furniture and transport, saw gains of 4.5 percent and 12.6 percent respectively. Those areas may continue to grow - JCDecaux is the odds on favorite to win NYC’s $1 billion street furniture contract.
eROI this week issued the results of its most recent email study (via MarketingVox), finding that response rates have shifted from quarter to quarter over the past year, but one trend is clear: Quarterly response rates have declined year over year (for example, from 4 percent click-through in 2Q04 to 3.6 percent in 2Q05).
In the second quarter of this year, midweek seems a safe time to send out email campaigns, with response rates better than on Monday and Friday. Wednesday is tops with the highest number of clicks (4.1 percent).
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Midwest Airlines launched a campaign in Minneapolis/St. Paul this week that will include direct mail of specially designed Hallmark greeting cards to frequent flyers in the Twin Cities area, according to the Business Journal of Milwaukee. The campaign is meant to build awareness of the brand’s expanded service between the Twin Cities and its hub in Milwaukee.
The Midwest marketing campaign will also include three railcars on the Metro Transit Hiawatha light-rail wrapped in a special material that makes them appear like a Midwest Airlines plane. The campaign will include radio, TV, and newspaper advertising.
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WebTrends says customers who have switched to first-party cookies have tracked an average 10 percent to 15 percent more unique visitors and 13 percent to 30 percent more repeat visitors than the numbers seen using third-party cookies in the same period, DM News reports. Customers who switched report more than a 300 percent jump in accuracy.
According to WebTrends, a deeper analysis reveals an incremental impact on the number of visitors attributed to campaigns, with some sites tracking 10 percent to 30 percent more visitors responding to specific marketing campaigns.
A new FTC fee structure for companies that access the national no-call registry raises per-area-code costs from $45 to $56 and the maximum fee for 280 area codes or more from $12,375 to $15,400, DM News reports.
The FTC says the higher fees are needed because more telemarketers qualified for free access to the registry than expected, while fewer telemarketers than expected have paid. Telemarketers accessing five area codes or fewer as well as nonprofit telemarketers are exempt from the fees. The new rates take effect Sept. 1.
For the first time, a Spanish-language radio station was No. 1 in the Dallas ratings, according to the market’s Arbitron Spring survey, Mediaweek reports. Univision Communications’ Regional Mexican station, KESS-FM, scored a 5.7 overall share, up from 4.6 in the Winter. Dallas Hispanics make up 23.3 percent of the city’s population, according to Arbitron. Dallas in the nation’s No. 5 radio market.
Due to low ad pages during late summer, Newsweek is trimming the number of issues it publishes by one, opting for a double issue dated Aug. 29-Sept. 5, Mediaweek reports.
Through July 19, Newsweek’s ad pages have fallen 15.6 percent this year, to 970. It’s not alone. A lack of spending in the technology and automotive sectors has hurt the whole newsweekly category with ad pages falling 10.5 percent, to 6,332 through July 19.
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Sources familiar with last week’s crack-down by the ABC, which disqualified more than 100 magazines’ paid subscriptions generated by two sales agents, say the issue touches on 2.5 million subscriptions, according to Mediaweek. Though the ABC didn’t reveal which publishers were affected, circulation executives said Time Inc. and Conde Nast, along with BusinessWeek, have all used EBSCO Consumer Magazine Services and Inflight Newspapers and Magazines. Some in the industry wonder why it has taken ABC so long to take action, calling EBSCO’s practice of “playing fast and loose” an “open secret.”
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Mobile is set to be the fastest growing media platform over the next five years, according to a new report by Informa Telecoms & Media, reports NetImperative (via MarketingVox). The global market for mobile entertainment is expected to reach $42.8 billion by 2010, nearly tripling from the current $15.8 billion. Global revenues from mobile games are predicted to rise from $2.6 billion this year to $11 billion by the end of the decade, overtaking the music and adult-content categories. The number of mobile phones is set to climb from 1.8 billion to 3 billion.
Yahoo! will distribute several of its core services, including email, search, news and entertainment properties, on various Motorola products including mobile phones, home networking products, and the upcoming Internet radio-enabled iRadio phone, beginning in 2006, Mediaweek reports. Of note is Yahoo!’s decision to negotiate directly with a carrier, rather than partnering with a mobile content aggregator.
Sexual double entendres were removed overnight from Burger King’s new website, CoqRoq.com, but the company claims it has received no complaints from consumers or other outside groups, AdAge reports. The deleted content included captions, under photos of young women, that read: “Groupies love the Coq” and “groupies love Coq.” The captions were there when the site went live yesterday, but according to Edna Johnson, SVP for global communications for Burger King, malfunctions in the Flash and XML programming were responsible for putting the captions up. A misspelling of “Burger King” had also been fixed, she said.
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A study funded by major radio networks that claims radio advertising is a 49 percent better investment than TV ads hasn’t gone over well with the TV industry, The New York Times reports. The study tracked the purchases of about 12,000 consumers, some were exposed to both radio and TV ads for a set of products, some to neither, and some to one type of ads but not the other.
The study found that radio ads were about half as effective as TV ads in lifting product sales. Since radio is far less than half the price of TV, the study concluded radio the best buy.
Sunday’s final stage of the Tour de France, capped by Lance Armstrong winning his seventh consecutive Tour, was the most-watched program in the history of the Outdoor Life Network, which has carried the Tour since 2001, according to the New York Times. The program generated a 2.1 cable rating and garnered 1.7 million viewers. The live coverage of the 23-day race produced a 0.79 rating, up 27 percent from last year.
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Terrestrial radio isn’t going away, but it hasn’t been particularly innovative, either, Sirius Satellite Radio’s Mel Karmazin told Barron’s Online. But satellite radio in general, and Sirius in particular - deeply in debt and not expected to be profitable for several years - has unlimited potential, particularly because of the amount of time people spend in their cars. “Every time there is a construction boom in New York City, because so many more people are driving in to work, I see our stock going up, I see our advertising revenue going up,” he said.
DIRECTV will broadcast 30-minute previews of new programming for ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC, UPN, and The WB, plus fall programming from HBO and Showtime, according to WorldScreen.com. Beginning in August, each network’s sneak peek will air exclusively for a week. The previews will be shown to DIRECTV’s 14.5 million customers as well as to more than two million TiVo subscribers, as part of an on-demand DIRECTV Showcase.
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The Committee of Advertising Practice has advised UK drinks companies to use “unattractive - overweight, middle-aged, balding,” men in their advertising campaigns, the Times Online reports. New rules forbid any link between women’s drinking and sex, and watchdogs have issued a list of undesirable male characteristics advertisers must abide by.
Popular sparkling drink Lambrini is the first to suffer from the new rules: a ruling stated, “We consider that the advert is in danger of implying that the drink may bring sexual/social success, because the man in question looks quite attractive and desirable to the girls. If the man was clearly unattractive, we think that this implication would be removed.”
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Publicis, the fourth largest advertising company in the world, grew revenues by eight percent from April to June, the company announced today, for a total growth of 6.1 percent in the first half of the year. New business, including the General Motors account in the U.S., has hit record levels and accounts for most of the growth, according to the Guardian Unlimited.
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IT media company TechTarget has formed a partnership with Kunzer Ediciones, a Spanish IT publisher, to develop Spanish-language versions of the TechTarget Communities, the company announced Monday. Later on in the partnership, Kunzer editorial staff are expected to add local content about the Spanish and Latin American IT markets to each property. TechTarget Spain will enable advertisers to reach IT professionals and executives in Spain and Latin America.
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