Marketers in California - and marketers reaching out to California customers - will no longer be able to market via fax, even to customers with whom they have an established business relationship, thanks to a new bill signed into law by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Folio reports.
The latest turf-war tactic for competing U.K. newspapers is giving away free DVDs when a newspaper is purchased, the BBC reports. Over the weekend, for example, the Guardian was giving away copies of the 1999 Bafta-winning British comedy East is East with purchase of the paper, while the Times was offering a DVD of the 1972 Liza Minelli film, Cabaret, and Independent was offering the Oscar-winning film Indochine.
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The readership of Hoy, the nation’s leading Spanish-language newspaper with daily editions in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, has increased its daily readership in Los Angeles by 27 percent in the most recent six-month measurement period, according to new Scarborough numbers. But Hoy is growing tremendously in all its markets.
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JibJab Media has hired MSN to distribute, sell video ad units for, and work with JibJab and its advertisers to develop product-placement opportunities regarding new short films that will be shown on MSN Video and JibJab.com, ClickZ reports (via MarketingVox). MSN will be selling ads that, for the first time, appear outside its own network - for at least the next five JibJab films. It has also secured the rights to show previous JibJab films, which initially spread virally via email and word of mouth, granting JibJab a broad audience.
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Advertisers may soon have a new ad format to embrace with the invention of inexpensive, paper-thin TV screens that can be used in newspapers and magazines, the Guardian Unlimited reports (via the MIT Advertising Lab blog). Electronics giant Siemens unveiled the screens this week at the Plastics Electronics trade fair in Frankfurt, and the company said the screens should be available by 2007.
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The Vermont Teddy Bear Co. will mail a new handbag catalog this fall, DMNews reports. The first The Gift Bag Boutique catalog will go out in late November.
“We are always trying to keep on top of trends and find the latest gift trends out there,” spokesperson Nicole L’Huillier said of the new catalog.
While almost all newspapers now offer online classifieds, few are taking advantage of the full range of the internet’s interactive and display capabilities, a recent University of Missouri-Columbia study found, reports Mediapost. For the study, online classified ads of 24 newspapers, ranging in size from a 2,110 circulation to the Los Angeles Times’ 900,000+ circ, were examined over a two-day period in March.
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While a number of prospective bidders of Aegis remain on the sidelines, and while corporate raider Vincent Bollore continues to up his stake in the U.K.-based independent media agency, no material offer has yet been made to acquire the agency, Mediapost reports.
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Fox has cancelled The Simple Life, the reality show based on heiresses Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie, Media Life reports. The reason given was a lack of time on Fox’s midseason schedule, but the move was not unexpected, based on the fact that ratings had dropped in season three and the two (former) best friends were publicly feuding.
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The premiere issue of the Wall Street Journal’s Weekend Edition was read by 96 percent of the Journal’s subscribers, according to research conducted by Beta Research Corp., B to B reports. Nearly 90 percent read all three sections of the weekend paper, and 61 percent read the paper before noon on Saturday - good news for Journal advertisers who had hoped to reach subscribers at home on the weekend.
On average, subscribers read the weekend paper for 58 minutes, and 61 percent said that someone else also read their copy.
