Starbucks and Yahoo Personals have agreed to cross-market each other’s services until Valentine’s Day, with Yahoo launching the “Espresso Dating Guide” co-branded site, writes MediaPost (via MarketingVOX). Users can go to the site to get dating advice, find Starbucks locations, and receive a $10 Starbucks gift card for subscribing to Yahoo Personals - the most-visited U.S. dating site, according to comScore.
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The San Francisco Chronicle is launching a 30-minute television program called Chronicle Jobs TV that will run three times a week on UPN Bay Area Channel 44 at 5:30 a.m., Monday through Wednesday, MediaPost reports.
Classifieds on Chronicle Jobs TV will be up to 30 seconds in length and will be divided into six categories: general, sales and marketing, professional, health care, skills and trades, and technology. The ads will also be streamed at www.SFGate.com for a one-week period. The show is being created by Digital Media Classifieds.
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Maxim’s Super Bowl parties are known for lavish client sponsor integration into the event, and this year’s won’t be any different, the magazine has announced. The theme at the pre-game party will be Maxim Rock City. Guests will enter a rock opera come to life, an electric landscape of sights, sounds and spectacle inspired by Kiss, Ken Russell’s flamboyant film of The Who’s Tommy, and David Bowie’s memorable glitter era.
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The number of unique visitors to Apple’s iTunes Music Store website reached 20.7 million in December, up from 6.1 million a year ago - an increase of 241 percent - according to Nielsen/NetRatings, reports InternetRetailer (via MarketingVox). The traffic consists mostly of teens, with those age 12-17 nearly twice as likely as the average web user to visit iTunes.
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The Word of Mouth Basic Training conference, held over the weekend in Orlando, drew some 450 advertising and marketing professionals, the New York Times reports, and one of the main themes was ethics and full disclosure. Speakers repeatedly warned attendees against misrepresenting themselves. For example, said Robert Ricci, director of web relations for Weber Shandwick, “If you’re working on a video game, and you go onto a video gamer’s blog, let your contacts know that you are an employee of said company.”
General Electric’s Chairman-CEO Jeff Immelt said NBC would bring in between $650 million and $750 million in revenue and just break even on the Torino games, MediaPost reports. NBC’s plan was to bring in $900 million in ad revenue for Torino - a 22 percent increase over Salt Lake City in 2002. Now, even if NBC approaches the high end of Immelt’s projections, it may struggle to break even, with rights fees reported at $614 million and production costs estimated at well over $100 million.
The new AT&T is launching a campaign around its support of the 2006 U.S. Winter Olympic teams which will include a giant billboard in Times Square, with the message “U.S. Olympic Team. Delivered.”, the company has announced. The billboard is part of a campaign that plays off AT&T’s “Your world. Delivered.” brand campaign. The billboard will remain up through the end of February.
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Mobile ad technology firm Third Screen Media, which also runs an ad network, has just released its MADX|Publisher software - a mobile ad server with trafficking capabilities - to help publishers monetize mobile content, reports ClickZ (via MarketingVOX). Already being used by the Weather Channel and USA Today, MADX will by March enable publishers to accept and respond to RFPs from agencies and advertisers, and make available inventory visible to them. The current version enables delivery of ads to WAP handhelds, offering targeting and optimization based on device type, geography, daypart, browser and carrier.
U.S. marketers are significantly shifting their spending from brand building to direct response-oriented promotional channels, according to a new report released today by Winterberry Group, a direct marketing consulting. The report was commissioned by V12 Group.
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Media Buys, the agency helping to sell sponsorships for the City of New Orleans’ Mardi Gras, has announced today the addition of a Recovery Room to its Ad Support and Sponsorship program during Mardi Gras. This area will allow corporate participants to meet residents and businesses that have been affected by the hurricane face-to-face, and help them with various aspects of their individual recovery on an individual basis.
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NASCAR superstar Dale Earnhardt Jr. will join XM Satellite Radio for a weekly talk show. The show will debut during the week of February 13 on XM’s NASCAR Radio during Daytona Speedweeks.
Television networks and media agencies predict there will be no major drop-off in the upfront marketplace, Mediaweek reports. The migration of ad dollars out of broadcast and into nontraditional media, while widely reported, is happening relatively slowly, said Ray Warren, CEO of Carat North America. And Steve Grubbs, CEO of PHD North America believes that most spending in nontraditional media is happening as ad budgets are increased rather than at the expense of broadcast.
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NBC plans to make major programming changes in March, after covering the Winter Olympics, in the hopes of regaining some of its former status, Mediapost writes. Law & Order, its dominant, Wednesday 10 p.m. show, will be moved back an hour, and a light-drama thief series, Heist, will move into its old slot.
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Now that Nielsen has begun adding DVR data into its ratings, a strange occurrence has caused confusion among clients: some ratings and demographics are actually declining when the DVR data is added back into live ratings, Mediapost writes. Two explanations have surfaced.
Nielsen has reminded clients that the live ratings have included estimates for VCR audiences for about 20 years. The math created by Nielsen to calculate VCR audiences was designed only for its live ratings stream. When applied to the samples in its new DVR data streams, the VCR math changes the numerator and denominator, yielding “aberrations,” the company has said. Nielsen is still trying to understand all the ramifications of the new data streams, but any aberrations should diminish as the DVR sample grows.
Over the coming months, Rupert Murdoch will launch a string of new magazines through his British company, News International, Media Life reports.
The first launch, Love It, a weekly women’s ‘real life’ magazine, will hit newsstands on Feb. 7. Two more will follow, a home title in March and another women’s magazine in the fall.
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Traditional advertising may slow in the coming year, with numerous areas of concern, according to the Industry Report Card: U.S. Media & Entertainment from Standard & Poor’s Rating Services, B to B reports. While a boost is expected from local elections and the Winter Olympics, that lift could be counterracted by a general slowing of the media and entertainment industry. Perhaps of the most concern is the deterioration of the financial health of U.S. automakers.
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Herbalife Ltd. has announced the opening of business in Malaysia, the 61st country where Herbalife products are sold through a network of independent distributors. According to the Ministry of Domestic Trade and Consumer Affairs, the direct sales industry generated $1.35 billion in Malaysia in 2004. To date there are 520 licensed direct selling companies in Malaysia with more than seven million distributors.
