FHM joins the digital fray through Zinio beginning with its March 2006 issue. The service will be available today on Zinio.com and FHM’s Web site, fhmus.com. The print edition also hits newsstands today. Readers can purchase an individual digital issue for $4.99, or a full-year subscription for $14.97.
The Glad Products Company has signed on as Mardis Gras’ first-ever high-level program sponsor. In addition to its program commitment, Glad will work with the City of New Orleans Department of Sanitation in the carnival’s sanitation maintenance and clean-up efforts. Glad will donate more than 100,000 trash bags and be named the “official trash bag of New Orleans’ Mardi Gras.”
According to MediaBuys, additional sponsors are soon to be announced, and corporate sponsorship opportunities for Mardi Gras are still available.
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To help ensure accurate online advertising impression counts during audit processes, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and ABC Electronic (ABCE) today announced (via MarketingVOX) the launch of an expanded global Spiders & Bots List. The new list, for the first time, combines IAB’s advertising-related spiders and bots Ad List with ABCE’s Content Traffic List related to robotic site traffic, to help determine the impact that non-human activity may have on ad serving.
“The new global list will help to provide the most effective method of filtering out all non-human activity - affecting both ad impression counts and site traffic counts - enabling site owners to present transparent, accurate and robust auditable data relating to counts of variable user interaction,” according to the announcement.
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Google has blacklisted BMW.de after the carmaker’s German site violated Google guidelines by using doorway pages that automatically redirect visitors to a different URL - a technique that can artificially boost search engine rating - reports CNET (via MarketingVOX), citing Google engineer Matt Cutts’s blog. Though Google crawlers would see blocks of text with repeated keywords, visitors to the page would be redirected to a well-designed, graphically rich page without the text.
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Rocketboom, having decided to run ads on its site for the first time since its launch in 2004, is auctioning its video inventory on eBay, Mediapost writes. The auction is for five post-roll video ads to run in each daily video log entry from March 6-10. The ads, which will run from 15-30 seconds, will be created and produced by Rocketboom rather than the marketer, though the marketer will give input and have final approval.
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The heavy marketing of sleeping pills by drug companies is, perhaps, working. Sleeping pill prescriptions have increased nearly 60 percent since 2000, according to CBS4 Boston. Commercial Alert, the consumer advocacy group that has worked to halt pharmaceutical direct-to-consumer advertising, decries drug ads that say they will “make you feel happier, sleep better and improve your sex life.”
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More than 50 commercials appeared during Super Bowl XL on Sunday, but instead of vanishing into the ether as they once did, many have already found a second life online, writes the New York Times (via MarketingVox). This year, many have been officially made available through streaming video online - for watching, forwarding, adding to personal web pages, and even downloading to video iPods. And the post-game ad buzz is taking the hurt off the estimated $2.5 million price tag for each 30-second ad.
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ABC is the first network to claim unequivocally that it will not write business in the upcoming upfront season with media agencies that refuse to take Nielsen’s new ratings into account, Mediaweek writes. In December Nielsen began issuing new sets of TV ratings, including live plus same day and live plus 7 days, both of which take into account non-live digital video recorder viewing.
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NBC claims it will meet its revenue goal of $900 million for upcoming Winter Olympics, in spite of some inherent challenges: the Games come only five days after the Super Bowl, they’re being sold by a network that is struggling in prime time, and they’re competing against the American Idol phenomenon. So how is the network managing to maintain its asking price of $500,000 to $700,000 per spot? According to AdAge, it’s because advertisers that buy into this winter’s Games are being given a window of a few months during which they can negotiate a level of exclusivity - dependent upon the level of their Turin commitments - in the Beijing Games of 2008.
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Early indications published yesterday by Media Life seemed to show that Super Bowl ratings had slipped 3 percent from 2005, but those didn’t reflect the 210 total markets measured by Nielsen, and in fact updated ratings show that the game was up a half point from the previous year, Media Life reports today. The game averaged 90.7 million total viewers, up 5 percent from last year’s 86.1 million viewers.
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Google has launched Gmail Chat, allowing users to instant-message with a click from their email accounts, see when contacts are online and save their chat history as they would an email message, reports CNET (via MarketingVox). Users can also keep chats “off the record” by clicking on that option. The chat application’s Quick Contacts list is synchronized with a user’s Google Talk friends list and displays those with whom a user communicates most frequently. Clicking on an online contact opens a chat window.
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ABC Radio and Citadel Broadcasting Corporation will merge, and the newly combined company - Citadel Communications - will be the third largest radio group in the U.S., Radio Ink reports. The deal will not include ABC-owned stations under the Radio Disney and ESPN brands and networks.
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On February 10th, TV Guide and NBC will begin their cross-platform integrated coverage of the Olympic Winter Games from Torino, Italy. TV Guide Channel will showcase tune-in information regarding NBC’s Olympic coverage in the segment Watch This and in its Enhanced On-Screen Program Listings. The 14 million homes using TV Guide Interactive as their digital cable program guide will have access to a 24-hour interactive NBC Olympic icon. On February 6th, TV Guide Magazine begins its 3-week feature of the Olympics, including NBC TV listings. In return, NBC will direct viewers to TV Guide Channel for more extensive Olympic viewing information.
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General Motors reduced its national advertising budget from $1.5 billion in 2005 to $1.3 billion for 2006 to cope with the $8.55 billion net loss the company suffered last year, reports Auto Week. GM has historically led the auto industry in media spending. Brent Dewar, GM vice president of marketing and advertising, says their reign will continue.
The budget cut comes after GM consolidated its media planning and buying under one roof last year to solve inefficiencies in the media buying process.
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After suffering a 12.2 percent decrease in ad pages in 2005, Time4 Media’s Golf Magazine is repositioning itself as a multimedia destination, expanding to the internet, a spin-off magazine, and television, writes Mediaweek. The 1.4 million-circulation Golf Magazine is becoming a content company that is available to its audience whenever, wherever, Time4Media says. The new media outlets also give marketers of endemic and non-endemic products and services access to more online and print advertising.
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