Ad spending in major U.S. media - especially national TV, newspaper, radio and B2B - has slowed down from earlier expectations, resulting in a half percentage point decrease in TNS Media Intelligence’s overall ad spend projection for 2006, reports MediaPost (via MarketingVox). But in its midyear update TNS revised upward its outlook for the internet, Hispanic TV, outdoor and spot TV.
email this
permanent link
On July 13, Cottage Living magazine will open the doors to its second annual Idea Home in the historic Evanston suburb of Chicago. With a goal of bringing to life the magazine’s focus of “comfort, simplicity and style,” the 2006 Idea Home is sponsored by Bayer, Boral, Bulova, Broan, Circa Lighting, Flood, Georgia Pacific, Jeld-Wen, Kirsch, Kohler, Laura Ashley Home, Lennox, Monrovia, NuTone, Rubbermaid, Schlage, Shaw, Sherwin-Williams, Sunbrela, Thomas Kinkade and Wood-Mode.
Building upon recent launches of T: Style Magazine and Play sports magazine, The New York Times today announced that on Sept. 10 it will launch Key, The New York Times Real Estate Magazine, which will be distributed inside the Sunday Times.
BlueLithium has launched AdRoll, a video streaming ad network with behavioral targeting capabilities for in-stream or in-banner placements, reports DM News (via MarketingVox). Advertisers can target previous visitors to websites as they travel across other sites in the BlueLithium network of publishers (a process called remarketing).
email this
permanent link
AOL has confirmed that it is indeed testing ads within AOL Mail, a move considered unusual because, while both Yahoo and MSN Hotmail run ads on their front email pages, AOL is a paid service and subscribers who pay generally expect the service to be ad-free, writes DM News.
email this
permanent link
Pierre Bouvard & Owen Charlebois have written a letter to Arbitron subscribers saying that PPM won’t be going live in Houston in July as planned and instead the company will continue using diaries to determine Houston radio ratings this summer, Radio Ink reports.
In short, Arbitron has not secured Media Rating Council accreditation of its PPM system and stands by its commitment to not replace diary-based radio ratings in Houston with Portable People Meter radio ratings until the Houston PPM service receives Media Rating Council accreditation.
Clear Channel Radio, which has been fielding its own evaluation of electronic measurement options for radio, said that PPM’s inability to secure Media Rating Council accreditation proved that “PPM is not ready for prime time,” Mediaweek reports.
Clear Channel Spectacolor, a high-tech division of Clear Channel Outdoor, is building a giant complex of outdoor advertising in a Phoenix satellite city that will be second only to Times Square when it comes to a collection of signs and billboards, MediaPost reports. The complex, with 30 signs of various sizes including some that will be 100 feet tall, will be built into the “City Center” of Westgate, Arizona; City Council members hope that the development will help settle Glendale’s sparsely populated Yucca district and attract up to 22 million visitors a year to the 6.5 million square feet of retail space.
email this
permanent link
The U.K.’s Ofcom, in response to questions about the impact of a total ban on junk food advertising on television, has estimated that television companies would lose more than 140 million pounds in ad revenue if such a ban was put into effect. The media regulator was asked to answer the question as part of a public consultation on the issue that closes on June 30, the Media Guardian reports.
email this
permanent link
U.S. TV broadcasts of the 2006 World Cup in Germany on ABC and Univision are posting a 50 percent-plus improvement in viewership so far over the 2002 World Cup event, MediaPost reports.
Through the first eight games, Univision has been averaging 2.6 million viewers per telecast. ABC’s English-language television grabbed a 65 percent gain in ratings from two games versus four years ago.
Mediaweek reports that the match between Mexico and Iran on June 11 drew an audience of 5.4 million, making it the most watched sporting event in Spanish-language television history.
When Conde Nast’s new business title, Portfolio, hits the stands next May, media executives believe it will bring new advertisers to the category. And new blood is needed: Ad pages at business magazines are down - the latest bad news has IBM pulling advertising, $9.3 million worth, out of McGraw-Hill’s BusinessWeek magazine.
Portfolio’s top business competitors include Business Week, Fortune, and Forbes. According to Publishers Information Bureau, ad pages at Business Week were down 3.7 percent and revenue down 9.3 percent from January to May 2006 compared with the same period in 2005. For the same period, Fortune’s pages were down 5.5 percent and revenue down 3.3 percent and ad pages at Forbes were down 1.3 percent and revenue up 3.7 percent.
Still, Bill Kupper, president and publisher of Business Week, looks forward to Portfolio’s launch, MediaLife reports. “It means that for all those doomsayers saying that business publications are going totally extinct, it’s just not true,” Kupper said.
email this
permanent link
Clear Channel, in seeking new ways for advertisers to succeed with the medium, has conceptualized “blinks,” or one-second radio spots, and is currently in discussions with marketers and media buyers, AdAge reports. To illustrate the concept of blinks, Clear Channel’s creative services group created a demonstration of uses of the one-second spot. In one blink for BMW’s Mini Cooper, for example, a horn honked and a man’s voice said “Mini.” The ad was placed prior to a miniaturized news report.
The POPAI pilot study to measure in-store marketing has been derailed, at least for the time being, as Proctor & Gamble has opted out of participation despite the fact that a P&G executive sits on the study’s board, AdAge reports. Wal-Mart, too, has decided not to participate. The multi-million dollar study, which was designed to bring the detailed metrics used in TV and radio to the retail-advertising space and is being created by Point-of-Purchase Advertising International and the Association of National Advertisers, has no definitive start date now that P& G has pulled out.
email this
permanent link
Commercial Alert has sent letters to more than 300 book review editors asking them not to review Cathy’s Book, a young adult book that has a partnership with Cover Girl to include product placement for Lipslicks and other products within the book’s content, writes Adrants.
The letter from Commercial Alert calls the book “part of a marketing campaign for Procter & Gamble’s Cover Girl line.” It goes on to say that, “It is not unknown for works of fiction to advance political and other agendas, but this crosses a line. Cathy’s Book is in the form of a novel. But in reality it is an adjunct of a corporate marketing campaign aimed at impressionable teenagers. Its contents have been altered to that end.
email this
permanent link
