To kick off his return to LA radio yesterday, nationally syndicated radio personality Tom Joyner and 100.3 The Beat are offering $1 gas at stations around Los Angeles, RadioInk reports.
Direct Marketers who enter the international market through Canada, Britain and Australia should take a close look at India where English is one of the most widely spoken languages, DMNews reports.
Readers rank newspaper media as a top media choice when making purchasing decisions on products and services, according to a Scarborough Research study sponsored by the Newspaper Association of America and based on more than 4,500 respondents.
The study is part of the industry’s multi-million dollar advertising campaign designed to “surprise advertisers with the truth” about consumer engagement with newspaper advertising. The campaign is needed at a time when newspaper circulation is dropping - it fell 2.5 percent in the six-month period ending in March, according to the Newspaper Association of America’s analysis of data released.
Merrill Lynch has reduced its six-network upfront projection to -1 percent, down from a previous projection of flat, Mediaweek reports.
Merrill now sees the six broadcast nets landing $8.98 billion in total upfront sales, versus the $9.12 billion it projected in May. The big four are also projected to be down, taking in $8.34 billion of the total broadcast kitty versus the $8.47 billion Merrill estimated a month ago.
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Ford Motor Company has signed on as a key sponsor of AMC’s four-hour Western, Broken Trail, which premieres as a two-part special June 25 and 26 at 8:00 p.m., Mediaweek reports. This is the first time Ford has bought time on AMC and the automaker will be featured in special 30- and 60-second vignettes as well as tagged tune-ins, integrated bumpers, logo presence on print ads and online exposure on AMCtv.com and the Broken Trail micro site.
As many as a thousand Netherlands World Cup fans had to turn in their pants before entering a stadium in Stuttgart, Germany because the orange team pants carried a logo for a Dutch Brewery, UPI reports. Since Budweiser owns exclusive beer advertising and promotional rights at the World Cup, that’s not allowed, so stadium officials made the Dutch fans shed their logos - pants - before they could enter.
According to FIFA officials, the trousers were an attempt at so-called ambush marketing - where a company tries to gain free publicity - and that they had to act to protect the interests of sponsors, BBC News reports.
This is just the latest in what could be called a PR nightmare for Budweiser, which paid $40 million for the World Cup beer monopoly.
NBC’s Today show hasn’t suffered yet from the departure of Katie Couric, The AP reports via Yahoo News.
Today beat second-place “Good Morning America” of ABC by an average of 1.3 million viewers in the two weeks following Couric’s last show on May 31, according to Nielsen Media Research. The NBC show’s margin of victory (5.85 million to 4.92 million) was tighter during Couric’s last full week on the air. Still, the “Today” viewership the first week post-Couric was at its lowest since last Christmas.
PepsiCo has signed a deal with the National Hockey League that gives the beverage company will have exclusive rights in the beverage, sports beverage, bottled water and snack categories, as well as select marketing and promotional rights in North America. With the deal, Gatorade becomes the official sports drink of the NHL and will be available on the benches of all 30 NHL teams.
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BzzAgent is cutting ties with up to 10,000 of its 180,000 BzzAgents who have violated the company’s terms of service. It is also overhauling its rewards system.
By removing “pest” BzzAgents, the company says it is strengthening an earlier policy in which BzzAgents found to register multiple accounts, file false reports or commit similar infractions were blocked from joining word-of-mouth campaigns, but permitted to remain community members. BzzAgent will notify all participants found to be in violation of its terms of service of their expulsion over the next few weeks.
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Sony BMG Music Entertainment has launched its new, ad-supported Musicbox Video site - which offers videos, artist interviews, behind-the-scenes footage and other material from Sony artists - and is encouraging fans and bloggers to link to and provide the video content on their own sites, reports CNET (via MarketingVOX). The videos, in Flash, can’t be easily pirated. Advertisers DreamWorks Animation SKG and Hewlett-Packard have signed for the launch.
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