A recent campaign for Continental Airlines, promoting its new route to Japan, saw chopstick wrappers printed with the airline’s logo and website, along with the slogan “Sticking it to the competition. Work Hard. Fly Right” distributed at Japanese restaurants in New York, according to Media Life magazine.
U.S. college students (ages 18-30) prefer to spend their hard-earned money on brands they perceive to be socially responsible, according to findings released today from Alloy Media + Marketing’s 5th annual College Explorer Study, conducted by Harris Interactive. The study found that, while humor is good and big names still sell, students prefer an honest and effective social responsibility campaign to celebrity endorsements when it comes to spending.
This year’s college enrollment is the largest on record, overall spending has jumped by $8 billion and their discretionary spending power has grown 12 percent to $46 billion.
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The Audit Bureau of Circulations has launched its Rapid Report for consumer magazine circulation-reporting. The creation of ABC Rapid Report was a collaboration of ABC-member publishers, advertisers and advertising agencies working together to address an important strategic need for more frequently reported circulation data. ABC Rapid Report allows publishers to voluntarily report their top-line circulation data on an issue-by-issue basis within weeks of the on-sale or non-paid distribution date.
In a recent survey of ABC consumer magazine titles, about 15 percent of the respondents said they expect to participate in ABC Rapid Report, while half aren’t yet sure. Approximately half of those intending to participate in Rapid Report claim circulation greater than 750,000.
Seventeen Magazine has teamed up with MySpace.com to sponsor a contest, which begins today, requesting submissions of 15- to 30-second video public-service announcements encouraging social activism, the Washington Post reports.
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Online advertisers lost hundreds of millions of dollars to click fraud in 2005 - and as a result lost some confidence as well and so reduced search spending with Google, Yahoo and others, according to a study by Outsell Inc., reports the San Francisco Chronicle (via MarketingVox). According to the survey of advertisers, on average 14.6 percent of all clicks are fraudulent, and 75 percent of advertisers say they have been victims of click fraud at one time or another.
Marketers will spend an average of nearly $250,000 for database upgrades this year, according to Direct’s 2006 database practices survey. Seventy percent plan to install or enhance data mining capabilities, while 40 percent want to expand storage capacity. Nearly 20 percent hope to add a data mart or outsource complete services.
The Advertising Research Foundation plans to publish “The Online Advertising Playbook,” an online-advertising for “brand marketers eager to tap power of internet, but who have shied away because of lack of confidence in how to use the medium,” MediaPost quotes Taddy Hall, a guide coauthor, as saying, MarketingVOX reports.
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A bored Dutch design student who was “getting sick and tired of advertising everywhere” has launched a fake online ad agency offering advertising space on the thighs and cleavage of prostitutes, among other ideas, according to Yahoo. Raoul Balai’s site, InStoresNow.nl, shows photos of supposed campaigns: Heineken, written across the thigh of a scantily clad woman, for example.
Thursday night wildcard NBC’s My Name is Earl will run a close race with CBS’s Survivor, perhaps edging it out on Thursday nights at 8 p.m. next season, if results from Phi Power’s poll are borne out. The poll, conducted May 19-23, also shows that CBS’s Without a Trace will do very well among older viewers (though sagging in younger viewers) against ABC’s usually dominant Sunday schedule, Media Life writes. Across the networks, the new dramas seem to be more exciting to viewers than the comedies - however, no new show scored particularly well, according to the article. But that is to be expected, as the new programs are still unfamiliar and promotion had barely started when the poll was conducted.
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Two new programs are available for DMers looking for insert opportunities, according to Direct Magazine. Doubleday Entertainment’s Crafter’s Choice Reactivation ride-along targets 3.6 million club members who fulfilled their purchase requirements and left the club in good standing. Only one insert per package will be accepted, and the price is $50/M.
Clear Channel Outdoor is doing test in Europe of a new technology from Magink that allows users to shrink outdoor digital signage’s width, weight, and power consumption of existing electronic systems, MediaPost reports.
JCDecaux SA premiered digital billboards based on magink’s digital ink technology at the 59th Cannes Film Festival.
For the first month since January, radio ad spending rose, though only marginally, rising 1 percent, according to the Radio Advertising Bureau, Mediaweek writes. The increase is due mainly to increased demand from local advertisers, according to MediaPost. National sales fell 1 percent in May and are flat year-to-date, while local was up 1 percent.
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With large amounts of inventory available, aging off-net hits and declining ratings, syndicators are accepting deals that include price cuts in exchange for more volume as they negotiate in the current upfront marketplace, writes MediaPost. While syndication volume was projected to grow by about 4 percent to just over $3 billion, at least one veteran syndication media sales executive believes overall syndication volume will drop.
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Spam messages promoting porn are 280 times as effective in getting recipients to click on them as messages advertising pharmacy drugs, which are the next most effective type of spam, reports The New York Times, citing a report from CipherTrust.
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