Crutchfield, Tweeter and ABC Warehouse/Detroit launched multi-tiered promotional campaigns for HD Radio yesterday, and are adding more HD Radio receivers to their inventories, Radio Ink writes.
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Avon’s new promotion and catalog campaign for its Blue Rush line for men and women will feature stars from Days of Our Lives, the popular NBC daytime soap opera, writes Brandweek.
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Advertisers will be spending significantly less on television and increasingly more on online advertising in the next couple of years, according to a poll of major advertisers by Forrester and the Association of National Advertisers, writes ClickZ (via MarketingVox). Some 78 percent of the surveyed marketers said the effectiveness of their TV advertising has diminished in the last two years. Some 80 percent said they would instead invest more in web advertising, and 68 percent pointed to search marketing specifically.
According to those familiar with the agreement, Verizon Communications Inc. will pay CBS Corp. 50 cents per subscriber - a rate comparable to what cable operators pay for cable channels - for the right to run its programming on Verizon’s home TV service, a move CBS hopes will pressure cable operators to sign its TV stations, The Wall Street Journal writes [subscription].
Mokrynskidirect has allied with STG Media Corp., a print media research, planning and buying agency, to offer a new space advertising placement service geared toward driving online customer acquisition for catalogers, DM News writes. For catalogers, the internet has gone from being simply an order-entry platform to a way to gain new customers. Mokrynskidirect believes that space ads in targeted publications will drive traffic online and deliver measurable incremental sales.
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Internet Broadcasting, the nation’s largest local online news network, announced at the end of February new, multi-year agreements with Hearst-Argyle Television, Inc., Post-Newsweek Stations, Inc., and McGraw-Hill Broadcasting. With the deals, Internet Broadcasting will continue to provide local and national online advertising sales, interactive media services, and technology for their partner TV station website properties.
TowerPod, a service that offers podcasters rights-cleared music and a way to earn income, will be launched by Outhink Media and Tower Records at the South by Southwest Music Festival in Austin, Tex., on March 15, the two companies announced today. The service provides podcasters a platform to create music-intensive podcasts without the concern of copyright infringement and restrictive digital rights management (DRM). The website currently has no content, simply stating “TowerPod coming soon,” presumably in time for its March 15 launch.
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Sports Illustrated for Kids has partnered with Topps to create a multimedia program, promoting the collection of trading cards among young adults, writes Mediaweek.
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Plus-size apparel retail chain Avenue has launched a new catalog thanks to a venture with Redcats, Multichannel Merchant reports. The 84-page book began mailing on March 4, and was developed by the Redcats catalog division of Pinault-Printemps-Redoute. Redcats, the multi-title apparel and home goods mailer, teamed with Avenue because it wanted to capitalize on Avenue’s strong reputation in plus-size apparel for a younger, more fashionable audience.
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Wal-Mart will begin airing programming produced together with TV One - a new cable network that targets African American adults - on the Wal-Mart Television Network that reaches shoppers in 2,850 Wal-Mart stores nationwide, Mediapost reports. This comes just a few months after bloggers blasted the retail giant for producing search results in a way that seemed racist against African Americans.
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Frag dolls During the Women in Games International conference, held recently in San Francisco, Lisa Sikora, of the Casual Games division at Microsoft, reported that 70 percent of their players are women, writes Wired News. The Entertainment Software Association found that 44 percent of online gamers are female, who spend 57 percent of their total playtime on casual games.
A popular discussion at the show was how to encourage women to play video games. One side argued for casual games like Bejewled and Tetris that offer brain-twisting challenges in a short time period. The other side defended action games and team-based shooters.
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Six Flags and National CineMedia, the sales and marketing arm of the three largest theater circuits in the U.S. (AMC Entertainment, Cinemark USA and Regal Entertainment Group) announced today a marketing alliance giving Six Flags a significant advertising presence in those theaters through June and July 2006.
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Al Gore’s Current TV is giving its website’s users the chance to create commercials for its corporate sponsors, offering $1,000 for every spot aired on TV, AdJab writes. If the corporate sponsor involved wanted to broaden the scope of the distribution of the spots, the creator would get more financial rewards, amounting to between $5,000 and $50,000 depending on where and how the ad is used.
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United Airlines today announced it has added up to 19 music channels (depending on aircraft type) from XM Satellite radio to its onboard audio entertainment beginning this month. Channels will include Top 20 on 20 for latest hits, Suite 62 for adult R&B, Highway 16 for country fans, the Blend for adult contemporary, Top Tracks for classic rock, XM Pops for classical music, Bluesville to hear jazz and blues and Soul Street for classic soul.
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On the heels of a recent redesign, FamilyFun magazine is offering advertisers new opportunities to reach consumers via a series of marketing programs and initiatives in the coming months. This spring FamilyFun will sponsor PTO Today’s School “Fun and Games Nights,” with activities and events for kids and parents at their local schools.
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The Associated Press (AP) has officially launched its AP Online Video Network in the U.S. after two months in beta, MarketingVox reports. Powered by MSN Video and using AP content, the ad-supported service will allow some 4,000 AP newspaper and broadcast member websites to offer a free breaking-news video content to their audience, initially totaling 45 million unique visitors. At launch, 450 sites had signed up. The service will offer 40 or so video clips per day covering national, international, technology, business and entertainment news, including this week’s Academy Awards.
Only nine hours after the launch of the network, paidContent points out, the AP posted video of President Bush, Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff and other government officials being warned about Katrina, a day before it struck.
Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications is partnering with Google to integrate Blogger and Google search into Sony Ericsson mobile phones, reports CNET (via MarketingVox). Preloaded software on phones will allow Blogger users to update their blogs, including posting photos, from their phones. Also Google search will be the standard engine for all Sony Ericsson phones and is tightly integrated, allowing searches from within any page being viewed on the phone.
Nielsen announced today that it will not go into business with Arbitron to deploy the PPM (portable people meter, which automatically registers radio and TV signals within a given range of the subject), choosing to take a “portfolio” approach to TV ratings. That approach will be a combination of its LPMs (local people meters, which viewers have to log in to) with DVR data and the expansion of its national sample to include out-of-home viewing by college students.
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Revenue Science and Digital Advertising Consortium Inc., a Japanese advertising business integrator that represents major Japanese websites including Yahoo Japan, MSN Japan, and Infoseek, announced yesterday that the two companies have signed an exclusive contract for DAC to deliver Revenue Science’s behavioral targeting services to Japanese advertisers and publishers. The agreement marks the first time that behavioral targeting will be enabled for the Japanese Kanji alphabet.
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Sirius Satellite Radio and Court TV News have announced that Court TV Morning Radio - a weekday call-in radio news program hosted by Court TV News’s Vinnie Politan - is expected to debut March 20 on Court TV Radio.
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