V12 Group Offers Consolidated Below-the-Line Marketing

A newly formed company, The V12 Group, is offering direct marketing services to Madison Avenue based on a couple of marketing trends, CEO Paul Chachko told DM News. The first is that dollars are shifting from above-the-line marketing to below-the-line, and the second is that advertisers can’t effectively manage several vendors to work different channels so they’re looking for consolidation.

Travelocity Homepage Ads to Have Personal Touch

Travelocity will soon launch the next phase of a personalization effort with an ad on the site’s home page offering travel deals based on the visitor’s identity, writes DM News (via MarketingVox). The concept is similar to Travelocity’s two-month-old system of serving ads based on the site visitor’s geographic location, according to IP address. Travelocity’s efforts point to increasing sophistication in making e-commerce personalized and customer-relevant.

Retailers Don’t Take Advantage of Email’s Full Potential

Most marketers don’t use common email features such as personalization, dynamic content and advanced layout/design, according to Phase II of Silverpop’s “2005 Retail Email Marketing Study,” which compared message content and creative design of 175 major retailers’ email campaigns, writes ClickZ (via MarketingVox). Personalization, among the easiest tactics, was used in fewer than 5 percent of emails; and 27 percent of messages did not have a specific call to action.

TAAP Taps into Audio, Photo Capabilities for Data Capture

U.K. data capture systems specialist TAAP has announced a new version of its mobile data capture device which integrates audio and photo data into individual prospect records, the Market Research Bulletin reports. The ability to integrate audio and photo data was requested by TAAP’s clients, including Fiat, Vauxhall, and Chevrolet.

“Sometimes it’s the throwaway comments that are the most insightful, and that’s what we’re looking to capture,” said Matthew Young, e-commerce and direct marketing manager of Chevrolet.

Fathom Launches Analytics Business

Search engine marketing firm Fathom Online announced a new data collection and tracking business, Fathom Data Solutions, which will market the company’s ad data aggregation tool, Triton, reports MediaPost (via MarketingVox). Fathom CEO Chris Churchill said the new effort targets companies that want to spend more dollars online but don’t have the manpower to monitor dozens of online campaigns at once.

HarperCollins Taps Teen Market with Text Messaging

HarperCollins Children’s Books launched a text messaging campaign today to promote the Princess Diaries series and other books from author Meg Cabot, reports DM News (via MarketingVox). The effort, including the set-up of a club, targets mobile marketing programs to teenage readers and includes SMS-based promotions such as sweepstakes, text-based trivia campaigns, book-signing updates, screensavers and voice tones from the author.

Major U.S. wireless networks, including Verizon, Sprint, Nextel, T-Mobile, AT&T Wireless and Cingular, have agreed to host - hoping to benefit from teenagers’ attraction to mobile-based games, messaging, photographs, music, ring tones or just plain talk.

AOL, Feedster Team for ‘My AOL’ Personalized Homepage

America Online today announced (via MarketingVox) the initial beta My AOL, a personalized homepage on the AOL.com portal, featuring customized feeds for news and other web content. The portal’s centralized page provides a view of AOL.com’s suite of features and new Video Hub. To offer customized homepages to users, AOL has teamed up with RSS search engine Feedster to provide My AOL’s RSS/XML feed capability. Users can search and subscribe to publisher-specific and topic-based feeds on their homepages.

Dart Gets 6.0 Makeover

DoubleClick yesterday announced Dart Enterprise 6.0, a new version of its licensed software for online ad management. The upgrades bring greater scalability and flexibility to clients for managing and reporting on online ad campaigns and newer environments, such as iTV, according to the announcement.

Hot Ad Market, Convergence Convince Portals to Emulate TV

MSN, Google, Yahoo and AOL have begun to “act, look and feel like networks in everything they do. They want to be programmers - just like traditional TV networks, only wielding tools that help you navigate the new universe of hundreds upon hundreds of websites and channels,” writes USA Today (via paidcontent). The pursuit of advertising dollars has convinced AOL, for example, to in turn shift most of its “programming” from paid subscription to free access. Like the networks, the Big Four will make money mostly through advertising and are therefore constantly introducing new ways to keep users at their screens with free email, maps, sundry search tools, video and so on.

Online Firm Sues Conde Nast

Active8media, a firm that helps print publications create interactive versions of the ads in their pages, sued Conde Nast for both patent infringement and trade secret misappropriation, according to MediaWeek. Conde Nast used Active8media’s technology for its September 2004 Vogue issue, but started using another firm’s similar technology subsequently. That firm, RichFx, is now accused of using Active8media’s patents and trade secrets - two very different forms of intellectual property, which will likely be treated rather differently - for Conde Nast Traveler’s most recent March and May issues.