March 17, 2009
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Although it was billed as "The Future of Newspapers," last week's panel discussion at Columbia University's Journalism School didn't exactly seem to fit that description. Attendee Marcie Young, a 2006 graduate of Columbia J school, grilled panelists about why she and so many other reporters were losing their jobs in newsroom downsizings. She was told to get used to the idea that young reporters like herself were not going to be able work in the profession that they trained for.
March 17, 2009
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- The lobbying wars over advertising issues are heating up in Washington, and a phalanx of marketing trade associations has moved into the fray. The first big public clash came earlier this month, as congressional critics began a move to further curtail tobacco advertising. The American Advertising Federation led the charge on that one. In this program, new AAF President James Datri makes it clear that he sees the advertisement of any legal product as a constitutional right that Congress shouldn't limit.
March 16, 2009
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- How can Hulu and similar online TV-network video portals be improved? At the recent Association of National Advertisers' TV & Everything Video Forum, the question was put to eMarketer CEO Geoffrey Ramsey. He spends his days immersed in data reports about online consumer behavior and reactions. He gave the networks high marks for launching portals like Hulu but noted how those sites needed to improve their advertising structures and practices.
March 13, 2009
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Newspaper readers have long paid less than it actually costs to deliver the product to their homes. And now, as newspaper companies struggle to survive, those readers should pay the real costs of that service. That was one of the suggestions made by Hearst Newspapers President Steven Swartz at this week's Future of Newspapers panel. That event at Columbia University's Journalism School explored the dire straits in which print publishers like Mr. Swartz find themselves.
March 12, 2009
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- "Mad Men," AMC's 1960s advertising agency drama, has struck a chord with the general public while also becoming a cult classic in the marketing-services industry. AMC's president and general manager, Charlie Collier, a former advertising executive who switched to the content side of the business in 2006, talks about the hit show's continuing impact as it prepares for its third season.
March 11, 2009
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- The fortunes of music marketers continue to decline as consumers' music-related habits change for the worst. Although digital piracy gets all the publicity, it's only one of several trends that have converged into a choke hold on music-industry revenue streams. In his presentation to the recent Digital Music Forum East, NPD Group's senior analyst, Russ Crupnick, had nothing but grim news for music marketers. These are some excerpts of his remarks about NPD's latest national study findings.
March 10, 2009
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- You don't hear a lot of people talking about the current national economic disaster's "silver lining." But Euro RSCG's global chief strategy officer, Andrew Benett, sees one for his industry. We were also fascinated to learn that he's working on a book entitled "Good for Business." We wondered if that title seemed as ironic to him as it did to us in this era of relentless corporate catastrophe.
March 09, 2009
NEW ORLEANS (AdAge.com) -- The downsized American Association of Advertising Agencies' annual media conference was an affair nearly as somber as it was small. Speakers did their best to pump up industry morale from the stage, but the fear among attendees was palpable throughout the corridors and quiet gathering places of the event. In one of its more curious sessions, a series of consumer panelists raved about the value of various media in their lives -- even as executives in the audience bemoaned their inability to sufficiently monetize many of those digital formats.
March 06, 2009
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Devastated by a massive consumer pull-back from peanut-containing foods, the country's peanut farmers are launching a crisis-management advertising campaign. The effort, which kicked off in Grand Central Terminal this week, follows the peanut-related salmonella outbreak believed to have killed nine, sickened more than 600 and triggered a recall of 3,000 different food products. The National Peanut Board will be using print, TV, outdoor and radio ads in an effort to rebuild consumer confidence in peanut butter and other products.
March 05, 2009
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Talk of restricting behavioral-targeting practices is heavy in the air these days. But what if Generation Y -- the first demographic to grow up totally immersed in the digital life -- actually wants to be behaviorally targeted by marketers? Speaking at the recent OMMA Behavioral conference, Forrester Research's Emily Riley made a strong case for this idea. She even suggests the creation of a web portal that would enable Gen Y-ers to post their wants in an organized manner -- so appropriate marketers could more quickly and efficiently respond to them.
March 04, 2009
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- One of Time Inc.'s most successful digital features grew out of the discovery that online content related to hair drew more traffic than any other topic. Appearing at the recent AlwaysOn OnMedia NYC conference, Senior VP-Digital Amanda Kanaga said the company is looking for creative technology firms that can help it create more consumer tools like the wildly popular "Hollywood Hair" app it developed with Facebook.
March 03, 2009
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Gargantuan promotional icons are nothing new to Times Square, but few generate the curious mix of emotions triggered by a giant human colon. But there it was last week, a 20-foot-long inflatable organ beckoning consumers to enter and explore its diseased insides. It was all part of a colorectal-cancer-awareness campaign conducted by the Prevent Cancer Foundation and pharmaceutical giant Sanofi-Aventis.
March 02, 2009
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Is Warner Music Group's new music marketing experiment actually a new kind of tax that would have to be paid by all Internet users? That's just one of the contentious points of debate flying around the new efforts of the Warner-backed company called Choruss. The year-old non-profit wants university networks and the country's ISPs to collect a music licensing fee from all their customers. Choruss president Jim Griffin jabbed back at critics at last week's Digital Music Forum East in New York.
February 27, 2009
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- It's long been a frustration as well a revenue limitation for ad agencies that digital marketing is so dominated by direct sales pitches rather than broad-based brand-building strategies. The Interactive Advertising Bureau is now making that issue a major action priority. At its annual conference in Orlando, Fla., this week, CEO Randall Rothenberg called on marketers to fundamentally rethink their approach. At the same time, the IAB is launching a new advisory board and an online-creativity boot camp to show them exactly how it's done.
February 26, 2009
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- PepsiCo's Tropicana brand is junking the new orange-juice package design it just launched only weeks ago. The beverage marketer is switching back to its old design, whose centerpiece is an orange skewered by a drinking straw. In this video recorded at a press conference five weeks ago, Arnell Group CEO Peter Arnell vigorously defends his agency's carton design that has now been withdrawn from the market.
February 25, 2009
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Marc Cenedella is one of those rare marketers who's doing well as a result of the recession. He's CEO of TheLadders, an online job site that lists exclusively positions that pay $100,000 or more. The company is awash in new business from the droves of top executives recently dumped by corporations coast to coast. TheLadders expects to grow its business 60% during the next 10 months. No wonder Mr. Cenedella smiles so much during this interview.
February 24, 2009
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Although his nonprofit Wikipedia made him best known as the selfless guru of wisdom-of-the-crowd publishing, Jimmy Wales has a second site designed to make as much money as possible. Called Wikia.com, it has become a sprawling universe of thousands of wikis on nearly every imaginable subject. It now logs more than 500 million page views a month and has growing stable of blue-chip advertisers. Many marketers have begun to explore wikis as vehicles for product promotion. But, as Mr. Wales explains in this 10-minute interview with Ad Age digital editor Abbey Klaassen, several deeply ingrained flaws in their thinking often cause their wikis to fail.
February 24, 2009
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Declaring his company's intent to "democratize print publishing," Hewlett-Packard's CMO heavily hyped the new MagCloud.com site to the Interactive Advertising Bureau conference in Orlando, Fla. In a keynote that promoted several of HP's recently launched offerings, Michael Mendenhall appeared to put special emphasis on the game-changing potential of MagCloud. The site enables anyone to produce a full-color, ad-supported print magazine and make it available -- via on-demand printing and an e-commerce system -- to anyone else.
February 23, 2009
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- The widgets and other applications that were little more than digital window dressing a few years ago have exploded into a vast new advertising venue. Many apps now draw millions of users each day at the same time they've become a broadly networked social medium in their own right. And, that, in turn, has given rise to a new sort of apps-only media-buying agency.
February 20, 2009
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Could Kindle-like devices put the KABOOM! on the comic-book business? That's the fear of some publishers who see the handheld digital-book readers as a direct threat to their viability. Sales of paper-based graphic novels are actually up 5%, but at the recent ComicCon in New York, industry analysts cast a wary eye at electronic reading devices. They agreed that comic-book fans would be early adopters of the new technology and explained why that could be devastating for the industry.
