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December 2003
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BMW Dives into AdvergamingBMW dived deeply into advergaming, releasing a 3-D video game that tries to replicate the experience of mountain biking, snowboarding, kayaking and driving the X3. IAR reports.... continue reading »Charmin 'Wins' Opportunity to Blow Budget on Superbowl SpotIn a strange internal contest reported here earlier, Procter & Gamble chose a spot by its Charmin toilet paper brand to run in the Superbowl. The parent company will not supplement the brand's media budget, but will rather make the... continue reading »Car Buying Online Great for Research, Still Same Old Creepy SalespeoplePamela Parker is buying a car, and the process of researching and choosing a model and dealer showed her some things about car marketing and lead generation. One lesson learned: most online dealership contact opportunities lead to the same cheesy... continue reading »Online Ads Present, but Low on Campaign Priority ListTelevision still trumps the Internet when it comes to political campaign advertising, but candidates can no longer ignore the electronic media, according to a Dynamic Logic study. The study found that voters ranked highest the influence of TV ads and... continue reading »IAB Shifts Chair, BoardThe Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) named Steve Wadsworth, president of Walt Disney Interactive Group, chairman of its board. CNET's Shelby Bonnie was the previous chair for the term ending in 2003. Also, the IAB added executives to its board from... continue reading »Keyword Trick Turns Bush into 'Miserable Failure'In an interesting example of how Google's algorithm can be exploited, a team of webmasters chose to anchor links to President George Bush's bio with the term "miserable failure," giving his bio a top ranking in Google. Google's algorithm is... continue reading »Agencies and Brands Partner with PortalsPortals like MSN and Yahoo are winning ad dollars with custom marketing solutions. These portals are pitching their ideas directly to the clients and involving their agencies to create unique branding experiences. Now that large marketers are using the Internet... continue reading »Bacon's, Media Map Merger is Good News for Online PRBacon's Information, Inc. acquired MediaMap, bringing together two providers of media databases and other tools for PR practitioners. Testing these types of services two years ago, both Bacon's and MediaMap were standouts. Since then, services providing direct contact with editors... continue reading »Small Portion of Bloggers Motivated by MoneyOnly 13 percent of bloggers run ads on their blogs; 9 percent of bloggers have been approached by companies to blog about their products; and 7 percent of bloggers blog for money. These are among the findings of a survey... continue reading »Spammed and Spammers Agree: Can-Spam Will Fail on EnforcementIn what hardly seems a coincidence, DM News reports both that Gartner predicts the Can-Spam Act will fail due to lack of enforcement and that direct marketers are hailing the Can-Spam Act as a vast improvement over the prospect of... continue reading »Study Says Revolving Ad Positions Increases EffectivenessA new study from the Usability Company and Eyetracker has just made the stunning finding that viewers get used to same size ad positions on a website and begin to ignore them. Digital Bulleting reports. Steve Hall rolls his eyes.... continue reading »Supreme Court Justice: Tech Cases Need Generalists TooLeft-leaning Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer told the American Bar Association that tension continues to grow between the judiciary's ability to consider complex and technical cases - such as patent cases that determine the fates of Internet firms - and... continue reading »Networks to Lure Viewers with Interactivity…AgainThe image of the couch potato may go the way of the videocassette and vinyl, if network executives have their way. With so many distractions pulling viewers from television, the networks are coming up with new ways to keep viewers... continue reading »J. Crew Site Revenues TumbleJ. Crew's web revenues dropped almost in half in the third quarter. The reduction was in line with the other direct sales channels, as the company restructured and radically changed both its merchandise and promotional programs. Last year's results also... continue reading »Married Men Profiled in Demo SurveyJoseph Jaffe moves on to young married men in his long-running survey of the online habits of different demographic groups. His description of "Carlos" shows he is without kids and balances his time fairly evenly between work-oriented web activities and... continue reading »Newspapers Size Up Competition, Forget InternetIn a shocking display of ignorance, newspaper executives at the nation's top 12 dailies indicated their biggest threats were other newspapers and competition posed by radio advertising. The Merrill Lynch survey found that the Internet was not mentioned as a... continue reading »Online Media Coming to Dominate IT MarketingTech firms, already pumping two of every five marketing dollars into some form of online marketing activity, will increase that to 45 percent of spending next year. A study by Bitpipe and Sam Whitmore's Media Survey showed that online media... continue reading »Holiday Shopping Online in OregonPowell's Books' website accounts for more than one third of the company's sales, which is astronomically high compared with the bullish Forrester figures cited of online sales - accounting for an average of about five percent of retail sales in... continue reading »Hire Santa as Your Marketing VPSanta knows his customers, we don't mind him invading our privacy, he's very generous, his brand is consistent year after year, he stands out in a crowd, and customers understand his benefits. Can this all be said for your business?... continue reading »New App Blocks Paid Placement, Strips HTMLInternMute's new product, AdSubtract Pro, acts as a proxy server, stripping out paid placement ads, re-formatting the search results that customers see. This brings up an interesting problem. Unlike banner ads, which get served upon page rendering, the search engines... continue reading »Ebooks Gain MomentumFrom July through September, publishers sold about two thirds more ebooks than they did in the same period last year. As the average price came down, those sales amounted to about only another third of revenue on top of what... continue reading »Congress Strips Can-Spam of Subject Line Labeling RequirementThe House and Senate conference had their Can-Spam Act adaptations accepted by the House of Representatives yesterday, including a measure that made subject line labeling necessary only when involving adult content. Previously, all commercial email was to be labeled in... continue reading »Circle K Site Refocuses on Local StoreAs companies like Dynamic Logic and Eyeblaster continue to try to develop measurement technologies to determine online-advertising-to-offline-sales rates, companies with widespread bricks and mortar retail locations are exploring the art of driving offline traffic through their sites. Circle K just... continue reading »ChannelScope to Track Online Ads' Offline SalesAvenue A says that its new ChannelScope service can measure offline results of online advertising by linking ad server cookies to client consumer databases. Using the technology - still largely under wraps - for two clients, the firm claims that... continue reading »Ad Agency Salaries Still Not RisingThe annual Ad Age Salary Survey is out and after three years of limping through the recession, the industry that has become the leading indicator of an economic downturn and a trailing indicator of its return still needs more time... continue reading »Big Holiday Surprise: Predictions Were RightIn an unusual confluence of agreement, early holiday season e-commerce predictions are matching quite well with retailer reports of actual sales, which in turn are squaring nicely with web measures and reports from analytics companies. Predictions of business increases of... continue reading »Newspapers Take Classified Model to Social NetworksNewspaper giants Kight Ridder and The Washington Post have invested in Tribe.net, a social network that connects like-minded people together. Kight Ridder hopes Tribe.net will shore up its traditional classified advertising model for a new generation of readers by tying... continue reading »Eyeblaster to Test Brand MetricsWhen DoubleClick launched its Motif rich media solution earlier this year, established rich media providers said they would win the competition by continuing to provide superior service and customized support that advertisers crave. Today, Eyeblaster went a step farther, announcing... continue reading »Pop-up Surveyer Shunning Pop-upsOnline market research firm InsightExpress, in acknowledgement of viewer disdain of pop-ups, shifted its method of recruiting survey participants from pop-ups to on-page rich media units. The unit is called AdInvite, which can take on any rich media form and... continue reading »Cigar Ad Shows Toothpicks and Breast Implants Don't MixSomehow this web-only viral ad campaign for for Hamlet Cigars tries to combine toothpicks, breast implants and the post-coital cigar. Oddly, it works. Steve Hall comments.... continue reading »D-Squared Takes on the FTCD-Squared is going to court against the FTC to fight the regulatory body's decision which forced D-Squared to stop using the Windows Messenger feature to promote it's $29.95 product that would turn off the Messenger feature. Seatle Post-Intelligencer reports. Steve... continue reading »Coke (Sort of) Copies Pepsi Music IdeaBecause someone at Coke would get fired if they ever let Pepsi do anything that wasn't immediately copied, Coca-Cola announced yesterday that they, too, would offer a music download service. But Cokes will launch in Britain and will cost money,... continue reading »Playboy Profits from OnlineWhile Playboy the magazine is the brand's hub, Playboy.com is the major driver of Playboy's business and growth. Playboy.com is driving its online revenues through 25 subscription-only areas and by responding to the needs of large advertisers by creating content... continue reading »Coming Soon: Celebrity Endorsement SurvivorBrands are starting to tell their A-list celebrity spokespeople, "This ad's not big enough for the both of us." Pepsi got rid of Britney and Beyonce (in favor of a pants-eating robot vacuum cleaner, which I don't really get). And... continue reading »Google Sniping Inappropriate, UngratefulGoogle's recent re-index, now infamously dubbed "Florida," has many webmasters in a tizzy. Most of the howls of pain have coming from professional optimizers and spammers. But Google's not in business to cater to them, anyway. Quite the opposite. A... continue reading »EU Hops up and down on Spam ComplianceThe European Union castigated half of its countries, warning them that they were failing to comply with mandatory spam policy by enacting E.U.-specified laws. The European Commission sent nastigrams to Belgium, Germany, Greece, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, Finland and... continue reading »Yahoo Proposes Public Key Encryption Email ID SystemWith a clever use of public key encryptions, Yahoo is forwarding a potential solution to the unknown sender conundrum. Currently, email recipients cannot determine for sure whether or not email coming from a domain - for instance, www.bankone.com - is... continue reading »Patent Head Steps DownDirector of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office James Rogan will step down. His two-year tenure marked a high-point in patent office whimsy, allowing for many process patents that enabled Internet companies and others to legally prevent other people from... continue reading »Chrysler Fires ArnellIn covering the story a couple weeks ago, when Chrysler admitted that its Celine Dion strategy has been wrong all along, and that the agency had been against it from the beginning, the only odd part of it was that... continue reading »Amazon.com Pre-announces Changes in Affiliate ProgramsIn its December affiliate newsletter, Amazon.com gave a preview of what's going to change next quarter in its commission structure. Olivier Travers lists the changes and comments that Amazon definitely seem to be about to properly address long-standing sore points.... continue reading »Expedia, US Airways Break LinksExpedia nearly doubled the booking fees for US Airways over Thanksgiving, so US Airways is taking its flights off the travel site. USA Today presents a balanced version of the story compared with how others are reporting it. Poynter's E-Media... continue reading »Free to Fee in 10 (Not so Easy) StepsVin Crosbie recaps tips for introducing fees to previously-free online content provided by Donn Friedman, assistant managing editor for production technology and new media innovations at the Albuquerque Journal, which switched to a paid model a couple years ago. This... continue reading »Internet Ad Revenues Up Five PercentThe IAB has released its ad spending figures for Q3 from PricewaterhouseCoopers which show a five percent increase over Q2 and a 20 percent increase over Q3 of 2002. Ad revenue for Q3 totaled $1.75 billion, the highest since Q3... continue reading »Bigger Ads Aren't Always BetterOver and over we hear bigger is better. Bigger tires, bigger burgers, bigger screens and bigger units (yes, ad units). Online ad sizes have crept up over the years from the tiny 88 X 31 buttons to a monstrous page... continue reading »Automakers: Go Where the Prospect IsHonda, Toyota have decided to try interactive, Internet-only ad campaigns, taking advantage of MSN's network. AutoWeek reports. Martina Zavagno comments.... continue reading »Too Much Sex Doesn't SellTeens may not be influenced by overtly sexy ads - or at least not enough to make the uproar worth it. Abercrombie & Fitch had a significant drop in November sales after the release of their holiday catalogue featuring naked... continue reading »Testing Web Copy Improves ResultsTraditional direct mail companies wouldn't dream of sending out a large mailing without first testing the copy and layout of the piece. But many web marketers craft expensive web marketing campaigns and never test, which is akin to gambling marketing... continue reading »Silverpop Hosts Webinar Monday to Explain Anti-Spam Law NuancesConfused at how the new federal anti-spam legislation may affect your company? Email marketing firm Silverpop is hosting a free webinar next Tuesday, December 16th, at 2pm EST, to explain details and offer advice as to how to stay on... continue reading »Arrogance Reinfects IndustryJoseph Jaffe is detecting a gradual, but pervasive, return of the fin de siecle arrogance witnessed just before the last great online bubble popping. Which isn't entirely a bad thing, as he points out it can also lead to confidence,... continue reading » |