The Wall Street Journal (paid sub. req.) takes a look at several agencies that have recently walked away from fickle but lucrative accounts. Here's a quick view of one high profile move. Last week, Sausalito, Calif., independent Butler Shine Stern & Partners parted ways with Nike's Converse, a client of about three years' standing. Winning the Converse account in 2004 was an important win for the agency, says Butler …
Positioning Deconstructed
Jackie Huba opens her latest blog post with a provocative declaration. Positioning is a marketing facade that paints a picture idealized by the marketer, not necessarily the customer. She then points to OwenBloggers.com, a group of MBA students and alumni from Vanderbilt's Owen Graduate School of Management who provide a view of the Owen brand not available from the school itself. The Owen bloggers are brand …
Push To Purchase
CNET News.com looks at the desire people have to purchase things with their thumbs. Ads for the new CD by singer Tim McGraw carry a texting code, as do magazine writeups for the new Harry Potter novel coming this summer. Some concert halls are selling tickets by text message, and some charities are taking donations that way. CosmoGirl magazine will feature text-message codes throughout its June/July issue, both in …
Mobile Really Is Your Space
Edelman DERT, the new blog from Edelman’s Digital Entertainment, Rights and Technology Team speculates that social networking sites have an immense opportunity in the mobile realm. The nature of social networking is in many ways ‘information snacking’ or dropping in to the site for a few seconds to see what friends are up to. Nielsen/Netratings confirm that the average MySpace or Bebo user spends less than 30 seconds …
PepsiCo Thirsty For Gamers
According to Ad Age, Pepsi-Cola North America wants to keep gamers gaming deep into the night and they have just the solution—a new co-branded beverage called "Mountain Dew Halo 3," named for Microsoft's popular Xbox 360 game. The new Dew is positioned as "game fuel." PepsiCo has partnered with Microsoft before. In 2005, the beverage marketer gave away nearly 10,000 Xbox 360 systems in its "Every 10 minutes" cap …
Custom Publishing Is Advertising
Richard Siklos of The New York Times, after spending "a languorous afternoon watching a new form of video entertainment, sponsored by advertisers like Budweiser and General Electric," questions the line between commercial messages and content. While I question his questioning, I do like how he ties it all back to custom publishing, pointing to examples like Time Inc.’s All You, Benetton’s well-regarded Colors and …
Google The Good
Google Earth, a satellite mapping service from the search giant that seeks to "do no evil," has teamed with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in a bold move to shine light on the crisis in Darfur, Sudan. photo courtesy of Houtlust Thanks to this initiative, 200 million Google Earth users worldwide can now literally see razed villages, casualties and squalid refugee camps in the central African …
In B2B Circles, Event Income Outpaces Ad Revenue
Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 points to some interesting data from Media Daily News: In a milestone symbolic of the shifts taking place across all media, business-to-business media can no longer be described as the "trade press." That's because print advertising now represents a minority of the revenues generated by business-to-business media companies. According to a compilation of 2006 revenue data released Monday …
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