Archive for the ‘Advertising’ Category

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McClatchy to automate online ad creation

Sunday, May 23rd, 2010

McClatchy newspapers are set to begin using a computer program that automatically creates online advertisements for local businesses, the New York Times reported Friday.

After the user types in the business name and location, PlaceLocal builds a display ad automatically, “scouring the Internet for references to (the business)” the NYT says. “Then it combines the photographs it finds with reviews, customer comments and other text into a customized online ad for the business.”

“The company has … signed up the McClatchy newspaper chain and will soon be on some of its Web sites,” Roger Lee, chief operating officer of PaperG, the program’s developer, told the newspaper.

The program is already in use on 32 local media websites, including Time Out New York and Time Out Chicago, and on 29 network TV affiliates owned or managed by Hearst Television, Lee said.

Advertisers pay about $150 a month to $500 or more, based primarily on how many times the ad is shown, and PaperG takes a percentage of this fee.

“Because the program creates an ad in moments, it saves the time of people on the Web site who might normally need to build the ad themselves, or work with the customer to build one. That can translate into lower charges,” Shaina Park, a sales representative at Time Out New York said.

Victor Wong, PaperG’s chief executive, said sales reps at media companies also use PlaceLocal to create sample or “spec” ads to show potential customers.

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Magazines show signs of recovery

Monday, May 17th, 2010

Magazine advertising is up by 7.34 percent for June and 4.67 for the second quarter, says Min Online, comparing the “modest uptick” with the 1992 recovery, “which proved to be the beginning of a prosperous eight years.”

Among the big movers are Elle Decor with a 91.28 gain and Playboy with a 94.69 percent increase. Playboy, which formed a business partnership with American Media, has also dropped plans to publish 10 times a year and will remain a monthly.

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Magazine ads said to drive web traffic

Thursday, May 13th, 2010

Magazine advertising is a good vehicle for building website traffic, according to a new poll discussed by Adweek.

The poll by the Chief Marketing Officer Council says 90 percent of the magazine subscribers they talked to prefer print to online or e-reader mags, but “48 percent of respondents answered affirmatively when asked whether they ‘go online to find more information about the advertisements in your printed magazines.’” Sixty-three percent said they’d do so “if the advertising in your printed subscription magazines was customized,” according to Adweek.

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Social Media: Resistance is Futile

Saturday, May 8th, 2010

A You Tube slide show with a slew of statistics shows us how social media have taken over our lives. The 4 1/2-minute video in the end is a plug for a book — “Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms the Way We Live and Do Business” by Erik Qualman — but not before it likely convinces the hardiest social media holdout to give in.

Social media have overtaken porn as the No. 1 “activity” on the Web, the video says. Facebook has higher weekly traffic than Google. “Social media isn’t a fad,” it concludes, “it’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate.”

Among the points made that pertain to advertising and traditional media, none of which are attributed in the video:

- 25 percent of search results for the world’s top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content. 34 percent of bloggers post opinions about products and brands.

- 78 percent of consumers trust peer recommendations. Only 14 percent trust advertisements.

- Only 18 percent of traditional TV campaigns generate positive ROI. 90 percent of people skip ads via TiVo or DVRs (this was disputed just this week).

- 60 million Facebook updates are made daily. “We no longer search for the news, the news finds us. We will no longer search for products and services, they will find us via social media.”

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Posted in Advertising, Marketing, Online, Video | No Comments »

TiVo, DVRs don’t hurt TV advertising

Wednesday, May 5th, 2010

A Duke University study concludes that the use of DVRs and TiVo has no effect on television advertising or buying habits, Triangle Business Journal reports.

DVRs and TiVo record TV shows, allowing viewers to fast-forward through commercials. There has been a fear that this would spell doom to TV advertising.

But, for starters, the study found that 95 percent of viewers still watch TV live. Secondly, those who do fast-forward through commercials still watch the screen to see where the show re-starts, so they are exposed to advertisers’ messages.

The investigators found no difference in shopping habits between groups of study participants with TiVos and those without.

The study also found that people are watching more TV because they can record shows.

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Posted in Advertising, Television | No Comments »

Could the FTC kill behavioral targeting?

Tuesday, April 20th, 2010

Media critic Bob Garfield thinks Internet advertising could be wiped out as an industry if the FTC and Congress decide to “safeguard consumer privacy from behavioral targeting and other online wizardry.”

One approach under consideration, he says, is  “an ‘opt-in’ requirement for every user to affirmatively acquiesce to accepting cookies on their Internet browsers. … The industry’s future resides almost entirely on being able to boost CPMs with ultra-targeting, but it’s hard to imagine any wording of the opt-in language that wouldn’t sound to Joe Laptop like, ‘Yes, please stalk me.’”

FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz tells Garfield he wants the industry to regulate itself, but the way he talks about behavioral targeting seizes “not on the rational but the visceral,” Garfield says. “Imagine that you were walking through a shopping mall, and there was someone that was walking behind you and taking notes on everywhere you went and sending it off to every shop or anyone who was interested for a small fee,” Leibowitz says. “That would creep you out; that would be very disturbing, I think, for most people.”

As the FTC seeks more rule-making authority from Congress, “Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va.) has been promising a bill to deal with loose personal data — by statutory means either moderate or draconian, nobody quite knows.”

Boucher told the Wall Street Journal in February “that there is a need for a set of laws that dictate parameters for how companies collect, share and use online data about their consumers.”

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Posted in Advertising, Online | 1 Comment »

Magazines show ad growth in few sectors

Saturday, April 10th, 2010

New figures from the Publishers Information Bureau show some advertisers are coming back to magazines, says Advertising Age, including automotive advertisers, whose spending on ad pages and rate-card ads rose in the past quarter for the first time since 2007.

“Three of the 12 major advertising categories in magazines ran more magazine ad pages in the first quarter this year than in the first quarter last year: financial, insurance and real estate, which increased ad pages by 11.3 percent; toiletries and cosmetics, which increased ad pages by 7.6 percent; and automotive, which increased ad pages by a slim 1.3 percent,” the magazine says.

“The other nine big marketer categories continued to post significant drops, led by apparel and accessories, which ran 15.7 percent fewer ad pages; drugs and remedies, which ran 15.6 percent fewer ad pages; technology, which ran 14.7 percent fewer pages; media and advertising, which ran 13 percent fewer ad pages; and public transportation, hotels and resorts, which also ran 13 percent fewer ad pages.”

“Keep in mind that these comparisons are being made against a quarter last year that was wholly abysmal, with a 25.9 percent drop in ad pages by the bureau’s count,” the magazine says.

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Nielsen changing the way it counts viewers

Thursday, April 1st, 2010

Nielsen, the television ratings service, this week said it is making “fundamental changes in the way it calculates its so-called ‘average audience’ ratings — long the currency of the $80 billion TV advertising marketplace,” Media Daily News reports. “Perhaps the most significant of the changes is that Nielsen will begin including duplicate viewing of all program telecasts in its average audience ratings, a move that could undermine one of the core tenets of Madison Avenue’s media planning theory: unduplicated reach.”

“While the absolute amount of duplicate viewing that currently takes place via the Internet and various devices such as digital video recorders and video-on-demand services currently is small, it is expected to grow over time, and potentially could dilute the meaning of audience reach,” the report says.

“It’s unlikely that any repeated program content viewing will deliver repeated commercial viewing,” Don Seaman, vice president-director of communications analysis at MPG, told Media News Daily. “Once again, the metric is favoring the content providers and probably overstating what the actual commercial impact really is.”

Nielsen spokesman Gary Holmes said it’s much ado about practically nothing. “The estimate is that it will increase viewing under 1 percent,” he said. That figure is the amount Nielsen estimates the inclusion of duplicate viewing done via DVRs will have on the absolute size of average audience ratings. The impact of viewing TV programs online currently is negligible.

In another move drawing fire, Nielsen is eliminating overnight access to its live-only local TV program ratings, which covers around 70 percent of local U.S. television homes. “For the better part of 50 years, advertisers have used live-only as their currency,” Media Daily News says. “In the last few years, Nielsen has added new streams of program data to account for time-shifting. But few, if any, advertisers made deals on these other metrics.”

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Posted in Advertising, Television | No Comments »

Newspaper revenue sinks to 23-year low

Thursday, March 25th, 2010

Another bad report about newspaper ad revenue: the Newspaper Association of America, a group that some accuse of spinning too positively for its industry, said this week that ad revenue hit its lowest level since 1986 after a drop of 27 percent in 2009.

But the $27.6 billion in 2009 revenue looks worse when you adjust for inflation, the Associated Press’ report says. The $27 billion earned in 1986 “would equal nearly $53 billion in today’s dollars.”

On the other hand, “ad revenue in the final three months of the year fell 24 percent from a year earlier to $7.7 billion — the smallest quarterly percentage decline of 2009.

“‘Unfavorable trends for newspaper ad spending continued to diminish as the fourth quarter progressed, a sign that business conditions have begun to gradually improve,’ NAA President and CEO John Sturm said in a statement.”

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Radio revenue may have turned the corner

Thursday, March 25th, 2010

Folks in the radio business have some good news with what Advertising Age calls “not just a slight increase for 2010 but several years of compounding growth.”

It’s not much though. “The predicted turnaround will be slight, leaving radio revenue in 2014 still shy of its 2008 level,” the magazine says.

BIA/Kelsey, a consulting firm specializing in local media, says radio ad revenue is likely to see a 1.5 percent gain this year.

“The industry will continue to grow its online revenues in 2010 as increasingly more progressive radio groups recognize they are more than just over-the-air transmitters and begin to integrate cross-platform promotions with their broadcast and Web operations,” Mark R. Fratrik, VP at BIA/Kelsey, says in the report, according to Ad Age.

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Posted in Advertising, Online, radio | No Comments »

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