Bottom Line Communications, which follows media and marketing issue in the Kansas City area, says a local supermarket chain that left the Kansas City Star for direct mail marketing is taking its advertising back to the newspaper.
The chain, Hen House, has 29 stores in the area.
The KC Star is a McClatchy newspaper, and we saw this first at McClatchy Watch.
NBC Universal is telling advertisers that old folks spend money more than they think they do and they should be targeted with advertising.
By “old,” they mean people aged 55 to 64, a new demographic group dubbed the “AlphaBoomers.”
“Every seven seconds someone turns 55, and once they do, they are eliminated from the highest-end Nielsen demo measurement: 25-54,” Allen Wurtzel, president of research and media development at NBCU, told Mediaweek. “It is the fastest-growing demo group in the country and now numbers 35 million people that account for close to $2 trillion in annual spending.”
AlphaBoomers have a median household income of $69,000, dwarfing that of those under 25 ($27,000), better than the 25-34 group ($58,000), and close to those 35-44 ($75,000).
Wurtzel and NBCU want Nielsen to make the older demo group official and start counting it in ratings, but the entire industry needs to accept the idea to make it worthwhile.
“Wurtzel [said] the goal of creating the new demo as part of industry currency is not to impact program development to people in that age group, but to get advertisers to realize that people in that demo make buying decisions similar to younger demos,” Mediaweek said.
The American Society of Magazine Editors has updated its guidelines for keeping advertising and editorial separate for the first time in five years, focusing mainly on the use of “false covers, cover flaps, sponsored sections and advertising adjacencies … to help publishers work effectively with marketers without compromising the relationship between editor and reader.”
The guidelines are meant to ensure that readers can tell the difference between editorial content and ads, the group’s CEO, Sid Holt, told MediaWeek.
“But,” says MediaWeek, “with magazines scrapping for every ad they can get and to compete with digital and broadcast media, where interruptive ads and product placement abound, publishers, advertisers and even some editors have expressed doubts about the relevance of the guidelines.”
Robin Steinberg, director of print investment and activation at MediaVest, said the guidelines make magazines less competitive. “This continues to hold a noose around our neck,” she said.
Violation of the guidelines results in disqualification from ASME’s National Magazine Awards and a “stern letter” from the group.
ASME is also revising its digital guidelines to reflect the growing use of invasive and interruptive ads online and federal rules requiring bloggers to disclose commercial ties. That process is expected to be finished later this year, MediaWeek says.
The next big thing in television advertising, interactive ads, could be ready to take a big leap.
Media Daily News says Canoe Ventures already has “request for information” ads on such cable networks as AMC and Style, and is developing an iTV product involving polling and trivia questions. “The opportunities for an advertiser are endless,” David Goetzel writes.
Viewers with iTV capabilities could take part in live votes on shows like “Top Chef” and an advertiser could sponsor the results, for example.
“[R]esults of studies Canoe conducted … show interactive advertising is effective across three metrics: recall, opinion and purchase intent,” the article says.
Canoe’s request-for-information ads boosted unaided brand recall by 132 percent on average in testing, the company said. “Also when a poll runs during a show with an attached sponsor – followed by a related spot in the next break – results showed better unaided recall (167 percent higher) than if the spot did not follow,” Online Media Daily said.
“Canoe is owned by the six largest cable operators and licenses its technology to deliver iTV ads to national cable networks. … Ultimately, Canoe wants to run iTV ads in tens of millions of homes that have digital cable.”
Google is apparently cleaning up on paid search and display advertising, with profit up 32 percent in the third quarter for a staggering $2.17 billion. That’s profit, not revenue, according to Online Media Daily.
They are making money on what should be $2.5 billion worth of display ads and $1 billion in mobile on an annual basis – including about 90,000 Android apps - and by monetizing more than 2 billion YouTube views per week.
Online Media Daily says “search ads remain the company’s primary revenue driver, from desktop to mobile,” topping display ads, though apparently specific figures for search were not released.
Advertisers are paying more for paid-search advertising, and clicks on ads posted to Google’s site and the sites of AdSense partners are up 16 percent year-over-year and 2 percent from the second quarter (see our AdSense ads below each post here and on our Carolina Outdoors Guide and its This Land, Your Land blog, and our Carolina Music Festivals site).
The AdSense program pays its partner sites a small portion of advertisers’ fees when readers click on an ad that appears on the partner’s site - pennies per click, usually. But that money, called Traffic Acquisition Costs, adds up, and payments increased to $1.81 billion in the third quarter of 2010, compared with $1.56 billion in the third quarter of 2009.
Online Media Daily also reports that “Google has agreed to pay $3.5 million to settle a class-action lawsuit alleging that it used a misleading registration form that tricked marketers into paying for ads that ran on its publisher network.
“The proposed settlement affects marketers that advertised on Google between October of 2007 and July of 2009 and didn’t realize that they would be opted-in to Google’s AdSense network by default.”
$3.5 million out of a quarterly profit of $2.7 billion. Yeah, that’ll hurt.
Magazine advertising grew in the third quarter for the second quarter in a row, up 3.6 percent July-September compared to last year, according to the Publishers Information Bureau. Year-to-date ad pages are still down 1.6 percent for the first nine months of the year, Media Daily News reports.
One hundred and thirty-six magazines showed growth, compared to 25 in the third quarter of 2009.
Alternative newspapers and mainstream metropolitan dailies are cashing in on medical marijuana, the New York Times says.
“It is hard to measure what share of the overall market they account for, but ads for medical marijuana providers and the businesses that have sprouted up to service them — tax lawyers, real estate agents, security specialists — have bulked up papers in large metropolitan news markets like Los Angeles, San Francisco and Denver,” the newspaper said Tuesday.
The Obama administration said last fall that it would not prosecute users and suppliers of the drug as long as they complied with state laws. Fourteen states and the District of Columbia make legal allowances for medical marijuana, the Times says.
Demand is so large that newspapers are publishing supplemental guides to medical marijuana with titles like “Chronic-le,” which had 48 pages for its summer issue, “The Rolling Paper” and “ReLeaf,” also 48 pages last week
Scott Tobias, president and chief operating officer of Village Voice Media, which publishes alternative weeklies across the country, said that in Denver, money from advertising for marijuana-related businesses has totaled 15 percent of the weekly Westword’s revenue this year and nearly 40 percent of its classified advertising revenue.
At The Missoula (Montana) Independent, medical marijuana advertising now makes up about 10 percent of the paper’s revenue.
Some 5,000 advertisers led by the American Association of Advertising Agencies and the American Advertising Federation have agreed to offer an opt-out device to thwart behavioral marketing, or the practice of sending ad messages based on the user’s online searches.
Behavioral advertising opt-out icon
“The program promotes the use of the Advertising Option Icon (right) and accompanying language, to be displayed within or near online advertisements or on Web pages where data is collected and used for behavioral advertising,” the group’s statement says. “The Advertising Option Icon indicates a company’s use of online behavioral advertising and adherence to the principles guiding the program. By clicking on it, consumers will be able to link to a clear disclosure statement regarding the company’s online behavioral advertising data collection and use practices as well as an easy-to-use opt-out option.”
“The industry initiative is based on guidelines recommended last year by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission,” Bloomberg says. “The FTC’s proposals stemmed from the agency’s continuing inquiry into how companies tailor their advertising to individuals and whether practices based on consumer Web browsing intrude on privacy.”
Behavioral targeting is the cornerstone of such online marketing as Yahoo’s Newspaper Consortium, which includes such publishers as McClatchy, Cox, Belo, Scripps and Media News Group.
Addendum: Our original post about the FTC’s regulation of behavioral targeting slipped our mind this morning.
As advertising rebounds worldwide, television is the one old medium fully recovering while newspapers continue to fail and others show meager growth, The Economist says.
“First, its power to monopolize attention is undiminished,” the magazine says. Online and mobile video are growing but have nowhere near the presence of TV. Newspapers have largely moved online, where they make much less money. But TV viewing has risen – up to 158 hours per month in the first quarter of the year, two hours more last year.
And, TV works better. “Search engines and online banners are not nearly so good at making people aware of new products,” The Economist says. “Nor do they offer emotional experiences. Television’s ability to build brands by surrounding adverts with gripping content is unsurpassed. Online video is still not a serious competitor, partly because viewers are less tolerant of ads, partly because much of it is poor.”
Social network marketing is seen as one threat to TV, but so far what’s being spent on it is hardly measurable, the magazine says. Keith Weed, the head of marketing at Unilever, “forecasts a drift from paid advertising to ‘earned’ media, including Facebook, as companies learn to build brands through discussion.