YouGov, the UK-based international internet research firm, recently published their BrandIndex report which polls thousands of consumers to find out which brands are hot and which are not. Unsurprisingly, advertisers that spend loads of money, especially if they are spending on innovative advertising, captured the largest portion consumers attention in the first half of this year.
Microsoft, Best Buy and KFC have been able to create brand buzz in spite of the critiques levied by scores of industry people. Ford emerged a real winner in the report, generating buzz by denying government bailout money while competitive brands, GM and Chrysler, who took the money suffered.
Industry News, Trends
The AOL-owned online celeb rag TMZ.com saw record traffic in June with 11.7 million unique visitors, a 10% increase over May. TMZ’s mobile site and iPhone app set a new one-day record of over 11 million page views on June 25.
Industry News
iphone, jackson, tabloids, tmz
On the heels of the leak of internal Twitter docs suggesting the company will take in $20 million per month by Q4 of 2010, evidence has shown up suggesting Twitter is testing a new contextual advertising system.
Industry News
The Internet is abuzz with the news that shoe and apparel Internet retailer Zappos has been acquired by Amazon.com, the online bookstore turned everything store. Zappos’ CEO Tony Hsieh in his email announcement said he preferred newspaper headlines not read “Zappos Sells to Amazon” and instead quip “Zappos and Amazon sitting in a tree…” The deal is worth more than $800 million mostly in Amazon stock.
What does Bezos have in store for the customer service crazy shoe seller? Can Zappos’ particular brand of over the top customer service scale the Amazonian heights? Can Amazon’s overgrown technical prowess help boost Zappos’ bottom line? Regardless of what happens, two remarkable online companies are now joined together and the results, good or bad, will be studied for years to come.
Industry News
acquisitions, amazon, e-commerce, internet, online, retailers, shoes, web, zappos
Subway has put Phelps in new TV advertising created MMB Boston, Ad Age reports.
The sandwich chain had pulled the world’s fastest swimmer from their unfortunately titled FreshBuzz website following the publication of a photo of Phelps take a bong toke. In the camera-phone age fans should probably expect this trend to continue especially amongst younger stars.
Industry News, Trends
michael phelps, phelps, subway
By many measures the work Crispin Porter + Bogusky has done for Burger King has been stellar. It has earned heaps of awards, respect and press, both in the advertising industry, mainstream media and online. It turns out the one vector CP+B’s work hasn’t blown the roof off is perhaps the most important: market share.
Ad Age is reporting that in the time that Crispin has served as BK’s agency of record their market share has fallen from 15.6% to 14.2% while their largest competitor, McDonald’s, share rose to 46.8% from 43.6%.
Industry News
Village Voice Media, the publisher of the legendary Village Voice, has launched its own online ad network that leverages its print-ad sales staff. The network is called Voice Local Network and its demographics are exactly what you think they are, 18- to 34-year-olds interested in nightlife, food and lifestyle. Village Voice Media currently operates in 15 cities.
The Village Voice began in 1955 as a neighborhood paper serving Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. It was highly successful at its peak both in terms of circulation and ad sales. That was 40 years ago, before Rupert Murdoch owned the paper and long before Craigslist.
Industry News
What a waste of effort. Glad these media companies don’t entertain these right-wing nuts and their tired theories despite the down economy. Of course Snopes has got the real dirt.
Industry News
File under obvious but saddening: John Mangelaars, Vice President of Microsoft’s Consumer & Online International (COI) division for Europe, Middle East and Africa, said that his employer isn’t counting on an online ad growth for a few years. Mr. Mangelaars attributed part of the slow to increased efficiency,
“A lot of laziness has gone away. If marketers are reaching their goals with [their current budgets], why would they spend more?”
Economic Meltdown, Industry News
TweetBucks is a new service that makes affiliate linking through shortened urls easier. The way it works is basically thus, you use bit.ly to shorten a link to a third party site, let’s say 1-800-FLOWERS, and post it to Twitter or Facebook. TweetBucks scans its database of merchants for affiliate programs matching the destination site. If they are able to match your link to an affiliate program and someone clicks through your shortened url and generates a sale you keep 70% of the commission.
Industry News
