Advertising Industry Archive

In yet another move shoring up its nascent television advertising initiative, Google TV has signed a deal with CoreDirect, the leading transaction agent for the direct response industry. The move will allow Google to burrow much deeper into the ecosytem of agency media buyers, and shows yet again that Google is very serious about making television part of its overall ad offerings. CoreDirect...

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Major ad holding firm WPP has announced a hiring freeze until further notice, battening down the hatches for what looks to be a major downturn over the next year or two. Via our good pal The Founder over at Tribble Ad Agency, the freeze looks like it will hit long-suffering ad speciality shop Enfatico especially hard. A quick refresher on Enfatico: Formed to served the marketing needs of Dell,...

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Via MediaWeek, it looks like even if every other sector of advertising, including the majority of online, is about to feel the oncoming crunch, plucky search advertising will continue to do just fine. If search advertising has a problem, it’s that advertisers are frustrated about not being able to spend enough. From the MediaWeek write-up: For example, search spending surged by nearly 27...

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A new report out of the Cone and Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business shows that advertisers pairing up their message with a non-profit cause can effectively raise sales, at least for some products. The study followed 182 sample consumers, who were shown a new regional print mag, which contained either an ad for a consumer good paired up with a non-profit’s plea, or simply a...

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In another sign that in-game advertising has come of age, the Obama campaign has placed ads urging early voting inside the video game Burnout Paradise. The game, a popular racing title for the XBox 360, has been featuring billboards for the Democratic nominee while players race each other online. While the story has bounced around the blogosphere for the past week, the possibility of the image...

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Lessons from the 1970s recession — AdAge reprises a piece from its archives on what marketers, media, and agencies did right and wrong during the recession of 1973-1975. [Source: AdAge] Starbucks makes oatmeal trendy — Starbucks has stumbled upon a hit product that has taken even the chain by surprise — oatmeal. Millennials love it, apparently, and the marketing pitch (why...

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With the merger between ad holding company WPP and marketing research powerhouse Taylor Nelson Sofres nearing completion, it looks like the landscape of the Big Four may be due for a significant upheaval, with WPP now drawing within spitting distance of long-established leader Omincom. AdWeek’s Steve McClellan reports: Based on full-year 2007 revenue figures, the combined WPP-TNS total is...

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Over at iMedia, Chris Weiss, director of marketing at ad network LucidMedia, offers up an impassioned defense against the growing sentiment that ad networks may be on the way out. While Weiss is the furthest thing from an impartial observer, he offers up some compelling reasons why the myriad ad networks, which Weiss pegs at numbering around 314, may still be on the rise: 1.  Price Isn’t...

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The New Yorker magazine, famed for its error-free copy and formidable fact-checking department, has printed a special advertising section upside-down and back-to-front in this week’s edition. The ad was for investment bank Barclays Capital, which itself is being roiled by the ongoing mess in the credit and stock markets. My desktop scanner isn’t that great, so I can’t give you...

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Oscars to allow movie ads — Since the 1950s, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences has banned movie advertisements during the Oscars to avoid looking like it endorses particular films. Not anymore. Next year the Academy will let the movie promos in, albeit not without a slew of restrictions: Any mention of the words “Oscar” or “Academy Awards” is...

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