Friday, September 14, 2007

Media Ups and Downs

TNS Media Intelligence recently released the advertising expenditures by media for the first half of 2007. Overall, advertising expenditures declined slightly by 0.3 percent. Newspaper advertising saw the biggest decrease with a decline of 5.8 percent. Radio advertising decreased 2.7 percent nationally, and television was down 2.4 percent over this same period.

The biggest gainer during the first half of the year was Internet advertising, which grew a robust 17.7 percent from the same period a year ago.

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Thursday, September 13, 2007

Mmmm…is that mango tango you’re wearing?

Your sense of smell can be an evocative trigger to emotional connections and powerful memories. In essence (pardon the pun), if you can bottle the fragrance, you can bottle the memory. Branding is all about creating emotional connections, so consequently, as you might expect, branding fragrances is a multi-billion dollar business. Most of the time we are used to seeing fragrances sold with chic, expressive names and/or associated with a celebrity. However, some companies are taking a different approach to olfactory marketing. Demeter is now selling Crayon fragrance cologne. That should conjure up some past memories.

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Different Headlines for Online News Sites and Mainstream Media

Every day, newsrooms struggle to determine which stories to cover and which should receive prominent placement. In contrast, many popular online news sites (Reddit, Digg, Del.ici.ous and others) rely on users to rank and elevate stories. Do editors and web users agree on the day’s top news? Not even close, according to a new Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) study. 

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Wednesday, September 12, 2007

The Virtual Search for Missing Adventurer Steve Fossett

The search for pilot Steve Fossett, missing for more than two weeks after failing to return to a private airfield in southern Nevada, has now extended to the Web, thanks to satellite image analysis. Tens of thousands of virtual helpers have since joined forces to augment air and ground search efforts. 

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Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Web 2.0 spam: Can you trust your online community?

Recently, I have been reading with great interest stories about sites like Quechup that have spammed their members contacts in an attempt to increase membership. This represents a new breed of aggressive Web 2.0 sites which are attempting to build community not by creating useful and friendly online services to help connect you with your family, friends, and co-workers, but by convincing you to upload your contacts into their systems and then spamming everyone you know without your explicit knowledge or consent.

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