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TOP ONLINE STORY
Pew Report: Grown-Ups Text Too
by Mark Walsh
Adults aren't as avid text messagers as teens are, but a growing number are letting their fingers do the talking via cell phone. The proportion of U.S. adults sending and receiving text messages has grown from 65% to 72% from September 2009 to May 2010, according to a new Pew Research Center study on mobile use.
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TOP MEDIA STORY
Disney,TWC Strike Carriage Deal, Includes Disney Jr., ESPN3
by Wayne Friedman
After weeks of high-profile public squabbling, Disney-ABC Television and Time Warner Cable have reached a carriage agreement for all Disney cable and broadcast properties -- as well as for new Web-based sports channels.
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TOP MARKETING STORY
Jaguar Takes A Suite At Edward Thomas Hotels
by Karl Greenberg
Jaguar first showed off the XJ car at the Sunset Marquis Hotel earlier this year. The automaker's posh-positioning grassroots strategy is central to its "City Takeover" marketing plan, which includes broadcast, print, digital and outdoor advertising and sponsorship and PR efforts in Los Angeles and New York.
THIS JUST IN
Understanding IBM's Plan To Support Online Marketing, Advertising
by Laurie Sullivan |
IBM Software Group's strategy to support marketing services for companies and agencies continues to take shape as Big Blue waits for Unica to join the company, pending regulatory review. It should close by the end of 2010. In August, IBM announced its intention to acquire the company for $21 per share in cash or a net price of approximately $480 million to build out tools that analyze and predict customer preferences and develop more targeted marketing campaigns. Behavioral targeting will become another service it will provide.
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| BLOGS/COMMENTARY |
MoBlog:
Walsh Sep 3, 5:30 PM
Android Success Doesn't Rely On'IPad Killer'
By partnering with manufacturers and wireless carriers to spread its Android operating system across smartphones, Google showed it didn't have... |
On Media:
Mermigas Sep 3, 4:32 PM
Digital Titans Keep Their Business Heads In The Cloud
The titans who make it possible to access unlimited music, video and text on a postage stamp-sized player or a... |
Daily Online Examiner:
Davis Sep 3, 4:15 PM
Consumer Watchdog Pushes For Do-Not-Track List
As part of a new initiative to lobby Congress to create a do-not-track list, Consumer Watchdog has posted a video... |
The Social Graf:
Sass Sep 3, 3:22 PM
Juror Booted Over Facebook Post
This story encapsulates so many illustrative points about the rise of social media: its effectiveness as a communications platform, the... |
SearchBlog:
Sullivan Sep 3, 3:00 PM
On The Road: Googling Travel Behavior
Marketers know travelers rely heavily on the Internet and search engines to research destinations and fun stuff to do, but... |
VidBlog:
Smith Sep 3, 2:00 PM
Hey Lady! Time for Jerry's Schmaltz-Fest Weekend
There is an old adage among Catholics (especially fully lapsed ones like me): "once a Catholic, always a Catholic." As... |
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IN PRINT

INSIDE MAY
Letter from the Guest Editor
Media continues to migrate to whatever screens are placed in front of us. By now, all manner of pundits will have weighed in with opinions on the much-hyped Apple iPad after its April launch. And as we look forward to seeing what these new tablet media experiences will...
This Is Your Brain on Screens
I am writing a story about how our brains perceive and process content across various media screens, and I can't help thinking about what my brain is doing at this very moment, even as the words I write appear on the screen of my computer. Or, for that...
The Human Factor
Ever feel like a character in a science-fiction story in which some rogue technology goes awry, and begins to alter who you are? Lately, I've started to think that's actually happening to me - to all of us. That some recent advances in media technology are accelerating the...
Wild Gestures
The next game controller you pick up in your living room ... may be you. After decades of fumbling with increasingly complex 12-button, dual-stick, thumb-spraining console controllers, Microsoft is promising to remove the layers of digital abstraction that have been with us since the first desktop mouse arrived....
Why Size Matters
Forget Lee Clow. Creative directors looking for inspiration these days might instead turn to Godfrey Lundberg, an early 20th-century engraver who famously carved The Lord's Prayer on the head of a pin....
Nation Building in Digital Worlds
When Britannia opened for business in July 1997, 100,000 people swarmed the city. Within days, the homesteaders transformed the barren landscape into a town and that became a community. And it would be a lovely story except for one fact: Britannia was a jumbled mass of human chaos....
Paradise by the Dashboard Light
Get ready to have a conversation with your car.
The generic Web is grinding through its commodity end-game, with prices for both advertising inventory and content falling. And the mobile Internet is reaching early middle age, with worldwide cell subscribers flattening, and the app market tightening into narrow...
Now Playing at a Theater Near You
Early 2010 felt like the 1950s all over again. No, cruising and poodle skirts did not come back, but the theater world became once again obsessed with 3-D technology. While it has failed to maintain a foothold over the years, this time around it seems that worldwide domination...
The Making of a 'Legacy'
Produced in 1982 by a quartet of mainframe computer developers, the Disney film Tron was a visual feast in its day, sprung on a virgin audience unfamiliar with terms like "CGI" and "digital 3-D."...
Something in the Air
Aside from air and other people, screens are probably among the most prevalent things with which we surround ourselves....
Enormous Changes At The Last Minute
Our media consumption patterns may be known in microscopic detail, yet the motivations behind those patterns are largely assumed. The result of these quite dangerous assumptions: Small, often untraceable shifts can happen in our aggregate media consumption patterns each year that, over time, can subsequently cascade into a...
Dominion Over Reality
Many actions of magic, and even religious ritual, are fairly described as gestures.
Back when the explanation for why anything beyond the power of man happened was invariably supernatural, man tried to exercise dominion over reality by appealing to the same supernatural, invoking it to do his bidding through...
Exit Interview with Guest Editor Dale Herigstad
"Gesture Man." That's what Wired recently called Dale Herigstad. Okay, so it was the Brit edition of Wired, but that's where he's been gesturing lately - in the London offices of WPP's Schematic, where he is chief creative officer, and gesturer-in-residence....
Go Flexible or Go Home
Get ready for the Gumby factor in point-of-sale: Big bright clear, commercial displays - that also happen to bend - will be coming to a mall, TV show or supermarket near you sometime in mid-2010....
The Fox & Hound in the Living Room
By the middle of the 20th century television had comfortably made its way into the American living room. And 52.6 million families watched nearly seven hours of TV a day. In the middle of this boom a chief engineer and manager of equipment design for the military electronics...
A Blinking, Flickering Landscape
You see them everywhere now -- video screens flashing like beacons in public spaces, asking for your attention. What started as an absolute niche product a decade ago is fast becoming part of the landscape....
Certified Organic
Get ready for the next wave in displays: the organic user interface. Organics will not be mere screens at all. They will carry their own intelligence, be able to find and connect to other nearby organic displays; they will quantify their place relative to users, bend to any...
DOA Q&A | Philo Farnsworth, Inventor of Television
For a medium that is so universally derided as television, a surprising number of people have claimed credit for it. Over the years, encyclopedias and history books have been revised and revised again, but the most current thinking is that it was a teenage inventor named Philo Farnsworth...
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INSIDE JULY
Ed:Blog: Going From <3 to H8
The T-shirt emblazoned with the hashtag #ny<3lebron given to us by The Fader crew (who, like any good New Yorkers, were just doing their bit to spread the word for the campaign to get LeBron James to sign with the Knicks) still smolders in the incinerator where we...
Do You Know Where Your CPM Is?
If you're in the online advertising business, you've finally seen the headline you've been waiting for: "Online Advertising Surges." And the news looks good everywhere you turn. According to TechCrunch, industry bellwethers AOL, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo were up by a total of 10.2 percent in the fourth...
Bringing It All Back Home
You've seen the studies and heard the hype: Network TV is in trouble, its audience and advertisers increasingly migrating to social media, video games, mobile phones and a thousand other digital distractions. The sky is falling in TV Land: in its place, a mess of wires, keyboards and...
Cross-Media Case Study: The Cracker Doesn't Crumble
Everyone, it seemed, was suddenly talking about eating locally grown produce, cutting down on salt, eschewing processed food. Trans fat was last year's battle. The latest cause (backed by Michelle Obama, no less) was all about eating fresh and local. Women who wanted healthy, colorful, fresh food for...
Logging In: Quid Pro Grow
The Latin phrase quid pro quo means "something for something." Literally speaking, this is an equal exchange of gifts between two parties. Both sides have to contribute something for the other to receive fair value; it cannot be one-sided. Too often social media takes a more cynical approach...
Web U: The Big Budget Buster
We all love a big budget, don't we? Clients with big budgets get wined and dined. Agencies with clients with big budgets make money ... and get to go to sporting events and cool parties. And the clients that spend big online, are a special kind of celebrity....
Industry Watch: Ready for Take Off
Not long ago, leisure travel looked anything but relaxing. Oil rose to more than $140 a barrel, airline prices were sharply escalating, and customers were wondering if they'd ever go on vacation again. Well, they don't wonder as much anymore. Oil sits at $72 at press time, some...
Metrics Focus: Verify Your Paranoia
Few professionals are as willing to trust their business partners as media practitioners. This quality is especially obvious during industry love fests - also known as upfronts - where billions in media spend are distributed in advance, primarily based on mutual trust between the buyers and the publishers....
Market Focus: From Boppers to Shoppers
Tweens and teens live in the present - but not the same present as adults do. Recession, schmecession. Teen spending has bounced back, up 6 to 8 percent over last year, according to NPD Group. On what? The usual: fashion, lifestyle, music and fun....
Behind the Numbers: A Bigger Boat
Despite the very public failing of the first addressable ad efforts from the cable industry's Canoe consortium last year, advanced advertising is poised to become a $4 billion business by 2014. Fueled by tech advancements from video providers such as Verizon, Comcast and Cablevision, coupled with the increased...
Creative Roundtable: Bizarre Ride to the Dark Side
Carmakers marketing hybrid vehicles tend to craft cheerful, earnest and inspiring messages about how good the cars are for the environment. But Lexus opted to go dark - and sexy even - in allowing Skinny to create Lexus Dark Ride, an interactive film that takes participants on a...
Air New Zealand Knows Where You've Been
Air New Zealand began working with TagMan in June to implement and manage campaign tracking tags across its European Web sites. The single-page tag container embedded in Web site pages houses all tags used to track the airline's online campaign, including display, paid and natural search, affiliates and...
Cats' Tolerance Tested at Devo Listening Party
There's no denying that when it comes to the Internet, cats are power players. You've got Sockington, the Twitter cat with 1.5 million followers; all those photogenic felines over at icanhascheezburger.com; and Keyboard Cat - technically, Keyboard Cat has been dead for years, but he lives on via...
Cable News May Soon Get Some Depth
Forget slick 3-D cameras from the likes of Cameron/Pace - for better or worse, the gear needed to bring the third dimension is coming soon to a 24/7 cable channel near you....
Sears, Suckers
Road trip! Are there any more tantalizing words in the English language to cubicle monkeys watching summer unfold outside their office windows? How about if the trip is on some famous stretch of American highway and someone hands you $1,500 to pay for gas, food, motels, beer and...
Fishing Where the Fish Are
Figurative allusions to fish and fishing figure big in the business world -- getting a nibble from a client, casting a wide net, fishing where the fish are, big fish in a small pond, and so on. But online ad agency Pereira & O'Dell is taking the whole...
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UPCOMING MEDIAPOST EVENTS
RECENT MEDIAPOST EVENT VIDEOS
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| TODAY'S ONLINE NEWS AND HEADLINES |
Report: Video Usage Surges, Thanks Partly To Streaming Sites' Commitment To Infrastructure
Over the past year, the amount of time American audiences spent watching video for the major live video publishers has grown 648% to more than 1.4 billion minutes, according to comScore....
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Coalition Urges Court To Reconsider Ruling In Case In Which Craigslist Promised To Remove Posts
A recent court ruling allowing a California man to sue Craigslist over harassing posts threatens free speech online, a coalition of digital rights groups and law professors are arguing to a California appellate court. The groups argue in a friend-of-the-court letter that the ruling threatens to undermine the...
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Facebook Added 5 Million U.S. Users In August
Facebook continued strong growth in the U.S. in August after a lull earlier this summer, adding five million new monthly active users in its home country last month. That's more than the three million added a month earlier and a strong rebound from the meager 328,000 U.S. members...
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FCC Delays Broadband Reclassification Decision
The Federal Communications Commission will not consider a controversial plan to reclassify broadband access as a Title II telecommunications service at its public meeting this month, according to an agenda released on Thursday afternoon....
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ABI: Location-Based Marketing To Reach $1.8B In 2015
Location-based services from Foursquare and Loopt to the new Shopkick app have generated lots of buzz and interest among marketers and investors. But how much spending will they lead to? According to a new report from ABI Research, location-based marketing will increase from only about $43 million this...
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News Corp's IGN Partners With 5min Media
News Corp.'s IGN Entertainment on Thursday announced a syndication partnership with popular video sharing site 5min. Per the deal, IGN Entertainment is joining the 5min Video Games Channel. Using its proprietary VideoSeed technology, 5min Media will semantically match short-form videos like IGN's game reviews, instructions and news from...
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AOL's Mobile And Video Push Powers Google Search Deal
AOL renewed a search and an ad agreement with Google Thursday, cementing a decade-long partnership, but it appears that expanding the deal to encompass mobile and video support clinched the deal. The five-year deal, announced Thursday, includes a revenue share on a per-search basis. Many believed the prior...
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| AROUND THE NET IN ONLINE |
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NPD: iTunes Still About The Music NPD Group
Apps may be gaining ground (and a lot of attention) among iTunes users, but music is still its central service. According to the NPD Group, which surveyed nearly 4,000 iPod, iPhone and iPod Touch users 13 and over, 82% have...
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Data: Live Video Streaming Up 600% comScore
Over the past year, the amount of time American audiences spent watching video for the major live video publishers has grown 648% to more than 1.4 billion minutes, according to comScore. By comparison, the amount of time American audiences...
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Digg Down Despite More Social Web MediaMemo
Less than a year ago, Digg was the single most important social site for a number of blogs within the Gawker Media network, including Gawker, Gizmodo, and Jalopnik. Now, it has been eclipsed by Facebook, Twitter and even StumbleUpon, according...
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Jobs And Zuck New Best Frenemies? Boomtown at al.
Both hugely ambitious company men, reports portray the relationship between Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg as increasingly close. Complicating matters, though, there was no sign of any Facebook connection on the iTunes-based social network that Apple debuted this week, due...
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YouTube Winning Over Content Owners The New York Times
Every week, consumers view some two billion ad-supported videos on YouTube, and, according to The New York Times, a third of them are uploaded without the copyright owner's permission but left up by the owner's choice. "They are automatically...
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Data: Twitterers More Active Than Ever Royal Pingdom
Twitter, which critics have suggested has already peaked, now boasts over 145 million registered users. "That's a lot, but how much is Twitter actually being used?" asks research firm Royal Pingdom. The Answer? "Turns out that there's more activity...
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| TODAY'S MEDIA NEWS AND HEADLINES |
Yahoo, Vestal Bring WebTV To Europe
Continuing the rush by Internet companies to work themselves into future technology of television sets, Yahoo has made a deal with the Vestal Group, a large TV manufacturer with the biggest share of TV sets in Europe. The deal will build out Yahoo! Connected TV, integrating TV apps...
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No Cord Cutting: ESPN3.com Strictly For TWC Subscribers
The deal with TWC gives Disney a chance to reach TWC's huge customer base with ESPN3, propelling ad sales on the site. The bulk of the 12.7 million TWC homes with TV are now potential users. And a heavy portion of Bright House's 2.4 million customers are eligible...
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Nielsen Projects More Hispanic TV Households
Hispanic TV homes will rise 3%, or 400,000, to 13.4 million for the 2010-2011 broadcast season. Nielsen says this represents 40% of 1 million U.S. TV homes that will be added this season. The 3% hike is higher than the 2.3% gain in Hispanic homes for the 2009-2010...
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Dateline Dollars: Vivendi Gains $2B From Comcast/NBC Venture
As government regulators review the proposed Comcast-NBC Universal joint venture, top executives at the French company that stands to benefit said they continue to expect the deal to close by Jan. 1. Nonetheless, $2 billion is coming Vivendi's way this month, since the transaction did not close by...
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Calling All Cars! More Have Satellite Radio
Satellite radio and navigation systems are continuing to make inroads in the U.S. automobile market, up 66% this year, according to J.D. Power and Associates, which tracks the penetration of various audio technologies as part of its comprehensive survey of market trends....
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BP Triples Ad Spend After Deepwater Disaster, Incurs Political Wrath
The devastating Gulf Coast oil spill has increased the coffers of media companies and angered one Florida congresswoman. BP has told Congress that it spent $93.4 million in advertising from April through July, more than three times what it spent a year ago in the span....
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'MasterChef,' 'Big Brother' Cook Up Wins
Nielsen final Wednesday results show that Fox and its two hours of "MasterChef" gave the network a 2.0 rating/6.3 share among 18-49 -- just edging CBS' 2.0/6.0 and NBC's 1.9/6.0. 'Big Brother' continues to be the No. 1 show of the night....
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Sprint, Ford Partner For 'ControlTV' Web Show
Ford's Fiesta compact car is getting a star turn in a new Web-TV program that looks to be a cross between a 20something reality show and "Subservient Chicken."...
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Mag Bag: 'Gourmet' Makes Partial Print Comeback
After being folded by Conde Nast last October, Gourmet is creeping back, first with a series of new Gourmet-branded digital offerings, and more recently, with new print products for the newsstand. But there's no word so far on a possible return for the defunct (but much-beloved) epicurean magazine...
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NBC Rebrands Hallmark As Universal Channel In UK
NBC Universal, which acquired rights to the Hallmark Channel internationally in 2007, is swapping the famed moniker in the U.K. for one of its well-known brands. The network will be known as Universal Channel starting in October -- part of NBCU's efforts to elevate the Universal brand, around...
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| AROUND THE NET IN MEDIA |
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AT&T/Hallmark: Still No Talks...Or Carriage B&C
No news was not good news for Hallmark Channels or its viewers. According to a Hallmark spokesperson, there are still no talks with AT&T in its second day of being dark on the telco's U-Verse system. A Hallmark spokesperson...
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FTC Subpoenas 48 Food Companies Marketing To Kids Ad Age
The Federal Trade Commission is once again handing out subpoenas to companies that market food to children and teens. Three years after initially delivering what is technically known as "orders to file special report" to 44 marketers, the FTC last...
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Has Murdoch's 'Times' Pay Wall Paid Off? The Independent
Two months after Rupert Murdoch's decision to erect a subscription paywall around the Web sites of The Times and The Sunday Times, thus removing their content from search engines, the bold experiment is having a marked effect on the rest...
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Apple, Google To Clash Over Music Reuters
Google Inc is in talks with music labels on plans for a download store and a digital song locker that would allow its mobile users to play songs wherever they are as it steps up its rivalry with Apple Inc...
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Is Martha Stewart The New Barbara Walters? The Washington Post
Martha Stewart, whose talk/crafts show is moving to cable's Hallmark Channel in two weeks, coinciding with the launch of her prime-time interview specials for that network, wants to become the new Important Interviewer in the television firmament. ...
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| TODAY'S MARKETING NEWS AND HEADLINES |
Timberland Focuses On Environmental Heroism
The Stratham, N.H.-based retailer is launching the global campaign, with the theme "Nature Needs Heroes," in conjunction with its new Earthkeepers collection. Made with materials like recycled rubber and recycled PET (one and a half plastic bottles are used in each pair of Earthkeepers boots), Earthkeepers product is...
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Brand 'Warmth' Key To Loyalty, Purchase Intent
Memo to Burger King's new owners: Check out the "warmth" factor while strategizing about how to better differentiate BK from McDonald's. According to a new study, consumers' perceptions of a brand's warmth, in particular, along with perceptions of its competence, heavily influence both their purchase intent and loyalty....
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Mazda Seeks 'Soul Of Motion' In New Design Language
The new look -- a more mammalian, "about to pounce" sensibility -- reflects the aesthetics of new design chief Ikuo Maeda, who joined last April. Maeda has introduced his own concept to evince the "Kodo" look: the sleek Shinari four-door, four-seat sports coupe....
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Sharp Sells Its Solar Staying Power
"Sharp has been an innovative leader for the past 50 years," Neal Lattner, Sharp's senior director of marketing communications, tells Marketing Daily. "And as the competitive set has been growing, we need to start branding our solar products."
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Aetna Enlists KitchenAid, Lowe's For 'Food Fight'
The initiative, from G2 USA, includes an online recipe contest, live cookoff events and a sweepstakes. The recipe contest kicked off Sept. 1, with an employee event at Aetna's corporate headquarters in Hartford, Conn. that featured TV celebrity chef Bobby Flay....
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Consumer-Influenced Labels Are New Trend
Contests in which consumers help design or contribute to special product labeling -- closely tied in with digital/social media and larger marketing missions, of course -- seem to be popping up with increasing frequency among food manufacturers these days. Two examples are Chiquita Brands International and Knorr, Unilever's...
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Stores Get Back-To-School Bump After All
Limited was a stand-out, with same-store sales gaining 10% for the month. The Columbus, Ohio-based retailer says the gains came from a 15% same-store jump at its Victoria's Secret unit, fueled by a bra and fragrance launch, as well as steady back-to-school gains in its Pink collection....
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Is America's Coupon Craze Leveling Off?
"While coupon use gained 13% in the first quarter of this year, it grew only 1% in the second quarter," Matthew Tilley, director of marketing for Inmar Corp., tells Marketing Daily. "And while that is still way up from two years ago and we expect to see somewhere...
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