Hoping to avoid a Christmas as blue as the past few, retailers and marketers are experimenting with ambitiously novel ways to woo consumers. Along with traditional trappings like Santa's workshops, decorated store windows and teddy bears as gifts with purchases, shoppers will see an assortment of unconventional campaigns, all intended to encourage the impulse to buy among those bored with or tired of holiday chestnuts (literal and figurative).
Despite a soft advertising market for cable in the fourth quarter, programmers are optimistic that sales will pick up next year.
In all the ways television usually measures success, Leslie Moonves, the chairman of CBS, has enjoyed the best month of his network career.
Young man, turn on your television. Please. The networks are begging you.
Marketing extravaganzas are becoming the hottest tickets in town. Once-lowly event-marketing parties have been transformed into brand spectaculars, where companies roll out the red, pink or rainbow carpet for their products and host an A-list of stars and consumers to experience their brand live.
One of the tightest job markets for print journalists in recent memory has started to loosen, with optimistic recruiters expecting so many editorial professionals to change jobs in coming months that some talent shortages may occur beginning in 2004.
The trend to advertise in places that had until recently been advertising-free is accelerating, with two major marketers clambering aboard the booming brand wagon.
Forget the Big Three. Wal-Mart's TV network is cleaning up.
Metro officials who have long striven to keep the transit system uncluttered say financial pressures have forced a new philosophy: They want to turn rail cars and buses into rolling billboards, run animated commercials in dark subway tunnels, hang video monitors inside trains to broadcast commercials and welcome ATMs, florists and shoe cobblers at stations in exchange for a cut of the action.
The Federal Communications Commission's two Democrats have been harsh critics of new rules that they say will put the nation's media outlets in the hands of a few powerful companies.