• Annotated: Walgreens Times Square Billboard
    The Walgreens "spectacular," a sort of showoff term traditionally used to refer to the displays that illuminate Broadway, encompasses three sides of the One Times Square building. In total, 29 screens surround the building, and combine in various configurations to simplify the content production as much as possible. The diagonals that flank both sides of the building rise 17 stories - each side is comprised of three screens - and measure 28 feet wide by 250 feet tall. In front, the screen facing 42nd Street clocks in at 54 feet wide by 31 feet tall. The visual extravaganza is grounded …
  • The Element of Surprise
    A new book for marketers, POW! Right Between the Eyes! (Wiley, $22.95) by Andy Nulman kicks off its message about the value of surprise marketing straightaway in its forward (forwards, actually - there are two and they are by surprising choices).
  • Fool's Gold
    Are those big tv entertainment awards shows with ho-hum ratings still worth it? Not for everyone in these recessionary times. Other than that, go and enjoy your pricey tv purchase."For a long time, the Oscars and the Grammys were must-buys in the first quarter," says Brad Adgate, senior vice president and corporate research director for Horizon Media. "But now those shows are starting to get hit with the same kind of audience fractionalization that other regular primetime shows get."Last year on abc The Academy Awards earned a slim 10.7 rating among 18-49 viewers, while The Grammys took …
  • The Futurist:Sales Day Afternoon
    The LA skyline shares its usual musty-brown morning greeting with mark as he pours his first cup of coffee, its warm aroma promising the taste of dark nectar to revive the soul. Mark's modest apartment shows the signs of modern technology in all the usual places: the newest All-In-One phone, a 5,000 Mbps Internet connection, and a 15.1 channel stereo that his neighbors wish he didn't have.
  • How On-Air Pushes Online
    As an online-media professional, i will publicly admit the following only under duress (such as waterboarding) - traditional broadcast media still work. Shhh, don't tell anyone. Of course tv and radio don't work as well as they used to. Consumers are increasingly less attentive and those media are too cluttered. But, yes, they still work as marketing vehicles. Given their broad reach, they can effectively promote visitations to Web sites.
  • The Consumer:Call and Brand Response
    There's a principle in physics called the law of conservation of energy which basically says that in an enclosed system, energy can't be destroyed, it can only be transferred. For example, the energy that is expended in rubbing two sticks together isn't lost, it is simply transferred into heat - a different kind of energy - and the amount of heat is proportional to the amount of effort that is put into rubbing the sticks together.
  • Showing Some Skin
    When the producers of neil labute's latest play, "Reasons to Be Pretty," held an open casting call in New York this January looking for "real people, with real bodies ... (no professional models)" to be photographed for the production's advertising campaign, fans of the writer-director-playwright may have had reason to be dubious. The cynical (and perhaps slightly schizoid) stage and screen work of LaBute - critics, though not the box office, took notice of his films In the Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors - has been characterized as everything from a genius, to pedantic and abrasive, to …
  • Google, Kettle, Black
    Despite your best intentions, your Google search for sweatshop-free socks spun of organic cotton isn't helping the environment as much as you'd like. That's because a typical Google search generates 7 grams of carbon dioxide, the gas responsible for global warming.
  • Dust My Broom
    It was only the eighth day of the new year when the first magazine casualty of 2009 was trumpeted to the publishing world. Taking the first bullet? Country Home and its 40-strong staff, announced by Meredith as part of greater company-wide cost-cutting measures. Additional cutbacks were announced in 250 total company layoffs and the relocation of the creative functions of its ReadyMade and Parents.com properties (based in Berkeley, Calif. and New York City, respectively) to Meredith's corporate headquarters in Des Moines, Iowa. According to Meredith, the restructuring will cost $16 million.
  • Canned Rhetoric
    You are hungry, so you go to your local grocery store and walk down the snack aisle. There, you find waiting for you hundreds and hundreds of bags filled with artery-clogging chips of every size and color. And then your eyes meet with the Pringles can. Comedian Mitch Hedberg once joked that Pringles meant to go into the tennis ball business, but then a truckload of potatoes showed up instead ("Pringles was a laid-back company"). For decades, the Pringles can alone has set it apart from its salty competitors. And now, those recognizable cans are receiving new life long after …
« Previous Entries