After a successful test of an e-mail marketing effort, automaker Land Rover will launch a full-scale tactical e-mail push this year as part of an integrated consumer relationship marketing campaign. "We've decided that 2006 will see a significant ramp-up of this activity," said Serge Sergiou, Land Rover's CRM and Internet manager. "We found that follow-up e-mails, in particular, generated a significant positive uplift in response rates and sales where they supported direct marketing campaigns." The company will send a series of e-mails targeting both prospective and existing customers containing content outlining awards, product launches and invitations to test drives in …

Marketers will soon have a new resource to help them gauge how much celebrity endorsers contribute to their advertising strategies. Ad agency holding firm Omnicon Group is launching a new company through its Davie-Brown entertainment-marketing operation that will try to measure how much a celebrity can influence consumers' decisions to buy a product. "Some of these celebrities cost quite a bit of money," says Jeff Chown, president of Davie-Brown Talent. An advertiser, he adds, "needs to know if they are getting their return on that investment." The new company will compete with Marketing Evaluations, the Long Island firm that has …

Anheuser-Busch's popular Super Bowl ads are coming under attack for appealing to underage drinkers, even though A-B and other brewers say they strive not to target young people. The controversy was sparked by results of a survey of Super Bowl ads that breaks down voting by age and other demographic measures. In the so-called Adbowl poll, A-B ads for Bud Light ads ranked first, second and fourth in popularity. A Budweiser ad won third. Steve McKee, president of McKee Wallwork Cleveland, an advertising agency in Albuquerque that developed the poll, noted that the beer ads also scored well with adults. …

Beer marketers have long known that sporting events offer particularly good advertising opportunities. This is especially true for the major brewers, like Anheuser-Busch, which spent an estimated $300 million on sports-related advertising in 2004 and 2005. In addition to being the largest single sponsor for the Super Bowl, A-B also has a significant presence at this month's telecast of the Winter Olympics, the start of the Nascar season at the Daytona 500 and the NBA All-Star Game. In this wide-ranging interview, A-B's Vice President-Global Media and Sports Marketing Tony Ponturo discuss the brewer's objectives and strategies in using sports to …

Retailers are taking a page from their consumer product counterparts and are beginning to experiment with different forms of media in order to reach consumers. Faced with customers who make their own rules on media consumption and who turn increasingly toward the Internet as a source of news and general information, some retailers are looking to outlets like glossy direct-mail catalogs, online coupons, and even billboards to get their message across. "Long-term, there is a fundamental shift" under way in how retailers reach customers, said Mike Boylson, CMO for J.C. Penney, and those who start experimenting with new media early …

McDonald's Corp. has introduced a new Web site in connection with its sponsorship of a high-school all-star basketball game that shows highlights of former players, including those who became the game's greatest stars. The site gives users the chance to see players like Michael Jordan, Isiah Thomas and Shaquille O'Neal perform their feats of basketball magic when they were still in high school. McDonald's has organized the game since 1977 to benefit Ronald McDonald House charity. "[There were all] of these assets that we had and hadn't really leveraged," said Michon Ellis, senior manager of marketing communications at McDonald's and …

Marketers for the National Hockey League and Major League Baseball are focusing on two international events in their efforts to promote their respective sports. The current NHL catalog includes two pages that take advantage of players involved in the Winter Olympics hockey competition by luring readers to an NHL website that offers about 60 products adorned with logos of teams from the U.S., Canada, Russia, Sweden, and the Czech Republic, among others. "We try to link everything together to get an end result of people going to the online store to buy the product when the Olympics become top of …

It took five years of research and effort that even included practically living with consumers for an entire week, but Procter and Gamble and ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi finally came up with a new umbrella campaign for Tide, one of the company’s oldest, most enduring brands.  The effort is called the “Tide knows fabrics best” campaign, and it recalls the claims of past P&G advertising, but with a twist. Its music, rich visual imagery and emotional benefits break from the demonstrations and side-by-side comparisons that have filled the void since the brand’s long-running “Family Tide” campaign ended in …

When it comes to branded entertainment, there are apparently a lot of marketers out there who don't know what they're doing. The problem is that they are entering into this still- developing arena without knowing exactly who they are as a brand. That was one of the conclusions put forth at a conference panel on branded entertainment sponsored by Advertising Age in Los Angeles. The blame has to be shared with Hollywood, panelists said, for a willingness to sacrifice the integrity of a story for the sake of a deal. "You must be very clear about what you stand …

Marketers are beginning to discover the possibilities of mobile marketing, but much remains unknown about this new medium. In most large metropolitan areas, wireless penetration exceeds 70 percent and wireless devices--cell phones, BlackBerries, et al--have become ubiquitous communications tools. It's just too large a universe for marketers to ignore, and it's going to get even bigger. For the non-mobile-savvy, however, the complexity of the industry appears daunting. Faced with puzzling abbreviations like "SMS," "PSMS," "WAP," and "MMS," and terms such as "mobile video" and "mobile advertising," how does a brand begin to launch a mobile marketing campaign? This article helps …