Procter & Gamble wants to return its Crest brand to the No. 1 spot in the toothpaste market, and is going to spend $100 million in marketing to achieve its goal. The company plans to launch a marketing blitz in support of a new product under the Crest brand called Crest Pro-Health Toothpaste, to overtake rival Colgate Total for the top market spot. The focus of the campaign will be on the company's claim that Crest Pro-Health is accepted by the American Dental Association for treating all seven leading oral-care problems at once, a positioning no other toothpaste has ever …

And the winner is....Guinness! There are so many award competitions out there that it's hard to keep track of them all. But one of them tends to stand out among its peers, garnering more attention and conveying more prestige than all the others, which is why marketers should take note of it. It's the International Advertising Festival in Cannes, France, and it's considered the Oscars of the worldwide advertising industry. Each year, thousands of ad executives from around the world converge on the French Riviera to hold seminars, watch thousands of ads, party hearty into the early morning hours, and …

An increasing number of mainstream marketers are beginning to come out of the closet and directly target gay and lesbian audiences with gay-themed ads. While many companies have long advertised in gay-oriented publications and on gay-themed TV shows, the majority of those ads have been the same ones the advertisers run in traditional media. But now, more and more ads have gay-related themes and characters. "Typically, companies would come in, run their regular ads to get their feet wet, the same ads (they run) in other consumer books," said Todd Evans, CEO of Rivendell Media, a New Jersey company that …

Kellogg Co.'s Special K brand is getting bigger and healthier. Long positioned as one of the cereal marketer's most prominent diet and health-oriented products, Special K will soon include a new line of protein-fortified products such as Special K20 Protein Waters, Special K Protein Snack Bars, and Special K Protein Meal Bars. The new products join cereal, cereal bars, snack bites, and waffles in the Special K portfolio, and will be supported with an aggressive advertising campaign. Kellogg plans to position the line as nutritious "shape management" tools, targeting consumers interested in weight loss--and is counting on retailers to help. …

Marketers are always demanding a strong return on investment for their advertising dollars, and search engine Google says it has found a way to satisfy them. It's called "cost per action," and it only charges an advertiser for ads that generate sales or qualified sales leads. The new system is seen as a potential alternative to the traditional "cost per click" model that can result in click-fraud, which occurs when ads are clicked on repeatedly to paint a false picture of their value. Analysts and search marketers don't expect the "cost per action" program to completely replace cost-per-click, but say …

Marketers have used celebrity endorsers to help them market their products and services for many years, but that trend has been taking a decidedly international turn of late for at least one major marketer--Motorola. In the 1940s, the company used actress Betty Grable to help them sell radios--and later, star baseball pitcher Bob Feller promoted the company's television sets. Now Motorola's hot item is cell phones, and the advertiser has called on the likes of international rock star Bono, British soccer player David Beckham, and Indian actor Abhishek Bachchan to serve as endorsers. The move is not surprising, given the …

Two marketers have decided that the best way to capture consumers' attention is to give them what they really want and need--gasoline. Not surprisingly, the pair of advertisers are gasoline marketers--Shell and Sunoco. Shell is launching a "Million Gallon Giveaway" in which six top winners will get Shell gasoline for life, and 200,000-plus will get $10 gift cards for gas in an instant scratch-and-win promotion. Sunoco's "Free Fuel 5000" has a single grand prize of 10,000 gallons of its gasoline. The giveaway, which runs through August, also offers 5,000 instantly redeemable $10 gas cards. The two promotions were compared to …

Marketers are beginning to pay more attention to what time of day their ads run on the Internet. The situation hasn't quite reached the level of traditional TV with its many dayparts (prime time, late night, etc.), but it's quickly changing from the days when advertisers viewed the Web as an "on demand" medium in which users looked at content and ads at their leisure and feared they would miss certain people by narrowing their time frames. Now, with competition for prime spots driving up prices, that viewpoint is starting to change. "We can't afford to go out and buy …

Maurice Saatchi, who along with his brother, Charles, created an advertising agency empire in the 1970s and 80s, believes marketers should be succinct in their advertising messages. In fact, he believes commercial messages should be boiled down to a single word. Speaking at the current advertising film festival in Cannes, France, Saatchi told an assemblage of the world's leading ad executives that they and their clients need to reduce their strategies to finding just one word to characterize a brand. "What I am describing here is a new business model for marketing, appropriate to the digital age," he said. "In …

An increasing number of marketers are discovering the benefits of philanthropy. According to a consultancy that specializes in project sponsorship, cause-marketing spending by major advertisers will increase 20.5% this year to $1.34 billion. The company, IEG Research, said the projected rise makes cause marketing the fastest-growing segment of sponsorship, outpacing the industry's overall growth rate of 10.6% to a projected $13.4 billion. "Companies are realizing the powerful marketing benefits that can be gleaned from nonprofit affiliations," said William Chipps, senior editor of IEG Sponsorship Report, in a statement. One example cited as a successful program was Federal Express and Home …