The Media Debate Let’s say your media target is men 18–34 and you’re about to buy a million impressions on site X to reach them. Immediately, you’re faced with two issues. The first is that many media minds believe that if any of those impressions are seen by teenage girls, they are wasted expenditure. The second issue is that there’s a big difference in advertising impact between delivering 500,000 impressions once and 100,000 impressions five times. So how do you know how many different people you’re really going to reach, and with what frequency to reach them? It’s "Reach …

Hollywood Embraces the Web The look of fear on Jody Foster’s face was palpable. And if you were one of the estimated 130 million Web surfers who ventured onto the Yahoo! network in March, it was hard to miss images from Foster’s current motion picture, Panic Room. The Sony Pictures Entertainment production, the object of one of the heaviest movie promotions ever on the Internet, roared into theaters March 29 to the biggest Easter Weekend opening on record. "We employed some pretty sophisticated tactics to monitor buzz throughout the Web," says Dwight Caines, vice president of Internet marketing …

Much of Hitachi’s corporate advertising over the past 10 years has focused on the consumer electronics business. As a result, consumers have associated the Hitachi brand with — what else? — TVs, VCRs, camcorders, and DVDs. But consumer electronics account for only 10 percent of the company’s business, which last year was in the $68 billion range. It wasn’t until the mid-1990s that someone within the Japanese company’s corporate structure finally hit upon the idea of launching a global branding campaign to increase awareness among the other 90 percent of its customers — the business-to-business audience. Last September, a $20 …

Do you remember the :CueCat? Courtesy of Digimarc’s MediaBridge and Digital Convergence, it was all the rage in 2000–2001. Hundreds of thousand of these mouselike devices were given out at RadioShack stores in hopes that consumers would use them to scan bar codes printed alongside newspaper and magazine stories and be instantly taken to a website for additional information and advertising. But the idea didn’t catch on with consumers, who preferred reading their magazines and newspapers on trains, in their easy chairs and in other places located nowhere near computers equipped with :CueCats. Needless to say, the :CueCat is no …

Seven Smart Ways to Increase Email Success

It is a well-known fact that online creative is, to put it nicely, not very good. What's an advertiser to do?

Ah, innovation! Outdoor advertising was once just static billboards. Last year saw the arrival of audio/video display screens at bus shelters. Now outdoor ads at phone kiosks are beaming electronic signals with additional ad content to Palm handheld devices. That’s what Viacom-owned Simon & Schuster is doing to promote the new Stephen King book, Everything’s Eventual, in New York City. This April, 150 phone kiosks in Manhattan with flashing red lights started beaming excerpts of the book to Palm owners. Streetbeam, a New York company, developed the technology for the ad and is working with Viacom Outdoor, which …