• Trading Up
    Between skyrocketing gas prices, add-on fees from travel providers and plummeting on-time rates for airlines, doing business virtually looks better than ever. That's why companies like Cisco and IBM are turning to Unisfair.
  • Tall Tails
    A year ago, when NBC Universal and News Corp. announced their joint venture to aggregate and stream current TV properties into a YouTube alternative, many in the industry moaned, "Uh-oh, here we go again."
  • Sample Sale
    For aspiring Carrie Bradshaws, getting the best deals on luxury clothes and accessories comes down to who you know and if they'll invite you to shop. RueLaLa, a Web site launched by Retail Convergence this spring, is an invitation-only private sale site that features two-day sales on high-end, current-season merchandise. Its membership is exclusively user generated
  • Storm's a-Brewin'
    Why wait for your agency geeks down in the techie cubicles to finish fiddling with the new iPhone Software Development Kit for stand-alone applications? You could drag and drop your way to making iPhone widgets for your clients in a few minutes.
  • Widget-izing The Ad Network
    Like most good Internet notions before it, the branded widget format may be suffering from its own success. How does a brand stand out now in libraries crowded with thousands of these single-purpose social media apps?
  • Paltry Poultry Promo
    Animal fighting gained excessive media coverage last year: Forget soldiers dying in Iraq; NFL player Michael Vick's pit bulls were sucked into a far worse fate than any suicide bomber. PETA, the Humane Society, and the American public were outraged. That's kind of how some people feel playing the Las Vegas Hard Rock Hotel & Casino's chicken-fighting computer game. Chicken fighting, however, involves no hens; just two ladies perched atop the shoulders of male companions, duking it out to push the other into the water first. Popularized by women in pools nationwide, the game has developed more sexual connotations as …
  • Creative Roundtable: The Other Side
    Before coming up with a strategy for selling the Toyota Matrix to men under 35 (with twentysomethings being the key market), Saatchi & Saatchi Los Angeles did some research into the mindset of the demographic. The result? The agency discovered that these dudes hate advertising. They also hate corporations. Oh, and these guys are also tired of how everything is becoming commercialized these days, and they actively push away from the companies that advertise to them. Which begs the question: How do you surmount that kind of attitude? You work around it.
  • 5 Questions for John Vincent
    Oh, 1999. We here at OMMA remember it fondly. The dot-com bubble just kept inflating, Napster hit the Internet with illegal gusto, and sex-teen-bubblegum-pop-machine Britney Spears actually washed her hair. Those simple times were made even better, though, by the co-founding of EyeWonder Inc. by CEO John Vincent. Vincent, a Vanderbilt alum who lives with his two dogs, helped launch the first-ever instant play video ad in 2000, and he sure takes his video seriously. So seriously that the company launched its fourth European office in Amsterdam earlier this year (though Vincent was strangely vague about the office's proximity to …
  • Behind the Numbers: The Low Lows
    You can't listen to or read a news article today without the headlines turning to the subject of consumer confidence. An ABC News/Washington Post poll put the drop at 5 points in early May. Unity Marketing's (UM) Luxury Consumption Index (LCI) dropped 9.1 points at the end of this year's first quarter, after a 23.8 point drop at the end of 2007. The Conference Board's (TCB) Consumer Confidence Index, which had already declined sharply in March, fell another 3.6 points in April to 62.3. In addition, TCB's CEO Confidence and Help Wanted indices are also down. And to cap it …
  • E-mail Focus: Plays Well with Others
    Online marketers think they're pretty smart. Whether they cut their teeth on traditional marketing approaches such as direct mail or began their careers as online marketers, they know that today they're working on the leading edge of marketing practices. E-mail marketing. Paid search. Mobile marketing. As these fields develop, many marketers are eager to learn about the next new thing that will add luster to their résumés. Many assume these new channels will replace the old.
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