• Box Office Byte
    For Hollywood studios, the advent of social networking is a lot like the early days of nuclear energy: studios are learning to harness the power of Facebook and Twitter, but often become horribly irradiated, too. The downside associated with youthful, smart-phone equipped moviegoers communicating instantaneously with all the friends in their networks began to emerge last year, when Universal's Sacha Baron Cohen comedy Bruno debuted to a strong $14.2 million Friday, then cratered 40 percent the following day.
  • Engaging Solutions
    Once again, a solution to an ad problem lies in the creative. Recent studies have found that engagement rates with ads are three to four times higher when a marketer uses customized spots, with tailored creative and interactive features, than they are for pre-roll ads.
  • Flash in the Spam
    Without a doubt, the Web has been good to bacon. Closet bacon fanatics have united around recipes for bacon chocolates, bacon vodka and the culty "Bacon Explosion" meatloaf. Now Hormel's Spam, another underestimated pork product, wants some of that online action.
  • Flip The Funnel
    BOOK EXCERPT: It's time to set our sights on the very foundation of consumer behavior itself: the marketing funnel, aka A.I.D.A. (the theory, not the opera) - Awareness, Interest, Desire and Action. It is widely held to be the simplest and most accurate way of describing the four states or behaviors that almost all consumers experience - from being blissfully unaware of a product, service, offer or idea that they never knew they needed to the point at which they actually make some kind of commitment (usually monetary) to purchase, invest in, or acquire that item.
  • Picking Up the Social Pieces
    Think you know what integrated marketing is? Think again. While 2009 was a year of chaos, 2010 will be a year of consolidation, according to a new white paper from Media Logic. "There is no question that the old model of marketing, dependent upon an isolated and passive consumer, is dead, never to return," says Ronald Ladouceur, Media Logic's first senior vice president and executive creative director.
  • Rising Stars: Ezra Cooperstein, Maker Studios
    Already a seasoned media professional, 29-year-old Ezra Cooperstein was recently appointed CEO of Maker Studios - a studio focused primarily on YouTube as a platform, which aggregates Web content providers with eager audiences to form potent online video networks.
  • Creative Roundtable: Internet 'Explorer'
    If National Geographic is known for anything, it is for spectacular photographs of animals, landscapes and breasts. Oh, fess up: Who among us didn't spend hours thumbing through National Geographic magazine as kids looking for the boob shots? (For those of you who never got enough, National Geographic published National Geographic: The Best of the Breasts, a compendium of breast photography from the magazine, last year.) When it came to redesigning nationalgeographic.com, the in-house team at National Geographic Digital Media (NGDM) aimed to produce "a clean, straightforward site that focused on the content itself - all of the great …
  • Behind the Numbers: Rent to Buy (Audiences)
    Marketers shelled out more than $1.2 billion on social networking advertising last year, and that figure will only rise - to $1.3 billion this year - as advertisers aim to leverage their existing social media infrastructure in 2010, according to a new report from eMarketer.
  • Mobile Focus: The Moving Picture
    While consumer interest in mobile video continues to skyrocket, the new on-the-go medium is also creating unprecedented challenges for marketers looking to connect with customers. The new role that mobile video can play in marketing campaigns is inviting but can be overwhelming, unless marketers know how to create, implement and utilize the content and mobile medium correctly. The good news is that those who master the art of online video will have a truly compelling way to engage customers.
  • Market Focus: Fun and Games Are Serious Business
    Many hobbies aren't serious, but there's no question that hobbyists are serious business - a multibillion-dollar industry, in fact. In an increasingly stressful world, people crave a chance to get their minds off their worries - and will invest in the fix that fills the need. For example, the toy train collector has an average annual income of $60,000 and numbers in the tens of thousands - and that's just official membership, says Roger Carp, senior editor of Waukesha, Wis.-based Classic Toy Trains magazine. Or consider scrapbooking, which may seem as throwaway as the paper and photographs it's created with. …
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