The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science, at the University of South Australia, has collaborated with the Wharton School, at the University of Pennsylvania for the Empirical Generalizations in Advertising Conference. The aim of the conference was to take stock of what we do, and don't, know about advertising, as a base to try to understand how advertising might work in the future. The Empirical Generalizations in Advertising Conference brought together an outstanding group of researchers and practitioners in diverse areas of advertising who presented 44 different papers that summarize research-based knowledge in the field. Presented here are random excerpts …

A recent Student Survey by eROI to determine how high school and college students, as well as recent college graduates communicate digitally, reports that the mean number of email addresses per student surveyed is 2.4. Most college students have had an email address for about 8 years, with the average student getting an initial email address at the age of 13.

According to a recent Ipsos poll of U.S. adults, 37% of business travelers who planned to travel through the remainder of 2008 say their travel plans have been impacted by the current financial crisis. Additionally, 8% of U.S. business travelers say they have already cancelled a business trip they were planning to make by year-end, 6% are considering cancelling a business trip planned for 2008, and 10% have postponed a scheduled business trip until after January 1, 2009.

As a corollary to yesterday's Research Brief regarding the effectiveness of advertising on viewers of news channels vs. all media viewers, here are some demographics of news viewers as well as key advertisers and their ad types in October and November.

According to consumer research from Experian Simmons, reported by Marketing Charts, only 28% of the audience of an average news program, website or magazine gets valuable information about products and services advertised there, making news venues less effective at conveying ad messages than all forms of media combined.

According to the RAB third quarter Radio Revenue Report, the financial picture for Radio had some bright spots. Most notably, Off-Air continues its steady growth with increases from online and experiential marketing. David Silverman, a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, stated that "a weakening economy will continue to be a challenge for all forms of advertising-supported media."

In a recent survey by KW Strategems and Decipher in coordination with Survey Sampling International, slightly more than one-half of Americans (57%) said they will spend less money to reduce stress this season. Finishing holiday shopping early ranked second on the list with 30% of respondents vowing to not be standing in retail lines at the last minute.

According to a recent comScore study, "All about iPhone," 43% of iPhone owners earn in excess of $100,000 annually, but the strongest growth in users is coming from those earning less than the median household income. iPhone adoption since June 2008 rose 48% among those earning between $25,000 and $50,000 per year and by 46 percent among those earning between $25,000 and $75,000.

According to the Direct Marketing Association Power of Direct Marketing, in 2008 commercial and nonprofit marketers will spend $176.9 billion on direct marketing, accounting for 52.1 percent of all ad expenditures in the United States. These advertising expenditures will generate approximately $2.057 trillion in total incremental US sales. In 2008, direct marketing accounted for approximately 10 percent of total US gross domestic product and 1.6 million direct marketing employees in the US. Their collective sales efforts directly support 9.3 million other jobs, accounting for a total of 10.9 million US jobs.

55% of the chief marketing officers at leading brands surveyed by Epsilon said they're not too interested (22%), or not interested at all (33%), in incorporating social networking sites into their marketing strategies. Though dialogue marketing is a bonafide trend in the industry, says the report, only 10% percent of CMO survey respondents said they already are using these social sites in their marketing plans.