Keeping its recent promise, Snapchat introduced ads to its messaging platform this weekend. The first ad -- a sponsored story for the horror film “Ouija”-- appeared in the “Recent Updates” section of U.S. users' accounts.  “It’s the first time we’ve done anything like this because it’s the first time we’ve been paid to put content in that space,” Snapchat said in a blog post. “It’s going to feel a little weird at first, but we’re taking the plunge.” Weird, maybe, but Snapchat didn’t want the ads to take anyone by surprise. As such, Evan Spiegel, the start-up’s young co-founder and CEO, said the ads were coming “soon,” earlier this month. As promised, the new ads -- which users can expect to see “from time to time,” according to Snapchat -- are opt-in and untargeted. “You can choose if you want to watch it,” the startup said of its first ad product. “We want to see if we can deliver an experience that’s fun and informative, the way ads used to be, before they got creepy and targeted.” Just like the content in Snapchat’s "Stories" section, the ads are supposed to disappear after users view them, or within 24 hours. Also, at least for the moment, Snapchat is promising not to put ads in users’ “personal communication,” i.e., Snaps or Chats. “That would be totally rude,” it admitted. The effort comes at a sensitive time for Snapchat. Threatening its standing as a secure platform, hackers just recently intercepted hundreds of thousands of private user messages, which they promising to release to the public. Whether the company can weather the resulting storm remains the subject of debate. Snapchat debuted “Stories” late last year -- a feature that allows users to save and share photos for up to 24 hours. Adding a collaborative component to the service, the startup more recently unveiled its “Our Story” feature, so people at the same events could combine their own “snaps” into a single “story.” The new ads tie into Our Story, which was introduced to many users during the FIFA World Cup final this year. The service’s entire community was given access to a stream of curated content created by attending the big game between Argentina and Germany. Among other monetization efforts, Snapchat is also reportedly developing a new service, dubbed Snapchat Discovery, which will “show content and ads to Snapchat users,” according to The Wall Street Journal. Sources told WSJ to expect Discovery to debut by November. The company also recently added location-based filters to its growing list of personalization features, which hinted at some big opportunities for brands. Indeed, a video demonstrating the “geofilters” featured users snapping selfies in front of a SoulCycle, a Groundwork coffee shop and Disney World. Suggesting a clear path to promotional initiatives, each location offered visitors branded images to include in their snaps. Already, many on Madison Avenue have been happy to experiment with Snapchat. Following Taco Bell’s lead, McDonald's joined the service earlier this year, while Heineken more recently relied on Snapchat to connect with festival-goers at Coachella. Among brands, other early adopters have included Juicy Couture, Seventeen, NPR and HBO's "Girls." To bolster its business side, Snapchat recently poached the global director of Facebook’s Preferred Marketing Developer program, Mike Randall. Randall officially serves as vice president of business and marketing partnerships at Snapchat. Some notable investors have said they expect the anonymous social networking trend to be short-lived. Meanwhile, some industry watchers say Snapchat’s popularity is bad news for advertisers because it represents a turn toward personal privacy and digital anonymity. Snapchat experienced the highest growth in time spent in July, with total minutes up 114% year-over-year -- from 2.6 billion to 5.5 billion minutes, per a recent note from JPMorgan, citing comScore data. (To put those numbers into perspective, Facebook saw its time spent rise from 137 billion to 178 billion minutes, during the same period.) Naturally, Snapchat’s success has led to a lot of investor interest. Yahoo is reportedly close to investing around $20 million in Snapchat at a valuation of $10 billion. In August, Kleiner Perkins was reportedly ready to place another big bet on the company. To date, the highly visible venture capital firm has already invested upwards of $20 million in the messaging service. All told, Snapchat has raised roughly $100 million from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Benchmark and Institutional Venture Partners, among others. 

Brandnew, a native advertising platform that specializes in delivering messages through social media influencers on image-focused sites like Instagram and Pinterest, has unveiled its new “Influencer Marketplace.” The Brandnew Marketplace brings together around 860 influential social-media personalities hailing from 52 countries around the world, including 208 from the U.S., in a single interface. The aim is to make it easier for advertisers and agencies to identify influencers who match their brand profile and campaign needs.Above all, the Marketplace aims to give marketers a more nuanced portrait of influencers across social networks, rather than focusing on each social profile separately. It also provides a dashboard with tools to plan, execute and track native ad campaigns across the network, with a variety of social metrics delivered in real time, according to the company.Brandnew CEO Francis Trapp explained: “The marketplace resulted from our customers’ perpetual demand to understand more about the influential people in general rather than specific profiles on social networks. Social media profiles are still important, but they are only means to an end and come in second place. Foremost, the influencer him- or herself is important. Knowing this, we decided to put the focus on the influencer and who they are, rather than focusing on just their Instagram, for example.”Recent months have seen a move by native advertising platforms to simplify a range of activities that were previously stumbling blocks to carrying out native campaigns on a large scale, including campaign planning and content creation.A few months ago, Nativo unveiled its new Content Creator Consortium, intended to help marketers execute native campaigns more quickly by connecting them with native content creators, including NewsCred, Contently, Visual.ly, Niche, and Poptent. The consortium is part of a larger push by Nativo to streamline the native ad process, from conception to creation, distribution, and measurement.

Internet ad revenue rose 15% to $23.1 billion during the first six months in 2014, compared with the same time period in 2013, per an IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report released Monday by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB). The report, prepared by PwC US, estimates that search revenue rose 4% to $9.1 billion compared with the first half of the year in 2013. Mobile revenue rose 76% to $5.3 billion. Mobile search contributed $2.7 billion, mobile display contributed $2.5 billion, and other mobile media contributed $103 million. Brands continue to increase their commitment to interactive advertising, and mobile is seen as a crucial part of the marketing mix, per Randall Rothenberg, president and CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB). He said that with revenue in the second half of the year traditionally surpassing the first half of the year, the industry expects an even stronger full year compared with last year. Three advertising verticals contributed about 46% to revenue: retail at 21%, financial services at 13% and automotive at 12%. Display-related advertising revenue rose 6% in the first half of 2014 to $6.5 billion, and accounted for 28% of digital advertising revenue overall. Social media revenue -- including advertising on social platforms as well as social networking and social gaming Web sites and apps -- rose 58% to $2.9 billion in HY 2014, compared with the same six months in 2013. Impression-based advertising for the first six months in 2014 rose 34% to $7.8 billion, and performance-based advertising at 65%, to nearly $15 billion. Brian Wieser, senior research analyst at Pivotal Research Group, in a research note published Monday, compares the IAB findings to observations made in the national TV advertising sector during the same period. "In other words, our conviction that national TV advertising is growing in-line with the state of the economy and that it is not experiencing an accelerated shift of spending from offline to online is affirmed with this data," he wrote. "We have previously noted that on our estimates, contrary to generally prevailing views among some of the analyst community, internet-related advertising slowed in 2Q14, just as did television advertising and other media more broadly," Wieser writes. "This is a core component of our view that television is not suffering from a radical shift of spending trends beyond the vagaries of the advertising economy’s quarter to quarter moves. More specifically, new data from the primary trade group for internet advertising, the IAB, total online advertising (including that which ran on mobile devices) grew by 13.8% during the second quarter of 2014, decelerating from 16.4% growth in the first quarter." Growth rates for Internet-related advertising are also much slower than we saw during the same periods in 2013, Wieser explains. Last year's comparable figures were more than 18.0% during the first quarter in 2013 and  more than 17.6% during 2Q13. Notably, the half-year Internet ad revenue since the IAB began measurements in 1996 began at a base of $83 million -- rising to $4 billion in 2000, and $20 billion in 2013.

The “Sons of Anarchy” are riding Harley-Davidson Street Bobs into the sunset. Yes, this is the last season for the FX show about a nefarious gang and its leader who, for the past seven years, has been trying to extricate himself from gang life.  And for those seven seasons Harley-Davidson has been sponsor and bike of choice for the group. The company has had some 100 bikes — across its portfolio — dedicated to the show, customized by a team of its own designers and S.O.A. producers, according to Dino Bernacchi, director of marketing communications for Harley-Davidson U.S.A. The iconic Milwaukee manufacturer is in the midst of capping its gang membership with a promotion dangling a private viewing party with S.O.A. leads Kim Coates and Theo Rossi, and the chance to win an S.O.A. customized ride. Meanwhile, the company is continuing to up-shift on product integration efforts with Marvel movies and TV shows. For example, Harley has had motorcycles in "Captain America: The First Avenger"; "The Avengers"; "Iron Man 3"; "Thor: The Dark World"; the new Street 750 was featured in this year's “Captain America 2: The Winter Soldier," directed by Anthony Russo and Joe Russo, both Harley riders. And H-D bikes are in another Marvel property, ABC’s “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” Parenthetically, Harley has also promoted the Street 750 with ice and dirt-track racing events associated with the X Games. While bikes like the Street 750 and Iron 883 were in "S.H.I.E.L.D." the company will see its futuristic concept, the Project LiveWire electric-powertrain bike, and Street 750 bike in the Joss Whedon-written/directed "Avengers: Age of Ultron," premiering May 1, 2015. Whedon also co-created "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." In the movie, the Project LiveWire is ridden by Black Widow, played by Scarlett Johansson. Bernacchi says Harley-Davidson will run a promotion around the film, details of which have not been finalized.   "The second Avengers film is a cataclysmic moment because of the excitement and success of the first [film]. For both 750 Street and Project LiveWire it will be a 'holy bleep' moment. Version one was the third top-grossing film of all time, so for Street and LiveWire to be part of it will be exciting."  As for S.O.A., Bernacchi said Kurt Sutter, creator of the FX show (and a rider), "reached out to us and pitched the idea. It was an easy ask for us. The main cast, the sustaining characters all ride." Through the past three or four seasons of the show, Harley has run a promotion driving people online by offering limited-collection "while supplies last" Harley S.O.A. stickers. "They come and do lots more browsing than just get the sticker. This year, it crashed our server with 40,000 people asking for stickers in a 24-hour frame, just from a post on the S.O.A. Facebook page."   And Harley will return to the Terminator franchise for the next installment, "Terminator: Genisys," which will feature the Fat Boy nameplate. "It's cool because they reached out to us," says Bernacchi.  Harley is currently promoting the LiveWire via a road show called "The Project LiveWire Experience" comprising a fleet of 33 Project LiveWire bikes in two trucks criss-crossing the country giving riders a chance to throw a leg over the bikes and ride them. The point of the program is to get rider impressions to see if it's doable, drive social buzz, and promote the brand as future oriented.

Keeping its recent promise, Snapchat introduced ads to its messaging platform this weekend. The first ad -- a sponsored story for the horror film “Ouija”-- appeared in the “Recent Updates” section of U.S. users' accounts.  “It’s the first time we’ve done anything like this because it’s the first time we’ve been paid to put content in that space,” Snapchat said in a blog post. “It’s going to feel a little weird at first, but we’re taking the plunge.” Weird, maybe, but Snapchat didn’t want the ads to take anyone by surprise. As such, Evan Spiegel, the start-up’s young co-founder and CEO, said the ads were coming “soon,” earlier this month. As promised, the new ads -- which users can expect to see “from time to time,” according to Snapchat -- are opt-in and untargeted. “You can choose if you want to watch it,” the startup said of its first ad product. “We want to see if we can deliver an experience that’s fun and informative, the way ads used to be, before they got creepy and targeted.” Just like the content in Snapchat’s "Stories" section, the ads are supposed to disappear after users view them, or within 24 hours. Also, at least for the moment, Snapchat is promising not to put ads in users’ “personal communication,” i.e., Snaps or Chats. “That would be totally rude,” it admitted. The effort comes at a sensitive time for Snapchat. Threatening its standing as a secure platform, hackers just recently intercepted hundreds of thousands of private user messages, which they promising to release to the public. Whether the company can weather the resulting storm remains the subject of debate. Snapchat debuted “Stories” late last year -- a feature that allows users to save and share photos for up to 24 hours. Adding a collaborative component to the service, the startup more recently unveiled its “Our Story” feature, so people at the same events could combine their own “snaps” into a single “story.” The new ads tie into Our Story, which was introduced to many users during the FIFA World Cup final this year. The service’s entire community was given access to a stream of curated content created by attending the big game between Argentina and Germany. Among other monetization efforts, Snapchat is also reportedly developing a new service, dubbed Snapchat Discovery, which will “show content and ads to Snapchat users,” according to The Wall Street Journal. Sources told WSJ to expect Discovery to debut by November. The company also recently added location-based filters to its growing list of personalization features, which hinted at some big opportunities for brands. Indeed, a video demonstrating the “geofilters” featured users snapping selfies in front of a SoulCycle, a Groundwork coffee shop and Disney World. Suggesting a clear path to promotional initiatives, each location offered visitors branded images to include in their snaps. Already, many on Madison Avenue have been happy to experiment with Snapchat. Following Taco Bell’s lead, McDonald's joined the service earlier this year, while Heineken more recently relied on Snapchat to connect with festival-goers at Coachella. Among brands, other early adopters have included Juicy Couture, Seventeen, NPR and HBO's "Girls." To bolster its business side, Snapchat recently poached the global director of Facebook’s Preferred Marketing Developer program, Mike Randall. Randall officially serves as vice president of business and marketing partnerships at Snapchat. Some notable investors have said they expect the anonymous social networking trend to be short-lived. Meanwhile, some industry watchers say Snapchat’s popularity is bad news for advertisers because it represents a turn toward personal privacy and digital anonymity. Snapchat experienced the highest growth in time spent in July, with total minutes up 114% year-over-year -- from 2.6 billion to 5.5 billion minutes, per a recent note from JPMorgan, citing comScore data. (To put those numbers into perspective, Facebook saw its time spent rise from 137 billion to 178 billion minutes, during the same period.) Naturally, Snapchat’s success has led to a lot of investor interest. Yahoo is reportedly close to investing around $20 million in Snapchat at a valuation of $10 billion. In August, Kleiner Perkins was reportedly ready to place another big bet on the company. To date, the highly visible venture capital firm has already invested upwards of $20 million in the messaging service. All told, Snapchat has raised roughly $100 million from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Benchmark and Institutional Venture Partners, among others. 

I've never been a big believer in Snapchat, and I dislike almost everything about the app and the company. More than that, I find its $10bn valuation beyond optimistic, and I find the promise of advertising in the context of our most personal, private and dubious messages to be worrisome. We massively overestimate the importance of reaching the young -- the least loyal customers on the planet with the smallest wallets. But say what you will -- their new advertising vehicle is fascinating and much more profound than it may first appear.  We have long made assumptions in digital advertising, and we have made them so quickly and so unconsciously that they have become automatic. What Snapchat's new advertising play has done for me is to challenge these assumptions and get me excited about how we can redefine a new canvas. It's about time too -- by far the biggest and least stated problem in the entire world of advertising is that we're spending more and more time on screens that have demonstrably shown themselves to be increasingly less effective for advertising. We go to smaller screens that we can make less money from, but we don't seem to be worrying about it?  We have this curious tension between incredible optimism for the future of online and mobile advertising, massive growth in the money flowing into this space and performance that started off poor only to become worse. One day we will look past the emotion and realize this is a problem on an overwhelming scale. But for the moment we're too busy being excited by the flow of money and the pace of change to look at these awkward findings. The curious and profound thing about Snapchat advertising is how the tiny things they've done to craft an advertising platform have resulted in interesting questions about the future of online advertising. 1. Broadcast We have always assumed the beauty of online is the incredible targeting, especially on mobile. For years, we've celebrated the fact that we can target by demographic, by device, by behavior, by recent search and even by exact location. We assumed that mobile would be the narrowest of narrow-casted ads. They seemed destined to become performance ads for the lower funnel, not brand ads for awareness to a broad audience. What Snapchat has done is to provide a platform that can't target. What if we considered this a good thing? What if we reveled in the opportunity to make brand ads online?  2. Optional We say that the age of interruption is dead and the age of engagement is here, but it doesn't really look like this. The last year has seen online display ads become larger and harder to ignore; we have seen video ads become unskippable and auto play. As banner ads continually fail to work, we have found ways to ensure they get in your way. What Snapchat has done is brave -- it has made ads separate to your stream and entirely optional. Anyone viewing your ad is doing so entirely of their own accord. 3. Custom Creative Virtually all online ads are not custom made, but merely TV ads that are cut down. Snapchat, to my knowledge, is the first mobile advertising unit for which brands are expected to make ads' purpose fit for that context -- a courageous move that Facebook was trying that should elevate the quality of creative.  4. Not social We have always assumed that ads online were social -- that in this age of engagement we'd be there to comment on ads and to share with friends. Snapchat ads -- hosted on the most social platform imaginable -- are simple. No sharing, no comments, no clicking. 5. No clicking The whole point of ads online is that you are there to click to find out more, to bookmark, to buy, to save for later. What Snapchat has done is change that assumption.  6. No time length  TV ads are 30 seconds, right? Because that’s what we can afford. But what if we paid for ads by the unit, and our job was to keep viewers' attention for as long as we wanted to? Sometimes what creativity needs is limitations. It’s at the edges of life where culture and ideas emerge, creativity needs problems to work against, and open spaces are too much to design around. In this case, it’s the fragile nature of the Snapchat audience and the dearth of user data that have made Snapchats ads unique -- and possibly brilliant. Snapchat ads give us an entirely new problem. We now need to make ads that people want to see, and we can make them any length, but they can’t be shared, commented on and  can’t lead anywhere. They will disappear within seconds -- and if as an industry combined we make terrible ads, people won’t ever click on them again. I like the idea of this challenge -- Snapchat just made online ads interesting and new.

Brandnew, a native advertising platform that specializes in delivering messages through social media influencers on image-focused sites like Instagram and Pinterest, has unveiled its new “Influencer Marketplace.” The Brandnew Marketplace brings together around 860 influential social-media personalities hailing from 52 countries around the world, including 208 from the U.S., in a single interface. The aim is to make it easier for advertisers and agencies to identify influencers who match their brand profile and campaign needs.Above all, the Marketplace aims to give marketers a more nuanced portrait of influencers across social networks, rather than focusing on each social profile separately. It also provides a dashboard with tools to plan, execute and track native ad campaigns across the network, with a variety of social metrics delivered in real time, according to the company.Brandnew CEO Francis Trapp explained: “The marketplace resulted from our customers’ perpetual demand to understand more about the influential people in general rather than specific profiles on social networks. Social media profiles are still important, but they are only means to an end and come in second place. Foremost, the influencer him- or herself is important. Knowing this, we decided to put the focus on the influencer and who they are, rather than focusing on just their Instagram, for example.”Recent months have seen a move by native advertising platforms to simplify a range of activities that were previously stumbling blocks to carrying out native campaigns on a large scale, including campaign planning and content creation.A few months ago, Nativo unveiled its new Content Creator Consortium, intended to help marketers execute native campaigns more quickly by connecting them with native content creators, including NewsCred, Contently, Visual.ly, Niche, and Poptent. The consortium is part of a larger push by Nativo to streamline the native ad process, from conception to creation, distribution, and measurement.

Internet ad revenue rose 15% to $23.1 billion during the first six months in 2014, compared with the same time period in 2013, per an IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report released Monday by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB). The report, prepared by PwC US, estimates that search revenue rose 4% to $9.1 billion compared with the first half of the year in 2013. Mobile revenue rose 76% to $5.3 billion. Mobile search contributed $2.7 billion, mobile display contributed $2.5 billion, and other mobile media contributed $103 million. Brands continue to increase their commitment to interactive advertising, and mobile is seen as a crucial part of the marketing mix, per Randall Rothenberg, president and CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB). He said that with revenue in the second half of the year traditionally surpassing the first half of the year, the industry expects an even stronger full year compared with last year. Three advertising verticals contributed about 46% to revenue: retail at 21%, financial services at 13% and automotive at 12%. Display-related advertising revenue rose 6% in the first half of 2014 to $6.5 billion, and accounted for 28% of digital advertising revenue overall. Social media revenue -- including advertising on social platforms as well as social networking and social gaming Web sites and apps -- rose 58% to $2.9 billion in HY 2014, compared with the same six months in 2013. Impression-based advertising for the first six months in 2014 rose 34% to $7.8 billion, and performance-based advertising at 65%, to nearly $15 billion. Brian Wieser, senior research analyst at Pivotal Research Group, in a research note published Monday, compares the IAB findings to observations made in the national TV advertising sector during the same period. "In other words, our conviction that national TV advertising is growing in-line with the state of the economy and that it is not experiencing an accelerated shift of spending from offline to online is affirmed with this data," he wrote. "We have previously noted that on our estimates, contrary to generally prevailing views among some of the analyst community, internet-related advertising slowed in 2Q14, just as did television advertising and other media more broadly," Wieser writes. "This is a core component of our view that television is not suffering from a radical shift of spending trends beyond the vagaries of the advertising economy’s quarter to quarter moves. More specifically, new data from the primary trade group for internet advertising, the IAB, total online advertising (including that which ran on mobile devices) grew by 13.8% during the second quarter of 2014, decelerating from 16.4% growth in the first quarter." Growth rates for Internet-related advertising are also much slower than we saw during the same periods in 2013, Wieser explains. Last year's comparable figures were more than 18.0% during the first quarter in 2013 and  more than 17.6% during 2Q13. Notably, the half-year Internet ad revenue since the IAB began measurements in 1996 began at a base of $83 million -- rising to $4 billion in 2000, and $20 billion in 2013.

Marketers plan to increase mobile ad spending this year at the expense of print, television and digital display media, according to new findings by research firm Advertiser Perceptions.  More immune to mobile budget poaching were social media, digital video and search. Among the 300 agency and marketing “decision makers” interviewed online in July, findings revealed that print will suffer the most from growing mobile ad budgets, with 41% citing that category as a source for mobile ad dollars. Another 34% indicated they would shift money from TV advertising to mobile, while 32% will tap digital display budgets. Nearly four in 10 (38%) said an overall expansion in ad budgets would fund more mobile ad spending. What objectives are advertisers turning to mobile for? Connecting with buyers on multiple platforms, building awareness for new brands, service and events and driving engagement with customers were cited as the most important factors by more than three quarters of executives. When it comes to mobile devices, smartphones were favored over tablets for ad results. “Smartphones are seen as the platform that delivers such benefits as impressions, conversion, sales, awareness and ROI. Tablets, meanwhile, are valued mostly for attributes like engagement and user experience,” stated the report. As a “platform for my advertising,” smartphones and tablets came out even, with 25% each citing smartphones and tablets, and 49% saying the two are the same. The two device types were also viewed about equal when it came to brand safety. In terms of mobile buys, Google and Facebook were the top media brands, cited by 25% and 21% of agency clients, respectively. That’s not surprising, given that together they accounted for the majority (67%) of U.S. mobile ad spending last year, according to eMarketer. Others mentioned included Yahoo (14%), YouTube and Apple’s iAd (9% each), Millennial Media (8%), Twitter (7%) and Pandora (5%). For a social network like Facebook to be considered a top mobile buy underscores how the company has benefited from the mobile shift. Nearly two-thirds (62%) of its ad sales revenue in the second quarter came from mobile, with that proportion likely to increase again when it announces third-quarter results this month. Twitter, similarly, gets about three-quarters of its ad revenue from mobile. Survey participants attributed Google’s predominance to its massive reach and ability to mirror the desktop experience in mobile with device-specific improvements, such as location.  Among executives surveyed by Advertiser Perceptions for the study,  59% were from ad agencies and 41% from brand marketers. Overall, 45% of respondents were at the vice president level or higher. Their purview spans mobile, digital, print and television.

The “Sons of Anarchy” are riding Harley-Davidson Street Bobs into the sunset. Yes, this is the last season for the FX show about a nefarious gang and its leader who, for the past seven years, has been trying to extricate himself from gang life.  And for those seven seasons Harley-Davidson has been sponsor and bike of choice for the group. The company has had some 100 bikes — across its portfolio — dedicated to the show, customized by a team of its own designers and S.O.A. producers, according to Dino Bernacchi, director of marketing communications for Harley-Davidson U.S.A. The iconic Milwaukee manufacturer is in the midst of capping its gang membership with a promotion dangling a private viewing party with S.O.A. leads Kim Coates and Theo Rossi, and the chance to win an S.O.A. customized ride. Meanwhile, the company is continuing to up-shift on product integration efforts with Marvel movies and TV shows. For example, Harley has had motorcycles in "Captain America: The First Avenger"; "The Avengers"; "Iron Man 3"; "Thor: The Dark World"; the new Street 750 was featured in this year's “Captain America 2: The Winter Soldier," directed by Anthony Russo and Joe Russo, both Harley riders. And H-D bikes are in another Marvel property, ABC’s “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” Parenthetically, Harley has also promoted the Street 750 with ice and dirt-track racing events associated with the X Games. While bikes like the Street 750 and Iron 883 were in "S.H.I.E.L.D." the company will see its futuristic concept, the Project LiveWire electric-powertrain bike, and Street 750 bike in the Joss Whedon-written/directed "Avengers: Age of Ultron," premiering May 1, 2015. Whedon also co-created "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." In the movie, the Project LiveWire is ridden by Black Widow, played by Scarlett Johansson. Bernacchi says Harley-Davidson will run a promotion around the film, details of which have not been finalized.   "The second Avengers film is a cataclysmic moment because of the excitement and success of the first [film]. For both 750 Street and Project LiveWire it will be a 'holy bleep' moment. Version one was the third top-grossing film of all time, so for Street and LiveWire to be part of it will be exciting."  As for S.O.A., Bernacchi said Kurt Sutter, creator of the FX show (and a rider), "reached out to us and pitched the idea. It was an easy ask for us. The main cast, the sustaining characters all ride." Through the past three or four seasons of the show, Harley has run a promotion driving people online by offering limited-collection "while supplies last" Harley S.O.A. stickers. "They come and do lots more browsing than just get the sticker. This year, it crashed our server with 40,000 people asking for stickers in a 24-hour frame, just from a post on the S.O.A. Facebook page."   And Harley will return to the Terminator franchise for the next installment, "Terminator: Genisys," which will feature the Fat Boy nameplate. "It's cool because they reached out to us," says Bernacchi.  Harley is currently promoting the LiveWire via a road show called "The Project LiveWire Experience" comprising a fleet of 33 Project LiveWire bikes in two trucks criss-crossing the country giving riders a chance to throw a leg over the bikes and ride them. The point of the program is to get rider impressions to see if it's doable, drive social buzz, and promote the brand as future oriented.

According to a new study from the Newspaper Association of America, conducted by ComScore, the audience engaged with newspaper digital content reached a new peak in August 2014, rising 18% to 164 million unique visitors (adults 18+) from 139 million in August 2013. That audience level was 25 million larger than a year ago. Newspaper Digital Audience (Millions of Unique Visitors 18+; August 2013 - August 2014) 2013Visitors (MM)    Aug 139    Sep 141    Oct 142    Nov 148    Dec 147 2014    Jan 146    Feb 145    Mar 161    Apr 155    May 153    Jun 155    Jul 157    Aug 164 Source: NAA/ComScore, October 2014 Additional data from the study also revealed that:

• 80% of U.S. adults who were online in August accessed newspaper digital content, also a new peak.
• Over the past year, young women (ages 18-24) were the fastest-growing segment of the newspaper digital audience, rising 38%.
• 92% of women ages 25-34 read newspaper digital content, the greatest reach among any age or gender.
• Those who use only mobile devices, smartphones or tablets, to access newspaper digital media now exceed those who use only desktop/laptop computers and those who used both kinds of machines during the month.