Year: 2013

Next time you read a post by your favorite blogger on your favorite website, watch out. It may be well-disguised advertising you’re reading, according to a September 6 Advertising Age report. Faced with low readership of, and response to, online display ads, advertisers have taken more and more to sponsored content. Sponsored posts are something…

Coca-Cola hasn’t learned from Budweiser’s experience. If they had, they wouldn’t have hired Translation Advertising, whom A-B InBev shoved aside as Bud Light’s lead advertising agency three months ago, to handle Sprite. “I can confirm that they are currently on point for some new work but don’t have any details I can share at this…

The purpose of advertising is to communicate with your potential or actual customers, but national brands are taking to Twitter to talk to themselves – or, as an August 30 Advertising Age report put it more grammatically, “they’re also increasingly talking to each other.” Some of this tweeting is not only incestuous, but also inane,…

Move over, MSNBC, you’re no longer the sick man of cable television news. According to ratings reported August 27, Al Jazeera America now holds that dubious distinction. MSNBC down badly… Of course, in view of how badly MSNBC’s done compared to a year ago, that’s small consolation. Some primetime shows, TVNewser reports, lost as much…

When Verizon, the nation’s second-largest advertiser ($1.43 billion), runs ads, Americans everywhere know and understand what they’re selling. But the more the nation’s third-largest advertiser – Obamacare ($1+ billion) – advertises, the less their key audiences seem to know or understand about the product. “[S]omehow, the public is even less informed about it than before,”…

When the new Al Jazeera America cable channel went live, CEO Ehab Al Shihabi said he didn’t want to clutter up its news content with advertising. Looks like he’s getting his wish, and then some. “In its first days on the air, Al Jazeera America’s short commercial window has been dominated by promotions for the…

In a Minnesota campaign scheduled to launch Monday, August 26, a Paul Bunyan statue water skis into one tree, sleds into another, chops his own leg with an axe and gets attacked by angry woodpeckers. But that’s nothing compared to the hits it’s already taking. Critics are complaining about its cost, its strategy, its execution,…

Robots don’t wear clothes, eat food, drink beer, color their hair or use any other consumer products. Yet, according to an August 9 Advertising Age report, online advertisers may be wasting tens of millions of dollars a year to reach them. At 4:30 PM Wednesday, August 14, University of Wisconsin professor Paul Barford will tell…

Before you talk to a target audience of 50-plus-year-old adults, you’d better relearn how to talk to them, an August 5 MediaPost post (link unavailable) advises. This is particularly important because, as the Python Generation, they’re already a growing plurality, if not yet a majority, of American consumers. “Knowing the preferred terms when talking about…

There’s a technical term that graphic designers and art directors use to describe QR codes, Dr. Kevin Berisso, of Memphis University’s Department of Engineering Technology, said in a telephone interview. That term is: “Blech!” For scanners, not people QR codes were originally designed to be read by scanners, not human eyes, so function not only…