Adblog

If you were the chief marketing officer of the number-three brand in an overcrowded and highly competitive category, with a large and loyal band of consumers, what would be at the top of your to-do list? Maybe I’m going out on a limb here, but I don’t think changing your brand name and identity would…

April may be the cruelest month, but this October hasn’t been so hot for the environmentalist movement, particularly its global warming division. Green packaging puts Sun Chips sales in the red First, after going on television for the first time ever to advertise new, 100% biodegradable packaging – the product of years’ and millions of…

In the wake of CNN’s ratings implosion, MSNBC is celebrating its rise by default to a distant second place in cable news by launching a new ad campaign this week. “You will see it on-air [sic], in promotions and in advertisements,” MSNBC president Phil Griffin told TV Newser. And according to other industry sources, they’re…

Back in the 1960s, the standard length of a television commercial was 60 seconds. Oh, you could buy shorter lengths, like :30s, but it didn’t pay to. While a 30-second spot was half as long as a minute, the air time cost 75% as much to buy. The same holds true for radio air time…

The official name for the demographic cohort born roughly between 1945 and 1957 is the Baby Boomers, but perhaps a better description would be the Python Generation. Because from a demographic and particularly a marketing standpoint their progress through America’s culture and economy resembles nothing more closely than the progress of a pig, dog or…

In case you missed the item in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, CarMax, based in Goochland County, just hired New York agency Amalgamated to do its creative. That’s interesting, but what’s more interesting is something an “expert” source was quoted as saying about Amalgamated’s approach. According to the article, Peyton Rowe, who teaches advertising at the VCU…

Richmond’s back-to-school sales tax holiday weekend has come and gone, and Labor Day (which the start of school must come after, according to Virginia law) is still to come. So let’s take a look at what, if anything, the barrage of tax holiday advertising for back-to-school merchandise accomplished. (more…)

Although 76 of the 100 Leading National Advertisers (LNA) cut their spending for 2009, that doesn’t mean they did less advertising. A new, previously unheard-of, phenomenon called media deflation has helped many do more for less. One cause is that mass media are hemorrhaging audiences left and right. With newspapers, that’s old news, but as…

Some 80 years ago, when William Wrigley, Jr., was on a business trip on a DC-3, another passenger asked him why he spent so much on advertising when his chewing gum business was doing so well. “How fast are we flying?” asked Wrigley. “Oh, about 150-200 miles an hour,” said the passenger. “Then since we’re…

Kantar Media, a division of WPP, just finished compiling the 100 leading national advertisers’ (100 LNA) measured-media spending for 2009, Guess which medium got the lion’s share. If you said Internet advertising, you’d be wrong. The biggest, hottest new 21st Century advertising medium is… (more…)