According to Jon Fine at BusinessWeek, "Google is rolling out its most ambitious print advertising initiative yet, an online marketplace that will let advertisers place bids on space in more than 50 major newspapers across the U.S." Nat Ives at Ad Age thinks it might work: With the participation of major papers from The New York Times to Gannett Co. titles, Google seems to have convinced publishers that the system …
Newspaper 2.0
Wired tells of organizational upheaval at Gannett, the publisher of USA Today as well as 90 other American daily newspapers with combined daily paid circulation of approximately 7.3 million. According to internal documents provided to Wired News and interviews with key executives, Gannett will begin crowdsourcing many of its newsgathering functions. Starting Friday, Gannett newsrooms were rechristened "information …
Develop Creative Specifically For The Web (Not TV That Runs Online)
Business Week looks at Levi's new video-driven web campaign. For decades, the medium has helped define the advertising message. Now marketers such as Levi Strauss are experimenting with the fledgling tableau of the Internet and coming up with new kinds of advertising. They're discovering that developing video campaigns for the Web is an entirely different craft. The privately held jeans company just completed a …
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North Korea Ain’t Trying To Hear That
This is a picture from space of a country that does not allow its citizens to go online. A glimpse into a black hole, courtesy of The New York Times: [T]he stark realities of life in North Korea were perhaps most evident in a simple satellite image over the shoulder of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld during an Oct. 11 briefing. The image showed the two Koreas — North and South — photographed at night. The South …
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Why It’s Not Rocky VI
The new Rocky movie is called "Rocky Balboa," not Rocky VI, for a reason. Of course, the Rocky character has been resurrected so many times now that the story is absurd, but the marketing behind it is interesting, if only as another example (as if one were needed) of how everything we consume is elaborately constructed to maximize profit. The New York Times explains how best to name sequels: Movie audiences prefer …
Righteous Indignation Is A Tough Sell
Keith Olbermann is a good writer and he has good writers around him. I'm a fan of his show Countdown and I agree with most of the things he says, even now in his hyperbole-filled rant phase. Yet, as a media professional I bristle at his delivery, of late. For instance, I agree with the following sentiment, but I question the "You, sir" delivery: We have a long and painful history of ignoring the prophecy attributed …
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BusinessWeek Doesn’t Care How You Consume It
MarketingVox reports that BusinessWeek has gone through a quiet revolution from print to media-neutral information source. Some 46 percent of the content on the website, in terms of word count, is exclusive to the site so far this year, compared with 33 percent in 2004. In August, BusinessWeek.com reached more than 7.1 million unique users and served nearly 50 million pageviews, and online advertising accounts for 13 …
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“China’s Google” Picks Up MTV Programming
The New York Times says China is about to get its MTV. Viacom, one of the world’s biggest media companies, said today that it had struck a deal to provide television and music video content to Baidu, one of China’s biggest and fastest-growing internet companies. Baidu.com, one of the world’s most trafficked web sites, is the biggest effort so far to introduce American television and entertainment programming into …
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