For years, even in the face of media unbundling, the advertising industry has been selling the notion of the one-stop-shop integrated approach to handling a client's advertising business. However, a new study out by Ballester Consulting states 81% of advertisers ackowledge their agency's integrated serices but prefer to unbundle their business to best of breed experts.
Also, "only" 43% of those surveyed felt an agency's integrated services are "very important". [via Ad Age]
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Will Leitch, managing editor of Black Table interviews Maer Roshan, publisher of the new Radar Magazine. Roshan discusses the explosion of publicity surrounding the magazine's launch, his editorial approach, where Tina went wrong with 'Talk', his readers, and most importantly, that Elizabeth Spiers (I now know that's "spy-ers", not "speers" as in Britney...sorry I had it wrong, Elizabeth) of Gawker will become a regular contributor. Now, that alone is worth reading every issue of Radar! Excerpt:
Black Table: You were recently in Milan, "trolling for advertisers," as you said. Are you still fundraising? Who you going after? Do you have a magic number of cash you're trying to raise? We've heard Harvey Weinstein is an investor. Is that true? If it is, dude, what's with his skin?
Maer Roshan: I trolled pretty successfully, I guess. We came home with lots of new advertisers, and we're continuing to make steady progress on fundraising as well. In our first round we raised more than $1.5 million, at a time when squeezing money out of investors was as difficult as finding a three-syllable word in Lucky. We estimate that we'll need $10 million or so to take the magazine to profitability. It certainly won't be easy, but our launch issue was very successful, and the economy seems finally to be going our way, and there are lots of smart people helping out and lots of interest from intriguing quarters, so I'm feeling pretty confident. But who is this Harvey you speak of?
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Under pressure to survive after emerging from bankruptcy, ReplayTV has decided to bow to the wims of big media. In their latest version of the personal video recorder, the ad skipping and send a program to a friend features will be removed.
But, will they really be removed or just "turned off" and how long before a hack is circulating around the web that will again enable the ad skipping function as there now is for TiVo? [via NYT (sub req)]
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No, this isn't the industry walking on eggshells. That's not possible. Advertising is too bold for that. It plows its way on to any open space that has any possibility of being seen by consumer. Now eggs are an advertising medium. I don't know when this company was founded but they will place your ad campaign right on an eggshell for you.
Just think, you can reach the bleary eyed consumer early in the morning with your commercial message. Perfect place for an orange juice company if you ask me.
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