Carat Gets Bigger

Carat North America has aquired New York based Independent Media Services and will assume IMS clients MTV Networks, Oxygen, New York Post and the Boston Herald.
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Blacks and Whites Watching Same Shows

About three years ago, there was an uproar over the lack of television programming targeted to and starring black actors. That seems to taken a 180 of late. Initiative Media found that nine programs ranked in the top 20 among both Blacks and Whites. [via MediaLife]
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PVRs (TiVo) Won't Kill the :30

A few months ago, industry luminaries were up in arms about how TiVo might dramatically change the TV landscape even saying using a TiVo is tantamount to stealing TV. Well, they seem to have come to their senses.
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A Traffic Based Weblog Advertising System

You've all heard of ad servers that do the job of serving ads on websites. Weblogs pose and interesting challenge to that method of ad delivery. First off, much of a weblogs traffic goes to pages (posts) other than the home page. And not even to the top of the page the post is in but scrolled down to the actual post. This is due to the practice heavy practice of "deep linking" used in the weblog world. What good does ad advertisement do at the top of the page when most visitors are never going to see it because they have been "auto scrolled" down the page?

As the addition of an advertising component to Adrants is considered, this situation was clearly demonstrated on Adrants yesterday. Slate wrote an article about a post on Gawker that then linked to a post on Adrants about the PUMA Ad Sensation. Traffic to Adrants sky rocketed. Ten thousand visitors, in fact, yesterday and 3,000 so far today. Normal daily traffic is between 500-800 visitors a day. If Adrants had an ad program up and running that placed ads only at the top of the page, the advertiser, and Adrants, would have lost out big time on that bonus traffic. Worse, those ads would be counted as served impressions when, in fact, they would never be seen. Not a good ad strategy. What is needed is the ability to "embed" ads (graphic and/or text) dynamically within individual posts based on traffic level so that any ad is always "served" to the most highly viewed area of the site.

I'm sure technology exists to accomplish this but I bet it is far beyond the price point of most weblog operators. Sure, you could do it manually but that would be highly inefficient. Some sort of combination of server log info and ad serving technology would seem to do the trick. Does this exist? Has anyone heard of something like this? Please, do tell. Currently for blogs, there's BlogAds, Google AdWords and TextAds. None of which, if I understand their technology correctly, is designed to address this issue.

Another weblog specific issue that poses a problem to ad delivery is RSS (or Rich Site Summary) delivery of weblog posts. This technology allows weblog operators to send out each post, via a special RSS link, to a newsreader. A newsreader is a piece of software that is used to read these RSS link so the person does not have to continually visit the weblog to see if a new post/articles has been added. Just enter the RSS link into your newsreader and wait for the posts to roll in.

The advertising problem? Again, if no one actually goes to the actual weblog to read the article, any advertising on the page will never be seen. Just like the above mentioned "traffic based" ad delivery system, there needs to be a technology capable of "attaching" ads to RSS newsfeeds as they are sent out. Again, this could be done manually but it would be very inefficient. Perhaps the simple auto-attachment of a Javascript might do the trick.

Please feel free to add to this conversation in the Comment section below.

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The Application of Weblogs in B2B Marketing

A MarketingFix associate of mine, Rick Bruner, will be speaking at Jupiter/ClickZ's Business Weblog Strategies conference in Boston, June 9-10. Read his post about the event, his thoughts on weblogging in business, and details on the conference.

Weblogs are the new CRM.
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Understand Contextual Relavancy Prior to Approaching a Potential Advertising Partner

Found on Gawker:

-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Becce
Sent: Monday, April 14, 2003 3:23 PM
To: tips@gawker.com
Subject: link exchange

Hello.

I am working with Tony Perkins (Founder/Editor-in-Chief of the Red Herring) on the AlwaysOn Network (AO) - www.alwayson-network.com. We wanted to explore the possibility of having a link posted on the AO site for the same on yours. Please let me know how to pursue. Thanks.

Michael Becce
President
MRB Public Relations
Red Bank, NJ - New York, NY - San Jose, CA
www.mrb-pr.com

MRB is a Founding Partner of the AlwaysOn Network - www.alwayson-network.com. MRB was named "Top 100 Tech-Savvy Small Businesses" - Small Business Computing. At MRB, we don't just work with the press -- we work for the press. MRB has prepared stories in association with 20/20, Associated Press, Business Week, CNBC, CNN, Forbes, Fortune, Newsweek, PBS Specials, Time, The Today Show, Wall Street Journal and many others.

__________________________________________________
Dear Michael,

This is first time I've ever seen a blogger hire an actual PR firm to solicit links from other bloggers. I'm not saying it's definitively a bad practice, but it seems a bit like having your mom run around the playground, asking all the other kids to be your friend. "Little Tony may not be the brightest bulb in the chandelier," she says, "and even his father and I admit he's a pretty ugly kid, but he's such a nice little boy! There was that one time he started a magazine that hyped a bunch of his venture capital investments, but�oh, let's not talk about that! Whaddya say? Play with him for five bucks? No? Ten?"

But I'm open-minded. So I'll make you a deal: when Tony starts writing extensively about the Hilton sisters, Tina Brown, Lower East Side restaurants that haven't opened yet, Harvey Weinstein, the smoking ban, Williamsburg hipsters, Andr� Leon Talley, Radar, Pat Kingsley, Manhattan skyscrapers, OR Colin Farrell, I'll link to Always-On.

Best Regards,
Elizabeth Spiers

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Beer Advertising Shocker! Puppies Instead of Boobs

In a backlash from the mudwrestling jiggle-fest, Molson has a different approach: The Molson Man. A hunk for the ladies with an advertising twist. Sell the hunk to the ladies in Cosmo and sell the fact that the ladies are being sold to in men's magazines with this interesting copy:

"Hundreds of thousands of women. Pre-programmed for your convenience. As you read this, women across America are reading something very different: an advertisement scientifically formulated to enhance their perception of men who drink Molson."
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Major Online Publishers Offer Half-Page Ads

New York Times Digital and CBS MarketWatch have launched half page advertising units on their pages allowing a much larger and more eye catching creative pallet.

"One of the major items we hear from folks is that creative ad folks couldn't do enough with the current sizes," said NYTD VP of Sales Jason Krebs. "We felt that was a valid point the agencies were making. We created something not just bigger but better."

Time will tell if this move to larger ad units, representing the traditional offline 50/50 ad to edit ratio, will succeed. [via MediaPost]

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New "*MTV" Wireless Brand Launched by MTV and Virgin Mobile

MTV: Music Television and Virgin Mobile USA today announced the launch of *MTV ("Star-MTV"), a new wireless brand from MTV available exclusively to Virgin Mobile customers in the U.S., its territories and possessions, and Puerto Rico. MTV provides Virgin Mobile users with mobile "sneak peek" updates on their favorite programs and MTV.com games, breaking stories from MTV News, video voting, audio postcards from music and TV celebrities to send to friends, Wake-Up Calls, Rescue Rings and more.

In connection with the launch of *MTV, MTV will premiere "Video Clash," a new interactive series that mercilessly pits one video against another - from "Eminem vs. Christina," "The Strokes vs. Sum 41" to "Missy Elliott vs. Kelly Osbourne." Viewers vote for the videos they want to see in real-time through *MTV in their VirginXtras phone menu or by text messaging MTV from their Virgin Mobile phones. Viewers also can log on to MTV.com to vote. "Video Clash" delivers instant gratification when voting results are displayed in real-time on-air and the winning video is immediately played on MTV. "Video Clash" viewers are also able to suggest their own fantasy 'video battles' and submit personal messages that may be used on air through MTV.com. [via MediaPost]

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Latina Magazine Rides the Rising Tide of U.S. Born Hispanic Market

"That woman whose heritage is Mexican, but is U.S. born and living in Los Angeles, has much more in common with the U.S.-born woman of Puerto Rican heritage in New York, than she does with a woman born in Mexico," says Latini Magazine publisher David Kahn.

Get that? His statement reflects the fact that the increasing number of U.S. born Hispanics has become so large that they identify more with U.S. Hispanic culture then the culture of their heritage.

Latina Magazine has grown to a circulation of 300,000 and is on target to hit 350,000 next year. [via MediaPost]
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