ËœPop-up at your own peril," warns a paper released this week by English consultancy Bunnyfoot Universality. The findings, which come a week after MSN announced it was banning the dreaded pop-up ads from its network, note that 60% of people tested believe the ads could make them mistrust the brand being advertised. To make matters worse, the study found that 50% of users closed the ads before they fully opened and only 2% saw the name of the brand being advertised. Said Rob Stevens, director-business behavior at Bunnyfoot: Brands are undoubtedly committing commercial suicide by insisting on pop-ups. The effect of such techniques goes way beyond simply annoying the user, they frustrate, they impose and they engender mistrust.

Continue ReadingPop-Up Ads = Brand Suicide

In its 2003 report, "Online Dayparting: Claiming the Day, Seizing the Night," media research firm Minnesota Opinion Research Inc. discovered significant shifts in media consumption habits among online users of newspaper sites. Peak news reading time is 8 a.m. to 11 a.m. As the day goes on, mainly between 2 p.m. and 6 p.m., interest in the news genre dissipates, while interest in entertainment and event resources picks up the slack. At night, consumers switch gears again to concentrate on jobs, cars, homes, and shopping content.

Continue ReadingDayparted Content Lures Readers Throughout the Day

An important new study based on a rarely done, but highly regarded form of media research - direct observation of media consumers - is raising new doubts about the veracity of conventional forms of audience measurement, and is providing new ammunition for proponents of new methods, especially Aribtron's portable people meters. The study, which was released Wednesday by Ball State University's Center For Media Design, also suggests planners and buyers may be grossly misallocating advertising budgets across the media mix based on actual media consumption patterns.

Continue ReadingStudy: Consumer Media Usage Higher Than Traditional Research Indicates

The fifth alternative newsweekly founded in the U.S. began as the Orange Pennysaver in 1969 and took its present name the next year in recognition of the end of old established times and the birth of a new counterculture era. The paper risked being shut down in 1984 but was rescued when the current publisher, a Syracuse-area businessman named Art Zimmer, bought it in part as a vehicle to publish his skiing column. The paper celebrates its anniversary with an airy new design and an overview of the paper's history.

Continue ReadingSyracuse New Times Celebrates 35th Anniversary with Redesign
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Meat-eating reporter Philip Dawdy visits a dairy farm and slaughterhouse to see if they resemble what he saw in videos made by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. The horrors don't materialize. Instead, he finds well-cared-for cows that meet their deaths calmly, in less than a second. While he gives PETA credit for advocating humane treatment of animals, he also chides vegans and vegetarians for their social isolation, moral certitude and unappetizing meals.

Continue ReadingCarnivore Thanks Vegetarians for Helping Him Eat More Ethically

Chairman Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. tells a journalism school audience his company has no intention of publishing any youth or commuter papers like the Chicago Tribune's Red Eye. Sulzberger considers such papers "condescending" and degrading to the readership, Mark Fitzgerald reports in Editor & Publisher. Sulzberger says the Times doesn't want to "become less than we are to reach an audience whose needs we wouldn't do a good job of meeting."

Continue ReadingNew York Times Won’t Court Short-Attention-Span Readers

The Media Credit Association (MCA), a little-known annex of the Magazine Publishers of America that provides credit information and services to magazine publishers to help them collect payments due from ad agencies, has been spun off from the magazine trade group and is aggressively pursuing a broader agenda that would make it a clearinghouse for advertising accounts receivable data--including the media payment, delinquency, and default histories of ad agencies--for all the major media.

Continue ReadingMag Unit to Launch Agency Credit Clearinghouse
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The media were on campus when University of Colorado Young Republicans held an "Affirmative Action Bake Sale," basing the price of goodies on the buyers' race. "Going to court and being outrageous and being silly is something that liberals have had a monopoly on for years," Brad Jones, the group's chairman, charges. Jared Jacang Maher analyzes the students' rhetorical brain twisters for Boulder Weekly, noting that while they criticize what they call the left's "culture of blame and oppression," they are fashioning themselves as the new victims.

Continue ReadingYoung Conservatives Steal Tactics from the Left