Studies released yesterday by America Online and BURST! Media signal strong e-commerce sales this holiday season. AOL found that consumers who research and/or shop online intend to do 53 percent of their holiday shopping online, while BURST! reported that 57.6 percent of consumers surveyed online with a household income of $75,000 or more plan to do more than half of their shopping online.

Continue ReadingStrong Online Sales Predicted for Holidays

Nader-supporting alt-weekly readers living in 10 swing states will see full-page ads next week urging them to vote Kerry in 2004. The ads promote a statement by more than 70 former Nader supporters -- including Noam Chomsky, Ben Cohen and Susan Sarandon -- who endorse voting for Kerry in states where he's running neck and neck with Bush. Colorado Springs Independent publisher John Weiss, who organized the campaign, says, "Our goal is to reach voters who have been almost entirely neglected in this campaign: swing voters on the left."

Continue ReadingAlt-Weekly Ad Urges Readers to Ditch Nader for Kerry

New figures from the Yankee Group claim the U.S. video games industry reaches more than 108 million gamers 13 years of age and older, who will have spent $7.4 billion by the end of the year. Advertisers have long wanted to penetrate the gaming market, but haven't yet been able to in any meaningful way. Despite the video games industry's size, advertisers only spent a meager $79 million on placing ads in games last year--a number the market research firm anticipates will grow to $260 million by 2008, according to the Yankee Group report.

Continue ReadingReport: Advertisers Will Triple Spending on Video Game Ads by 2008

For years Madison Avenue's leading thinkers have pondered the same fundamental question: How much of their advertising actually works? In what is likely the grandest post-buy analysis of all time, the Advertising Research Foundation this week will release findings of a review of more than a dozen of the most sophisticated cross-media case studies ever conducted. Its conclusion: About $50 billion in U.S. ad spending is "wasted." That figure equates to about 18.8 percent of the $266 billion in U.S. ad spending estimated by Universal McCann for 2004, but the precise number isn't as important as the fact that the ad industry now claims to have identified some of its biggest and most obvious areas of waste.

Continue ReadingIndustry Identifies $50 Billion in Ad Waste

Advertising sales at alt-weeklies varied from region to region during the first half of 2004, in large part following the path of the spotty economic recovery. Happily, the second quarter of the year was an improvement over the first, both for national sales overall and for local sales at selected alt-weeklies. Freelance writer John Ferri reports for AAN News on the state of the business.

Continue ReadingSome Alt-Weeklies See Improvement in Second Quarter

Pittsburgh Catholic apparently believes that its hometown alt-weekly should be wrapped in a brown bag and handed out from behind the counter. "We need to ensure that our children are protected from unhealthy and exploitative images of sexuality," says a representative of the local diocese who thinks it's "unconscionable" that Pittsburgh City Paper is openly distributed in public. “I’m not running a day care center,” City Paper editor Andy Newman tells the paper. “I have a newspaper, and I feel like other people are responsible for supervising their own children.”

Continue ReadingCatholic Paper Questions Alt-Weekly’s Availability to Children

The Louisville, Kentucky, weekly was among four publications banned from Kroger, three of them for having sexually suggestive content (in LEO's case, apparently, its adult ads). But what about the sexual content of Cosmopolitan, which is still on the racks, asks executive editor and founder John Yarmuth. He argues that the selective banning constitutes censorship. In an accompanying article, Tom Peterson interviews public relations professionals about Kroger's strategy.

Continue ReadingLEO Responds to Being Removed from Kroger