The Federal Trade Commission wants the Federal Drug Administration to drop its requirements that pharmaceutical print ads run detailed drug side-effects listings. Instead, it wants drug companies to be allowed to use the same kind of "brief summary" risk warnings in print ads that are now used in broadcast commercials.
Online shopping is expected to grow faster this holiday season than it has since the peak of the Internet frenzy in 2000, even as some analysts predict moderate growth in retail sales over all. And much of the growth is being driven by search engines like Google and other sites like Amazon and the online marketplace eBay, which are sending shoppers to tens of thousands of online stores, many of them small, independent operations.
Time Out Chicago will debut next September, entering an already crowded field of publications with extensive entertainment listings in that city, David Carr reports for The New York Times. Distribution of the weekly magazine will be through mailed subscriptions and newsstand sales. “They have been successful in a number of markets, but I don’t think they have ever come into a market that does listings as well as we do,” Jane Levine, publisher of the Chicago Reader, told Carr. Time Out Group also publishes Time Out New York and Time Out London.
To attract young readers, media companies are publishing free newspapers that capsulize the news and emphasize jazzy graphics. New York Times reporter Jacques Steinberg describes what research studies say young readers want and how new papers like Quick, published by Belo Corporation in Dallas, and the 5 Minute Herald, published by Knight-Ridder in Miami, seek to address their needs and capture advertising dollars.
New Times reveals its exclusive story claiming that antiglobalization anarchists planned to infiltrate the Republican Governors Association meeting in Boca Raton, Fla., was a ruse. Supposed author Greg O’Shube himself was a hoax; the name is an anagram for George Bush. O’Shube’s surrogate even created a Web site for the invented group, Anarchists for a Better State. “It’d be easy to say this story is about some bigger issue, like the fact that reporters all too often base stories on e-mails and websites, with little actual reporting…. But, hell, what it really was about was simply pulling one over on smarty-pants scribes and TV reporters,” O’Shube writes.
Speaking at the Measuring Media in the Future conference organised by the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising on Tuesday, Professor John Naughton said: "The ball game is over. We're moving from an economic system dominated by push media and moving to a completely different world which is a pull world - where consumers are empowered by digital technology and only get what they want."
That consumers shape markets is a truism, but their influence is probably understated and certainly not fully understood. Eric von Hippel, a professor at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, argues that a huge swath of innovation can be traced to elite consumers whom he calls lead users. These imaginative and technically adept consumers spot a need and invent a solution, often changing whole industries, from sports to software.
The question haunting Madison Avenue these days is, to paraphrase Sigmund Freud, "What do consumers want?" As changes in demographics and lifestyles accelerate, consumer behavior is becoming increasingly difficult to predict. More people are surfing the Web, fewer are watching the tube. And a many are becoming more skeptical toward advertising in general. As a result, advertising agencies are scrambling to understand and predict consumer behavior, the better to serve their marketer clients. The goal is to identify and forecast trends and patterns before they enter the mainstream and become obvious.
