All but two media, outdoor and spot radio, saw increases in spending, led as usual by Hispanic TV, which grew 19.3 percent (see chart below). Outdoor was down 1.6 percent and local radio was off 0.8 percent. Local magazines, cable and national newspapers followed Hispanic TV in the pace of their growth, at 11.9 percent, 8.9 percent and 8.8 percent.
Hoping to avoid a Christmas as blue as the past few, retailers and marketers are experimenting with ambitiously novel ways to woo consumers. Along with traditional trappings like Santa's workshops, decorated store windows and teddy bears as gifts with purchases, shoppers will see an assortment of unconventional campaigns, all intended to encourage the impulse to buy among those bored with or tired of holiday chestnuts (literal and figurative).
"Throughout the day I'd witnessed police provoke protesters," writes Celeste Fraser Delgado, who was reporting on the protests surrounding last week's free-trade meetings. "I'd seen young people cuffed and lined up along the street, but I thought they must have done something bad to be detained." Her perceptions quickly changed when she was handcuffed and jailed by Miami police who ignored her press credentials. Her crime: Doing "nothing but walking down the street."
Frustrated with the inadequacies in online- measurement data, Web publishers, media buyers and marketers want the two main providers of online data to improve their research methodologies, especially those used to analyze the highly sought after at-work audience.
While some analysts maintain that the downturn in the newspaper industry's classified advertising base is due primarily to sparsely populated help wanted sections, others believe at least part of the decline represents attrition for the print medium as more consumers migrate online.
Nat Hentoff (pictured) last week joined an august group that includes jazz greats like Miles Davis and Ella Fitzgerald, when he was awarded a Jazz Master Fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts. "No writer has been a greater friend to jazz than critic, historian, biographer and anecdotist Nat Hentoff," says the NEA. Hentoff's weekly column in the Voice, where he has written for over 30 years, has also made him one of the nation's most prominent defenders of civil liberties.
Nielsen Media Research, whose data shows a puzzling decline in younger males watching broadcast network television since the fall season began, offered a more detailed explanation yesterday for the shift in viewing habits that has vexed the networks, advertisers and agencies.
Investment bank U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray released its forecast for the industry yesterday, predicting 20 percent compounded growth for the next five years. For 2004, Piper Jaffray expects the online ad industry to grow 21 percent, from $6.7 billion to $8.1 billion. The forecast mirrors a prediction of 20 to 25 percent growth released a day earlier by Smith Barney.
