Smokers will still find Winston and Doral cigarettes on store shelves across the country. They just won't be seeing them much anywhere else. As part of a huge effort to cut costs that includes the layoffs of 2,600 workers, R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Holdings said yesterday that it would jettison advertising and promotion efforts for the once-popular brands.
Audience fragmentation is among the most significant challenges faced by the advertising industry, according to a just released American Advertising Federation survey of advertising leaders. Four out of five of those polled, or 80 percent, claim increasing audience fragmentation represents a significant change within the ad industry and 77 percent believe this fragmentation will continue to exert significant impact in the future.
"The air is thick with the smell of doughnuts. Every breath is a sugar-rush. An extra five pounds. A clogged artery. Although Krispy Kreme is only a short walk away from where I’m standing, I will not be tempted by the warm and inviting scent of sugar-slick lard. I will not be distracted. I came here to meet Chewbacca." Chris Haire of MetroBEAT searches for a Wookie, but he finds more: a man who fights flying snakes, a room full of Kit Culkins and the long lost Star Wars Holiday Special.
So says Chicago Reader Publisher and COO Jane Levine (pictured), who admits that Tribune Publishing's new youth-oriented daily tabloid has made it more difficult to reach Tribune clients who don't advertise in the Reader. "It's just easier for them and way cheaper" to add RedEye to their Tribune media spend, Levine tells Media Daily News. "These papers are going after, and I don't think very successfully, an age," Levine says. "They want 18 to 34, period, young for young's sake. What the reader of our paper is and always has been is more of psychographic and a lifestyle."
Willamette Week's John Schrag looks at the 1988 Neo-Nazi hate murder that changed Portland's self-image forever. "A trio of our own young men -- including a Grant High homecoming king, for God's sake -- was accused of standing at the corner of Southeast 31st and Pine and clubbing a man to death, simply because of his skin color," he writes.
Borders Group has named Crispin Porter & Bogusky, Los Angeles, its agency for an estimated $15 million creative and media planning and buying account.
