Arbitron recently used its Portable People Meter technology to measure podcast listenership. In mid-July, the measurement company encoded some podcasts from Clear Channel's Z100 which listeners using PPM-enabled headsets downloaded and played. Arbitron's Portable People Meter President Pierre Bouvard said, "Podcasting is a very different distribution system for traditional radio and the successful test of the PPM should further build confidence in how well it works with all types of audio programming. The state-of-the-art encoding system used in the PPM does a better job of identifying alternate distribution platforms and time-shifted audio content than any other approach to portable electronic audience measurement that we've seen." Inevitably, just as is now happening with television spots, podcast ads will be tagged and measured as well.
AdFreak reports the "marketers begging towns to change their name" trend, originated by then Half.com VP of marketing Mark Hughes is showing no signs of slowing. Like television and movie producers latching on to a past success rather than attempting original thought, the marketers over at Dish Network are offering free service to all residents of any town willing to change its name to Dish.
Japanese car maker Toyota had plans to shot a spot called, "Toyotaville" in the neighborhood of Cherry Hill Village in Canton, Michigan showing a Toyota parked in every driveway. That's not exactly the sort of thing you try to do in America's center of the automotive universe unless your an American car maker. Resident said "sorry, not in my backyard." The deal ended. One canton resident told the Canton Observer, "Maybe I'm just old-fashioned. I don't understand the excitement of Toyota in what is traditionally and what will hopefully continue to be Chrysler, Ford and GM country. Southeast Michigan, rightly or wrongly, was built on the automotive industry. I feel like there should be some loyalty to dance with the one that brought you."
Following a weekend overhaul to its search engine ad system, Yahoo has been having difficulty allowing marketers to make changes to their ad campaigns and, worse, some ad campaigns have stopped running. Yahoo search spokesperson Gaude Paez told MarketingVOX Wednesday evening that the upgrade caused "unexpected issues," and that their engineers were working around the clock to fix the problem.
MarketingVOX reports the problem seems to be affecting advertisers of all sizes and, when attempting to open an account Wednesday night, was presented with the error message shown in the image.
Here's a fun promotion by NightAgency for the upcoming, Diddy-hosted Video Music Awards airing Sunday, August 28:
"Diddy and Adrants invite you to the biggest party ever. The dress code must be respected! You must wear your finest gear. You must get your hair done! So, Adrants readers, please do not invite the rest of your friends like AdAge & Adweek, this invite is for you only. You have been selected. It's an honor to be part of history in the making. This will go down as the greatest party of all time! So please respect and adhere to all above said rules."
Part of the promotional website allows yo to create a customized invite, indicating who you'd like to invite as well as who not to invite, to send to your friends. All in good fun.
Asian expert Tian has taken Old Navy to task for their apparent lack of cultural knowledge in the creation of several t-shirts which butcher culture such as associating the Japanese rice wine sake with the Great Wall of China and describing a black t-shirt with images of Asian men in black masks with a Ninja star as a Karate t-shirt rather than, correctly, a Ninjutsu t-shirt. Seems America's great melting pot has forgotten the rest of the world has many varied, distinctive cultures that don't wish to be melted away by American marketing tricks. Tian does tell us Old Navy customer service reponded kindly and apologetically when the Sake t-shirt was brought to their attention writing, "It was not our intention to cause any offense. Please accept our apologies for any concern created by our product."
Perhaps forcing Nielsen to more quickly move its plans to measure commercial rather than programming, The PreTesting Company has is currently conducting a 2,500 Omaha home test of its MediaCheck Project Wannamaker (nice reference to the 50/50 statement), which measures ad viewership rather than program viewership, found most people tire of a campaign's commercials after just two weeks indicating overexposure and poor creative hurt TV campaigns the most. The study also found that DVR-equipped homes did not skip commercials any more than non-DVR (by changing channel, etc.) homes.
The company has plans to roll out a national, 50,000 home study and is is talks with cable operators to incorporate the measurement technology in set top boxes. Hello? Nielsen? Hello?
Dipping its feet into the viral advertising waters, with the help of AsaBailey and Saatchi New York, General Mills has created a "The Italian Job" movie spoof called "The Irish Job" which features a tiny leprechaun in a car racing away from perusers with a box of Lucky Charms in the seat next to him. The video has been seeded to 250,000 U.S. students and 20 somethings.
Not to be out news'd by Vogue's September ad page monstrosity, The New York Times Magazine announced today its upcoming fall issue of "T: Women's Fashion" has a total of 169 advertising pages – surpassing last year's debut issue, which had the largest number of ad pages since 1985 among any of its predecessor "Part 2-Women's Fashions of the Times" publications. "T: Women's Fashion" will be published on Sunday, August 28 and will feature actor Tilda Swinton on the cover.
To call attention to Upgrade 74, downstate Illinois' large road reconstruction project, Ross Creative + Strategy has created an online charades game, Upgrade 74 StayCool, which offers prizes to those who guess the correct movie title construction worker Jack Hammer is acting out. Prizes range from round trip tickets to Orlando to a large Papa John pizza each month for a year to tanning packages, free CDs and movie passes.
Having lived through the last 15 years of Boston's still unfinished Big Dig project, we can certainly identify with the need to portray the construction worker as a friendly, humorous character rather than one who conjures up images of the devil as you try to squeeze your way through a maze of detours on your way to work.
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