For brands looking to extend their awareness to the ad-averse generation, Adland points us to user bars, graphic images which people can add to their forum signature or other online presence. User bars, which have been around for some time and are available all over the place, and are grouped into categories such as hobbies, cars, games, TV, movies, sports and, yes, brands. Adidas, Coke, Converse, Corona, Nokia, Nike, Snickers, Sony, Playboy, Pepsi, Reebok, and yes, cigarette makes such as lucky Strike and Marlboro since its about the last place they can advertise. Many users create their own user bars along with those that have been created by forum owners. User bars are a great way to reinforce a brand to those who are forum addicted and advertising averse.
According to American Demographics Founder Peter Francese, Americans out pace the rest of the world, by far, in weekly spending on the consumption of goods. He says Americans, each week, spend more than the gross domestic product of Finland. Francese wonders just how necessary it is for many Americans to "need two homes, three vehicles and four TVs" but he's not complaining acknowledging that world-beating consumption keeps the ad industry afloat. In fact, if consumer spending, over the past ten years, rose at a rate equal to the increase of households (14 percent) rather than 23 percent, people would have spent $640 billion less altering the current American economy orders of considerable magnitude.
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Mobile entertainment firm Moderati has released its year-end wrap-up of ringtones including an analysis of regional preferences. Without surprise, hip-hop dominated top spots on the list again this year, with 60 percent of the songs from hip-hop artists.
Video game themes (Super Mario Brothers) and evergreen movie themes (Halloween) ranked high as well, with five top finishes. Cracking the top 20, a bit out of left field, was "Scotty Doesn't Know" by Lustra, a song from the 2004 movie Eurotrip.
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The wafting odor of the elder generation is diffusing online at an increasing rate according to a report from BURST! Media featured on eMarketer. The report says online users over the age of 54 are spending more time on the Internet and less time with offline media sources. While the over 54 crowd are still big consumers of offline media such as newspapers, many are finding valuable information online they can't find in traditional offline media. eMarketer has all the smelly details.
It happens to the best us us. We come up with a great idea. Get all high and mighty about how we're not going to be like everyone else. We promise not to sink into the gutter and use all the tired, old tricks to attract attention. We vow to be virtuous and laud ideals and intellectualism over insipidness. Then it happens. No one watches us. No one's heard of us. Our primary competitor towers over us and we are lost in a sea of television stupidity. Do we continue to stay the course? Do we try to beat them? No, sadly, we throw in the towel and join them.
After playing second fiddle to Lifetime for so long, Oxygen just can't stand it any longer and is pulling out the trump card of last resort: sex. Rather than rise above the misty-eyed success of Lifetime with higher brow offerings, Oxygen network has joined the titillation crowd with offering like "Talk Sex With Sue Johnson" and its new series, "Campus Ladies," a show that will somehow make the scenario of middle-aged, suburban women going back to college and frolicing with undergrad hotties funny.
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While some marketers would certainly explode with glee if every human being on the planet wore the brand's logo somewhere on their body but we just can't understand why any sane human would affix logoed fingernails to their fingers. Of course, we can't understand headvertising, assvertsing, babyvertising, voicevertising, cleavagevertising, bellyvertising or boobvertising either.
OK, wait a minute. Of course we can understand it all. Sorry. It must be this slower than death holiday news week rotting our brain. There's always plenty of money-hungry fools around to add to this list of marketing stunts. That and the fact the entire ad industry is in the middle of some sort of knee jerk reaction to all the "death of the :30/traditional advertising" woe that's been spinning around since marketers woke up and realized, oops, there's these ad skipping things called DVRs, iPods, pop up blockers, bit torrent TV, pirate radio and file sharing which they wish had never existed. Now advertising is...um...hard work when it was just supposed to be all about the parties and the three martini lunches.
How we got from someone's logoed fingernails to martinis we do not know but it passed some time on a slow Friday at the end of a slow holiday week. See you next year.
Nothing cool lasts for very long in this world. Now that millions have made MySpace their home for just about everything, many worried the acquisition by News Corp would changed things. Not so promised MySpace founders but alas they have. Many MySpace members link to videos on YouTube and, apparently, News Corp-owned MySpace doesn't like the practice. According to the Blog Herald, MySpace has been deleting any and all reference to YouTube from profiles. There's even a MySpace group fighting the censorship.
MySpace came out of nowhere as the single most popular place to go for...well...anything. It can disappear just as quickly and be replaced by another.
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