QVIews

We are starting to see some early reviews of Current TV, which does have advertising support from Sony and others. I’ve seen a couple of reviews (including the one below) and there seems to be some concern about content being in short supply and on-air personalities being a little slick, but the user-generated content itself…

On of the freshest, most stimulating perspectives on branding that I’ve seen in YEARS appears this month in CMO magazine. A guest perspective by Taddy Hall, the chief strategy officer at the Advertising Research Foundation, is full of insight and statistics and bitterly funny experience. And it’s beautifully written. He comes up with wonderful catch…

The Niketown in London will running the pictures of Londoners who’ve pledged to run in a big charity race. The pictures will appear on a TV in the window of their busy store. Visit the web site www.RunLondon.com for more information. This campaign represents a very good combination of community service, branding and customer recognition.

I’ve read the original WSJ story by Aaron Patrick and a couple of commentaries, but I don’t think many people are grasping the significance of econometrics to marketing. All my life as a marketing professional, I’ve been frustrated by our inability to ‘prove’ that advertising and marketing expenditures are effectively driving the business. By the…

CGM stands for consumer-generated media. No longer due publishers and media institutions hold a monopoly on the news. And now the CEO of one of the most powerful interactive advertising agencies asks the question…should we be sponsors as well as advertisers? ClickZ: The CGM Revolution by Mark Kingdon Current [TV] is intriguing because it aggregates…

David Baker, vice president of e-mail marketing and analytical solutions at Agency.com, has some good advice about the second most important part of your email communications–the subject line. Read the whole article for a sound approach to planning and testing subject lines. MediaPost EMail Insider Newsletter: Now Read This. The biggest mistake I see in…

The link below is to one of the leading blogs on innovation, by Dave Pollard. In this posting he refers to a new book, Becoming a Tiger: How Baby Animals Learn to Live in the Wild, by Susan McCarthy. The animal trainer mentioned in the excerpt is Karen Pryor, who finds that otters are too…

I have never found computer cookies threatening because most companies don’t even use the information they collect. But here’s the first cogent explanation I’ve seen as to why we ought to let advertisers put cookies on our computers. I believe we’ll get to the point where some companies are ‘accredited’ and most users will trust…

In her Economic Scene column at the New York Times, Virginia Postel presents a fascinating issue about consumer behavior which I think about, but haven’t correctly incorporated into my frame of consumer behavior. When we present an attractive offer to our target audience, do we really stop and think hard about how accepting it will…

I thought that trade shows were struggling for profits as much as magazines, but apparently not at VNU. This development may reflect the fact that trade shows are almost a multichannel operation, with programs to distribute and email announcements, etc. Mandese’s article also has some fine insight on VNU’s media research division, which includes AC…