The fact that a T-Mobile ad has attracted more views on YouTube than Barack Obama's historic inauguration speech may be viewed by some as a dispiriting sign of the times. The clip of commuters breaking into a dance routine at London's Liverpool Street station is, at the time of writing, the 57th most- viewed YouTube clip of all time. Its popularity ...

Diageo has increased the amount of advertising budget spent on the online promotion of its Smirnoff vodka. This year, a fifth of its advertising spend will be on digital media - double the percentage that the company as a whole spent on the same in 2008. It is hoped that this will increase the level of interaction between consumers and the ...

There's still nothing like the real thing. Or so say food marketers looking to stand out in the mass-produced herd. What really is "real" could eventually be for the government to determine. In the meantime, real people drink Caribou, real dogs eat Alpo, real sandwiches have Hellmann's and Canada Dry ginger ale is made with real ginger. Don't bother taking notes, ...

Philanthropic outfits increasingly are adopting PR programs to achieve their goals. Here's why some old PR objections are no longer valid. In the veiled world of private philanthropy, the practice of public relations is eschewed by many foundation leaders. Some believe that proactive media outreach is tantamount to inviting the Internal Revenue Service in for an audit, while others feel that ...

By the time you read this, James Cameron's "Avatar" could very well have become the fifth movie in history to gross more than $1 billion worldwide at the box office, helped along by pricey tickets that brought in a projected $325 million domestically after only three weekends in theaters. So how did 20th Century Fox pull off what could be its ...

When the New York Jets announced last week that they would not sell alcohol at their Jan. 3 Sunday night game, thinly advertised Majorska Vodka saw an opening for a major PR coup. The company put out a press release claiming that the lack of alcohol sales at the stadium would cost it $100,000 in revenue due to lost "tailgate parties," ...

Genius.com today announced the world's first URL shortener specifically designed to track both structured marketing campaigns and ad hoc social media "conversations." The easy-to-use Genius URL shortener ("GURL(TM)" for short) enables any member of a Genius customer organization to include trackable links in their Twitter, Facebook, blogs, or other social media posts. With GURLs, organizations can easily view the impact of ...

Argument: Umbrella branding is a case of corporate egos getting too big. Not everyone agrees that umbrella branding is the way to go. Some suggest that new brands need to take their time to break into the market rather than simply rely on their parent brand's name to justify their existence. They claim that umbrella branding means weak variants limp on ...

Pay before you stay, and save. That has been the deal with online travel sites and discount tour operators. Now, an increasing number of hotels are slashing room rates if you ante up in full in advance and forego a refund if you don't show up. Last year, Fairmont hotels began offering savings up up to 30% to those who book ...

Wanna know what consumers are feelin' in 2010? If you answered, "Um, DUH!"- watch this video from Trend Hunter. With mentions of "Crowd-Sourced Campaigns," "Peacocking," and "Next Besting" on the list, 2010 sounds like a real hoot. Watch and learn! More Crowd-Sourced Campaigns! Doritos Crash the Super Bowl Selects SIX Finalists! Golden Grahams Launches FML Job Search Ad Campaign Monster.com’s Fiddling ...

Using data and observations gleaned from recent consulting projects and a extensive industry-watching, Judy Franks, founder and president of The Marketing Democracy compiled the following top 10 trends to help integrated marketers navigate the choppy waters she expects to see in 2010. The top 10 trends for integrated marketers: 1. Less will get done until we learn to do more with ...

Recently, marketers have spent much time and money trying to reach the ever-populous Hispanic/Latino community. But not to be overlooked is another group -- African Americans, particularly African American-led businesses. According to the US Census, between 1997 and 2002 revenues generated by African American-owned businesses rose 25 percent to $88.8 billion. In the same period, the number of such businesses grew ...

Marketers are pushing the boundaries on data collection, but how far will regulators and the public let it go? The latest frontier for marketers is taking offline data such as income, credit rating, home value, savings, past purchases, number of children living at home and other data, and merging that with the blooming online data stream. The offline data - including ...

Green marketing has become ubiquitous in our post-"Inconvenient Truth" world, and consumers aren't always buying it. Some consumers simply don't embrace the "the hippie tree-hugger thing"; these consumers aren't the ones we're talking about here - they may never change their high-fructose corn syrupy ways. No, we're talking about the 20% to 30% of Americans who are health- and wellness-minded and ...

At a Target store, the visual sizzle usually comes from the photos of all the fabulous-looking people wearing fabulous clothes and doing fabulous things. Of late, though, there's an entirely new vibe—supersize signs screaming dirt-cheap prices. Past the cashiers is something else unmistakably novel: a sleek Euro-style mart carrying fresh cuts of sirloin, cheery piles of fruit, and hormone-free dairy. The ...

Of late, marketing has been over-identified with marketing communications, to its detriment. Great marketing operations find opportunities and develop and launch successful solutions, and if properly used, are the company's growth engine. I recently interviewed Philip Kotler, the well-known marketing guru at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, about the value of marketing in today's turbulent environment. Who better to ...

A jack-of-all-trades is a master of none. Entrepreneurs who see a direct correlation between the size of a target market and the probability of success miss the opportunity to serve healthy niche markets. Niche marketing not only provides startups with an opportunity to launch the business successfully, but can also help them grow into major players in a larger market. Healthy, ...

Good marketers see the value of developing a presence where their audience already gathers, whether online or at the shopping mall. Social media is all about sparking conversation, not just online, but offline too. Done well, social media draws us in, delights us, and even offers glimpses of the future. These dynamics overlap into the real world, as people go about ...

Companies that have strong performance-driven cultures support the classic adage that "You can't manage (or improve) what you can't measure." We recently interviewed 400 companies and found the important corollary: Measurement alone will not lead to results. Over the last decade, the science of marketing has grown in importance as marketing departments have come under increasing pressure to defend budgets and ...

This article first appeared on Monster. To the uninitiated, blogs, podcasts and wikis may not sound like topics suitable for boardroom discussions, yet that’s just what these new media forms are becoming as they start to shake things up in the business world. Think of it as Business 2.0, where media with online roots are augmenting traditional forms of communication and ...