Advertisers chided for ignoring Hispanic market

By Steve McClellan

Marketers received harsh criticism from Hispanic specialists Wednesday at the 8th Annual Hispanic Television Summit 2010, presented by B&C and Multichannel News, part of Advertising Week in New York.
  "CMOs are unbelievably illiterate about the Hispanic consumer," said Javier Palomarez, president and CEO of the United States Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. He said agencies and media companies would be "better served" to pitch company CEOs and CFOs their strategic marketing and communications ideas, given the "longer life span" of those executives in their roles.
  Even brands who play in the space received backhanded compliments. Take Levi's, for example. The iconic jeans maker kicked off its first Hispanic media campaign this week with a 10-episode brand-integration series on Discovery en Espanol called Norte a Sur: Una Ruta, 5 Experiencias. (See the trailer above.) It did pretty well, too. According to Diane Jones Lowrey, director of diversity marketing and operations at Levi's, the show scored the second best rating among adults 18-34 of any program in prime time last Saturday. Lowery said the series, about five young-adult U.S. Hispanics traveling along the Pan-American Highway, is intended in part to invoke the "pioneering spirit" that has long been associated with the brand. But Daija Arias, svp of RCN International Distribution, said Hispanics have been wearing Levi's for years yet the company "considers itself a pioneer for coming into this market" now. Clearly, the notion of pioneering "depends on your perspective," she said. Still, Arias credited Lowery for convincing the company to participate in the Hispanic ad space, even if belatedly. "I hope it does really well," she said of the campaign, which includes online and social-media elements and traditional 30-second spots.

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September 29, 2010 | Comments (80)

VIDEO: AOL's Tim Armstrong on playing to win

Adweek critic Barbara Lippert caught up with AOL CEO Tim Armstrong for a chat about Project Devil, the TechCrunch acquisition, the move toward a local-market focus, and how he'll fix AOL's image so your friends don't think you're typing that e-mail from a nursing home. Video after the jump.

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September 29, 2010 | Comments (10)

How consumers react to different kinds of ads on their online travels

By Mark Dolliver

An Advertising Week session on Wednesday morning at the Times Center gave a glimpse at a couple of studies commissioned by AOL about consumers' engagement with online content, including online advertising. Here's a detailed look at one of the studies, conducted by Data & Management Counsel Inc. (The full report, "The Consumer and Content: Benchmark Study," can be accessed here.)
  The research finds that consumers understand and mostly accept the tradeoff of having access to online content in return for being exposed to advertising. As the report states the matter in its analysis of the data, "Consumers believe that most of the content they experience online is supported by advertising. With the exception of ads that are invasive, consumers have largely come to accept advertising as part of online life." Nor is that acceptance merely grudging if consumers find an ad pertinent to their own needs: "When these ads are relevant (highly targeted and engaging), they become valued to consumers." (Polling for the study was conducted online last month among 18- to 69-year-olds who have broadband Internet access at home and spend more than an hour a week on the Internet for non-work reasons. The research also included focus groups.)
  More specifically, what works and what doesn't? Sixty-seven percent of respondents rated as very or somewhat acceptable "ads targeted to your likes." Nearly as many (64 percent) said the same about "ads with photos (like in a magazine)" or "sponsored ads in search results" (61 percent). Also deemed very/somewhat acceptable by a majority of respondents were "banner ads" (58 percent) and "ads with functionality—share on Facebook, e-mail to a friend" (53 percent). At the opposite end of the scale were "takeover ads" (very/somewhat acceptable to 14 percent of respondents), "pop-up ads" (15 percent) and "in-video ads" (33 percent). Moreover, adds the report, "Consumers want 'fewer ads' on a page so they are less intrusive (and page is less cluttered)."

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September 29, 2010 | Comments (17)

Hey, remember that funny old thing called TV?

By Todd Wasserman

Does TV advertising work? Opinions varied, but most CMOs gathered at an Advertising Week panel hosted by Fast Company on Wednesday agreed that yes, it does work quite well.
  "It still works, but not by itself," said Beth Comstock, CMO of GE. "You need other things to activate it. There's a whole media ecosystem to get your story out there." Barry Judge, CMO of Best Buy, agreed. In fact, he's so sure it works, he was promoting Best Buy's in-store TV network, Best Buy On, which launched a year ago and has its own upfront in December.
  The lone dissenter on the panel—which also included Yahoo! CMO Elisa Steele and Ben Edwards, IBM's vp of digital strategy and development—was Mark Crumpacker, CMO of Chipotle. But Crumpacker doesn't have much of a choice. His boss, CEO Steve Ells, doesn't believe in it. he "He never thought it was important," Crumpacker said of Ells's view of TV advertising. "He's actually asked me, 'Should we advertise at all?' "

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September 29, 2010 | Comments (16)

New devices, new models: Rethinking magazines and newspapers for ever more paperless world

By Lucia Moses

The economic storm has largely subsided for magazines and newspapers. So, what's next? Print-media veterans tackled that question during two back-to-back Advertising Week panels on Wednesday, presented by TargetCast tcm. Not surprisingly, much of the conversation focused on tablet computers and their attendant challenges and opportunities, from creating content for numerous tablet operating systems to selling advertising on them without compromising editorial integrity.
  As readers increasingly access magazine content on tablets and other digital platforms, companies like American Media Inc. are changing the way they market themselves and organize themselves internally. "We have to look at ourselves as powerful brands," said Diane Newman, evp and group publishing director at AMI, whose titles include Shape and Men's Fitness. "We have to be very nimble in how we connect with them."
  With terms like "platform-agnostic" and "liquid content" being bandied about, panelists wondered what will happen to the magazine as a curated, ink-on-paper form of content delivery. "Magazines will live forever," said Josh Quittner, editor at large for Time Inc. The format "takes a bunch of stuff, it packages it, it makes it intelligible. There is a great need for that."

  But Robin Domeniconi, chief brand officer of Hachette Filipacchi's Elle, said tablets demand different ways of thinking about packaging content. "Some content is no longer relevant in a magazine format," she said. "We should be talking 'brands.' "
  Of course, it doesn't help those trying to transform themselves that legacy models persist. Domeniconi bemoaned the fact that magazines are still measured on a cost-per-page basis and by Publishers Information Bureau (PIB), a service that keeps a tally of publisher-reported ad pages and revenue. "I'm so tired of talking about the PIB game and newsstand sales," she said. "I think [PIB] should go away. I think they should measure us by audience."

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September 29, 2010 | Comments (12)

Google's fortune tellers herald the golden age of display advertising

By Mike Shields

The online display market will be a $50 billion business. Half of online ads will feature video, and 75 percent will contain some sort of social element. And the majority of banner ads will be delivered to mobile devices over PCs.
  Those were just some of the seven bold predictions about display advertising for the year 2015 made by Google executives during the final keynote session of the 2010 IAB Mixx conference on Tuesday in New York, part of Advertising Week. Neal Mohan (left), Google's vp of product management, and Barry Salzman (right), the company's managing director for media and platforms, took attendees through a future where banners—to use their words—will be both smart and sexy.
  "The static ad banner will become a thing of the past," said Salzman. "The golden age of display is right before us."

  To prove their point, the pair demonstrated some of the capabilities of banner ads that Google will soon make available to advertisers. For example, at one point, the pair showcased an oversized banner ad that featured live footage of their address on a 10-second delay. Another futuristic display unit showed a live Twitter stream from the event.
  Such rich media ads—which essentially can house the same amount of content and visual imagery as the average Web site—will make up half the display ads in 2015, up from just 6 percent today, the two executives said.

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September 29, 2010 | Comments (22)

VIDEO: Barbara Lippert on 'disintermediation'

Going straight to the source for unbundled, best-in-class capabilities—it's what clients want. In this video, Barbara Lippert talks about the "D" word, and the difficulty for clients of managing so many agency relationships. Video after the jump.

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September 29, 2010 | Comments (45)