The feisty local tabloid continues its anti-tax jihad today from the very first page (via The Newseum’s Today’s Front Pages):
Inside the Herald puts a price tag on the tax hikes proposed by Gov. Deval Patrick (D-One Foot Out the Door) . . .
Read the rest at It’s Good to Live in a Two-Daily Town.
From Wall Street Journal theater critic Terry Teachout’s invaluable About Last Night blog at ArtsJournal:
First, marvel at the Parliament cigarette plug Wallace delivers.
Then, marvelous Salvador Dali.
The interview is two ships passing in the TV night: Wallace is all left brain, Dali is all right brain.
It’s a hoot.
P.S. And then there’s this, from Midnight in Paris:
Another hoot.
Advertisers to media content producers:
Stick it in!
From MediaPost’s Center for Media Research:
Product Placement An Emerging Brand Marketing Solution
According to the PQ Media Global Product Placement Spending Forecast 2012-2016, US marketers continue to up their investment in product placement to connect with harder-to-reach, multitasking consumers who are using digital and wireless technology to consume content more often and to view advertising less frequently . . .
The total US product placement spending is expected to finish in 2012 to $4.75 billion, fueled by strong growth in paid integrations on TV, internet, mobile and music media, as brands pursue alternative marketing solutions.
Product placement, as defined in this study, is a marketing tactic used by advertisers in which the objective is to integrate brand names, logos or products into non-ad content of media, such as TV, film, internet, mobile, videogames and music.
[Executive summary here.]
Of course, one man’s marketing solution is another man’s marketing intrusion . . .
Read the rest at Sneak Adtack.
Not-quite-matching her & her columns in the local papers on the topic of U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz and her (over?)zealous prosecution of Aaron Swartz.
Start with Margery Eagan’s column in the Boston Herald:
Outrage over zealous feds
Statement too little, too late
Just days ago, speculation was rampant. Gov. Carmen Ortiz? U.S. Sen. Carmen Ortiz?
Well, that’s all over now . . .
Read the rest at It’s Good to Live in a Two-Daily Town
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From our Whiskey Tango Foxtrot desk
The recently ended NHL lockout was like the Iran-Iraq war – you wished somehow both sides could lose. And in a way they both did, so that’s a good thing.
Now comes the task of winning back NHL fans, who by and large are far too tolerant. Regardless, the NHL poobahs ran this ad in today’s Boston Globe . . .
Read the rest at It’s Good to Live in a Two-Daily Town.
When is a print ad both a story and an advertisement?
When the New York Times makes it so!
From Wednesday’s Times Business section:
On Print’s Turf, Google Wins for Creativity
THE winner of a contest to encourage creativity in print advertising, with a grand prize of $1 million worth of full-page ad space in USA Today, is a company that, it can be said, is a reason there are contests to encourage creativity in print advertising with prizes like $1 million worth of full-page newspaper ad space.
The contest, the 2012 USA Today Print Advertising Competition, was announced on Oct. 1, in conjunction with a redesign of USA Today timed to coincide with the newspaper’s 30th anniversary. The winner of the contest is the Google Creative Lab unit of Google, which is known for, among other online innovations, Google News, a free aggregator of the content of newspapers like USA Today.
Irony, thy name is . . . well, you tell us.
Anyway, the winning entry:
Among the runners-up was “the Advertising Council in New York, for an ad from a campaign for Save the Children, which carried the theme ‘Every beat matters.'”
Representative sample in the Times piece:
So imagine our surprise when the hardworking staff saw this in the same day’s News section of the Times:
Apparently, the runner-up no longer waits for the winner’s reign to be interrupted.
Somebody needs to tell Donald Trump.
Several years ago the Wall Street Journal instituted a no-jumps policy, as noted quite bitterly by the Columbia Journalism Review:
The WSJ and the Limits of a “No Jumps” Policy
Dumbing down and devaluing The Wall Street Journal
We’ve talked quite a bit about the FT-ization of the Journal since Murdoch got his grubby paws on it, shoved out Marcus Brauchli (who tried to stop Rupe’s myopic moves), and installed his boy Robert Thomson.
One of the most-visible pieces of that effort has been to decrease the amount of jumps readers have to make on section-front stories.
Nut graf . . .
Read the rest at It’s Good to Live in a Five-Daily Town, the latest addition to our blogeteria.
The front pages of today’s local dailies almost – but don’t quite – say it all in their coverage of a looming tax hike in Massachusetts.
The Boston Globe’s Page One (via the Newseum’s Today’s Front Pages) appears measured and slightly left of center, as usual:
The report itself is equally straightforward . . .
Read the rest at It’s Good to Live in a Two-Daily Town.
This was bound to happen.
“Native advertising” – marketing material tricked out as editorial content – is all the rage these days, as the hardtracking staff has noted on numerous occasions.
And media organizations have been entirely complicit in mainstreaming this form of stealth marketing, justifying it as beneficial to consumers who find traditional advertising “intrusive” and just want a seamless stream of information.
[One marketing executive] says he believes the new native ad formats actually are more appropriate and authentic for contemporary news audiences because there has been a generational shift in the way they consume content and the way people communicate in general.
“Especially with the new generation, if it’s in advertising, it’s suspicious,” he says.
Used to be the other way around: If advertising was disguised as content it was suspicious . . .
Read the rest at Sneak Adtack.
The hardtracking staff is acutely aware that stealth marketing ranks somewhere below Ghana on the average American’s radar screen.
Still, you’d think the media hall monitors of this world would give it serious consideration.
WRONG!!!
Exhibit Umpteen: This piece by Andrew Beaujon on the Poynter website.
The problem with BuzzFeed’s sponsored posts
BuzzFeed is not just upending conventional wisdom on how Internet publishers can make money with its innovative digital ads; the lists, quizzes and posts it creates with advertisers show brands they can “actually create something people will engage with,” BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti told the Guardian’s Heidi N. Moore.
That’s good news for marketers, but its sponsored posts are also a win for readers who might otherwise flee from advertorial content. Though clearly marked, they look and feel like BuzzFeed’s editorial content, and they’re not sharing screen space with ads trumpeting the fat-burning properties of açai berries.
Seriously? “Clearly marked?” “Not sharing screen space with ads?”
Wrong on both counts . . .
Read the rest at Sneak Adtack.
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