Advertising

Today Hearst Magazines is launching a massive new ad campaign designed to reestablish the brand’s identity in the eyes of consumers. The effort – titled “Unbound” – features print ads, signage in Times Square and online executions. According to The New York Times the campaign will run through the end of the year.

Ads feature photos of the Hearst brands, specialized QR codes and invites to a new website, my.hearstmagazines.com, where visitors can peruse each of Hearst’s magazines. Michael Clinton, President for Marketing and Publishing Director at Hearst Magazines, said of the creative theme, “We’re unleashing our brand DNA.”

FishbowlNY always wonders why companies this large even bother with advertising. It’s like when you see ads for the iPhone. Has anyone ever forgotten about Apple? Have you ever sat back and not been able to remember that little company that makes those white mp3 players and computers? Ads for companies like Apple just seems like a waste of money.

However, those companies only stay those companies by getting people to buy their stuff, so advertising is a must. Clearly we should’ve been business professors, not writers.

Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews.

The Wall Street Journal has been telling everyone who will listen that it’s not just a business-centric newspaper for awhile now. Starting tomorrow, that message is about to get a lot more prevalent. The paper is launching an ad campaign titled “Live in The Know” tomorrow, and the theme is that there’s a little something for everyone inside the paper; it’s not just a place to read about capped indices (we had to look that up).

The video above is a spot for the campaign, which will also appear online and in print. Jim Richardson, Vice president of Brand Marketing for The Wall Street Journal, said of the ads, “The campaign highlights the breadth and deeper understanding readers get every day only from reading the Journal.”

A report from PricewaterhouseCoopers titled ”Global Entertainment and Media Outlook: 2011-2015,” indicates that print advertising sales will remain relatively flat through 2015 as readers continue to shift toward digital media. While that’s good news for digital sales – the report says digital advertising could reach $2.8 billion by 2015 – that means even less money being spent on print, which is where magazines make their money.

As Adweek points out, digital growth compounds the problem for magazines:

Underlying weakness in circulation will prevent publishers from growing print advertising at more than a modest pace. Competition from free sources, a weak economy, and decline in store visits has threatened newsstand and subscription sales. Celebrity and news magazines are particularly at risk because they trade in information that’s widely available for free online.

But let’s all remember that the report is just an estimate of what will happen. There’s still hope that magazines can maintain some print ad sales growth. We’ll just have to wait and see.

The jewelry industry and Tiffany & Co. haven’t done nearly enough to perpetuate the myth that buying someone expensive things is the only way to prove your true love, so Tiffany & Co. is launching editorial content to help everything along.

The microsite “What Makes Love True” will launch at some point today, and according to WWD it will include “a forum where users can share the places their ‘hearts beat faster’ in New York City, restaurant, cocktail and culture suggestions” and other original content.

If your significant other is already obsessed with Tiffany’s, we suggest keeping them away from this new site, or pay the price.

Literally.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) just released its findings on advertising trends in 2010 and 4Q 2010, and surprise! Internet advertising revenue is way up.

Not that we’re doubting the validity of the report. It’s just always funny when agencies release reports that are completely beneficial to them. It’s like when the police launch “internal investigations,” and shockingly never find that the cops they were investigating did anything wrong.

But anyway, companies really are spending more money online, and IAB has some pretty impressive stats to back that up. Here are just a few:

• Online advertising revenue in 2010 hit a record high of $26 billion, up 15 percent from 2009
• 46 percent of that advertising was search, up 12 percent from 2009
• Internet advertising has grown for the past five quarters straight

Randall Rothenberg, CEO of IAB, said the findings show that advertisers are adapting to the influence of the digital world. “Consumers have shifted more of their time to digital media – watching television shows and movies online – and advertisers now accept this multifaceted medium as a key component for reaching their targets.”

Fresh off the news this morning that AOL had acquired hyperlocal aggregator Outside.in for $10 million, representatives from both companies appeared this morning on a panel at Borrell Associates’ Local Online Advertising Conference at the Grand Hyatt to talk about the deal as well as the current gold rush taking place in hyperlocal media.

Mark Josephson, Outside.in’s CEO, said he was “thrilled” to be joining AOL, which will use his technology to beef up aggregation of information around the content produced for its Patch network of hyperlocal sites. He said that Outside.in had gone out of its way to build incredibly powerful tools for local journalists, and to serve consumers by organizing local media sources within tools and dashboards. Josephson said that he had envisioned a partnership with Patch since he heard of the company’s inception.

Patch media president Warren Webster also said he was “extremely exicted” about the deal, saying that pairing Patch’s local professional journalism and efficiency of scale with

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For the first time since 2007 ad revenue at consumer magazines rose this past year.  A Publishers Information Bureau report revealed that 2010 brought a 3 percent rise in print ad revenue as the 235 measured magazines hauled in $20 billion in profits.  This represents a modest gain over the $19.5 billion amassed in 2009.

Magazines flourished in the fourth quarter as ad revenue increased by 4 percent from 2009.  Much of the credit for the improvement goes to automakers whose advertisements boosted profits by 21 percent.

As for general interest titles, People had a memorable 2010 as the magazine collected $1 billion in ad revenue.  Food Network Magazine displayed the largest growth margin with a 174 percent spike in advertising dollars from 2009 to 2010.

In its first major refresh in 10 years, Comedy Central is revamping its look on-air and off. At the heart of the redesign is a new logo for the network, pictured above.

“10 years, that was the last time we did anything this meaningful,” said Bob Salazar, senior vice president/creative director, brand creative for Comedy Central. “If you think of social media, videogames, and the conventional competition, it has changed dramatically in the last 10 years. Even though the brand has never been as strong, we felt that refreshing it in our promotion and our branding, was something that we felt this moment in the network’s history would be the perfect time for.

Salazar says of the new double “C” logo with the upside down “Central” “it is the irreverent wink of Comedy Central.”

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If you’ve recently opened a current issue of your favorite magazine you may have noticed that publishers have taken off the gloves in an effort to prove that print is still viable.  NYT.com’s Jeremy W. Peters reports that magazines have adopted a more aggressive approach in their defense of the print medium with an ad campaign that attacks the merits of the Internet.  In a two-page layout headlined by the statement “This is not the Internet.  Feel free to curl up and settle in,” the pro-print ad shows a woman laying on a hammock on a beach and emphasizes the simple nature of magazines compared to distraction-heavy digital content.

Although many of the magazines carrying the ad have digital counterparts, the ad’s chief creator and president of marketing for Hearst Magazines Michael A. Clinton believes that people must remember that print still carries its weight in the industry:

Magazines didn’t have a consumer problem; they had an advertising problem.  We have to be delivering our content in different ways, but in a continually digitized world, the interesting thing is the passion people still have for the print product.

Although the anti-Internet element surfaced only recently, the overall campaign began in March.  The ads are designed by Y&R New York and have appeared in Hearst, Time Inc., Condé Nast, Meredith, and Wenner Media titles.

The once purportedly inviolable wall between editorial and advertising has all but crumbled at a seemingly innocent parenting title — all over a bottle of skin lotion — Nat Ives reports for Advertising Age.

For the latest issue of Scholastic Parent & Child (and really, if there ever was a corrupt media institution, Scholastic would be it, right?), editorial staff actually helped to put together an advertising page.

American Society of Magazine Editors chief Sid Holt is not happy:

A magazine industry group was dismayed. “Confusing editorial and advertising is a betrayal of the best interests of both readers and advertisers,” said Sid Holt, CEO of the American Society of Magazine Editors. “Scholastic Parent & Child’s defiance of industry norms is simply shameful.”

Parent & Child editor Nick Friedman doesn’t see what the big deal is, since the product in question, Curel Itch Defense Lotion (pictured) poses few threats to the magazine’s editorial vision.

Ives goes on to report that the Parent & Child flap underscores a larger-scale tendencies for editorial staff to collaborate with advertisers. The question is no longer whether a publication is pure, but rather whether it warns its readers what it’s up to and asks their permission before running a spot.

As partnerships between editorial and business have bloomed particularly in the past 18 months, so has research into what readers expect and will accept, according to Brenda White, senior VP and publishing activation director at media agency Starcom Worldwide. “I’ve talked to many editors about this topic,” she said. “They definitely protect their brands and, more importantly, they protect their consumers. I’m seeing a lot more research around from the magazines saying ‘Hey, would our readers be open to X, Y, Z?’”

But until standards change across the industry, publications at the forefront of the advertorial discipline are likely to find themselves in some itchy situations.