Advertising

Hitwise crunched some numbers and found that visits to NYTimes.com were down 5 percent to 15 percent during the first 12 days after the introduction of the website’s new pay wall. However, there was actually an increase Saturday, probably thanks to readers staying on top of the possible government shutdown.

• NYT visits down as much as 15% a day since paywall debut (via Romenesko)
• Research: YouTube Beats iTunes For Consumers’ Music Attention (via paidContent)
• Brandweek, Mediaweek to be consolidated into Adweek next week (via Romenesko)
• NY Post: Regis Philbin Eyeing New Talk Show (via TVNewser)
• ASNE board elected, Ken Paulson becomes president (via ASNE)

Thanks to the mediabistro.com mothership and Media Beat, creatives everywhere can add one more agency to their job search list: Deep Focus, whose CEO told Carmen Scheidel that his company is hiring “creatives at every level.” Contrary to common expectations, Deep Focus is seeking “t-shaped people,” who have broad knowledge and one specialization, rather than just pure specialists or generalists.

In addition, the company needs strategists and “brilliant media planners and buyers.”

“I encourage people that are looking for an opportunity to, not so much raise their profile in the industry, but really forward an idea they know to be true, we’re looking for people that believe they have something important to say and then we’ll give them a chance to back that up.”

SomeECards called this the “most brilliantly desperate Craigslist resume ever created.”

In the ad, the author, Travis Broyles, begins by stating: “I Do Anything.” “I will do whatever you want me to do for less money than whoever you are paying to do it now.”

It then launches into a list of things Travis will do for a certain amount of money. For example, for $5, he will “Stare at you for 5 minutes; give a hug to the person of your choosing; call you on the phone and seem genuinely interested for 10 minutes; draw your face on a balloon; sing Barenaked Ladies “One Week” from memory to the best of my ability.”

The last item on the list for $5: “6 minutes of copywriting.”

Under the $10 list, there are a number of silly things (“Spin until I throw up or you lose interest”) and “12 minutes of copywriting.”

For $50, you get an hour of copywriting. And so on.

We think this is a brilliant way to show off your clever writing voice while advertising yourself.
Unfortunately, the citizens of Craigslist didn’t think so: the ad has been flagged for removal.

AOL’s acquisition of The Huffington Post and subsequent installation of Arianna Huffington as content queen has already had repercussions throughout the media world.

To wit: conservative columnist Matt Lewis has already announced his departure from AOL’s PoliticsDaily, saying he is uncomfortable “with the notion of being permanently affiliated with an overtly left-of-center (sometimes activist) outlet.”

He’s moving to The Daily Caller, where he “look[s] forward to learning from its founder and editor in chief, Tucker Carlson, and working alongside the terrific team he has assembled. The Daily Caller and Tucker Carlson personify iconoclastic conservatism, and so I am hopeful I will quickly fit in.”

So far no other conservative AOL writers have departed, but we shall see.

And another possible fallout of the deal: some advertisers wonder how Huffington’s left-of-center style will mesh with their brands.

“All advertisers aren’t open to all things,” Catherine Warburton, executive vice president of national buying for Universal McCann, told the WSJ.

“If [the Huffington Post] were to become the full voice of AOL editorial, then I think, yes, that would risk alienating some people,” said Christian Juhl, a president at Razorfish.

Other advertisers couldn’t care less. A Kraft Foods exec: “We are not making commitments yet, but we think that the level of engagement that the Huffington Post gets from communities is impressive and therefore something that we like to think about more.”

AOL’s quarterly ad revenue has dropped about $200 million in the past two years, so “something we like to think about more” is surely tempting.

A new survey conducted by Harris Interactive found that 47 percent of mobile app users click on ads accidentally more often than they do on purpose.

We can understand that. Smartphone screens are not that big and our fingers are not that small and accidents happen.

But if those ad click rates are totally overinflated because a quarter or more of clicks are unintentional, what does that mean for the mobile industry?

By the way, these numbers aren’t just proving some well-worn trope about old technophobes making mistakes on their shiny new devices. Sixty one percent of mobile app users in the coveted 18-34 demographic click on ads more often by accident than on purpose.

Earlier this month Folio: reported that the Financial Times has generated $2 million in ad revenue from its iPad app, but that other publishers haven’t yet found the sweet spot. And without any reliable third-party measure of ad success for mobile and tablets, advertisers may have no choice but to take the Harris survey at face value.

Another day, another Twitter-for-an-internship announcement.

This time, it’s the Minneapolis, Minn.-based Campbell Mithun, who will be selecting its 2011 interns based on the quality of thirteen tweets. For those playing along at home, that’s only 1820 characters.

The would-be interns can write anything they want with those thirteen tweets as long as they include a couple required hashtags (so that’s fewer than 1820 characters, really). However, since the tweets are the only thing these kids’ll be judged on in the first round, they’d be wise to link to a resume, portfolio, or LinkedIn page.

The 10-week “Lucky 13″ summer internship is a paid one, and every year, at least one intern has landed a full-time job with Campbell Mithun. So if you think of yourself as a microblogger extraordinaire, better visit the Lucky 13 site and get going.

Hey, just so you know, Mediabistro.com’s introduced something they’re calling Creative Pro, an online ad/design training program copresented with Miami Ad School. For $19 a month, you get video tutorials, portfolio critiques from folks at places including Ogilvy, McCann Erickson, Organic, SapientNitro, StrawberryFrog, Mr Youth, and Sterling Brands, and webcasts. The service will also put you in touch with local like-minded individuals for networking and rocking out.

AgencySpy has the full release but what you should know is that next Monday, Creative Pro will be holding a free webcast teaching you about starting your own creative agency. Register at the Creative Pro site and kick your career up a notch.

Ty Montague and Rosemarie Ryan surprised the ad world in March when they announced they were leaving jobs at JWT to start their own agency. Now, the NYT reports, that agency has a name—Co:—colon included—and clients.

Co: is opening with four clients, two of which are Madison Square Garden, for the New York Knicks, and MTV Networks, for the Spike cable channel.

Howard Jacobs, SVP for marketing and sales at MSG Sports, said he was attracted to Co: because his job is “so clearly not an ‘advertising exercise’ ” but rather requires “a multidisciplinary approach, part strategy, part storytelling, part brand creation, part technology, part design.”

It does sound, however, like if you’re hoping to get a job at Co: you may have to come at it obliquely. From the article:

The pair said they knew the world was not waiting for another agency, but one with a nontraditional approach may be welcomed by marketers looking for different approaches to solving problems and selling products.

Mr. Montague and Ms. Ryan, whose titles at Co: are co-founders, described the agency as a “brand studio,” likening it to a movie studio that provides money and infrastructure to a continually changing lineup of actors, writers, directors and producers.

At Co:, “teams are formed around individual client needs,” Mr. Montague said, “and when the needs are satisfied, the teams are dispersed.”

To form those teams, Co: will draw from a list of “co-conspirators” — 40 agencies, consultancies and firms that specialize in tasks like media services, digital and interactive marketing, public relations, social media, design, brand identity, event marketing, technology, ideation and gaming.

Think your ad job is stressful? Well look at this new sales pitch the Newspaper National Network has decided to use for new clients.

It will begin guaranteeing 10 percent increases in sales volume after a new series of ads runs. There are a lot of caveats, but essentially if a client wants to try newspaper ad spending for the first time and commits to at least $300,000 then the paper group will guarantee a 10 percent sales increase. If the product, which has to be a packaged good, doesn’t see a 10-point jump, then the last ad in the series is on the house. As in, if the ad fails, then the last ad will be gratis.

The offer will be limited to five marketers across the group’s 170 newspapers at first. Of course the Newspaper National Network, which is owned by 25 national publishers and the Newspaper Association of America, did some background tests. According to the New York Times, of the eight goods it experimented with, all of them saw increases of sales, with a range from 7 percent to 25 percent increases. The average stood at 16 percent.

So maybe not as a precarious of a pitch as originally thought. Still now the newspaper ad folks need not just worry about their own ad sales, but the sales of the paying customer as well? Looks like everyone at the paper is doing more these days.

Photo by jbcurio

This should not come as any surprise for regular followers of Erik Proulx‘s work, but the man behind Please Feed The Animals is moving in a new direction.

Put simply, he’s sick of advertising.

“While early on, I wrote often about the state of the industry and how fucked up it is, lately I find myself not caring. I simply no longer give a shit about who’s doing what for what agency. I do care deeply about my friends’ successes and frustrations. But the business itself is a barely-audible ping on my sonar.”

Proulx’s “Lemonade,” the documentary about other laid-off advertising pros getting out of the biz, was pretty successful—enough that he can make a new film, Lemonade: Detroit, and a series of short branded documentaries for Dell.

“I’m still tinkering with who I am,” he says. “Right now, today, I am a film director. And that’s a full-time commitment.”