Category: Business

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Re-branding! Or not!

At one point I really thought these kind of deals are only possible in Romania. It seems they aren’t.

After spending S$400,000 ($240,964) to come up with a suitable new name for the revamped downtown Marina Bay, Singapore has decided to stick to, well, Marina Bay, media reports said Friday.

The city-state’s urban development authorities and global branding company Interbrand spent months deliberating over 400 potential names before settling on the original moniker, according to the Today newspaper. The $400,000 financed a massive branding exercise that involved market tests, focus group discussions and consultations with developers and the general public, Today said.

No comment!

via: Stefan’s Branding Blog

Technorati Tags: Interbrand, Re-branding

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Blogging Guide from Oglivy PR

Oglivy PR released The Executive Blogger’s Guide to Building a Nest of Blogs, Wikis & RSS (PDF, 2.8MB).

Changes in online technology have taken what was already a revolution in communication and now morphed the internet into a real-time forum wherein for the first time, participants are as powerful as traditional controllers of media and public relations messages.

The publication covers all important aspects of blogging, with an accent on corporate blogging:

  • Welcome to the Blogosphere: The End of Top-Down Talk
  • What are Blogs?
  • How Powerful Have Blogs Become?
  • The Unique Characteristics of Blogs
  • Business Blog Examples
  • How To Use RSS
  • Newsreaders
  • Searching and Monitoring Blogs
  • Launching Your Blog
  • Corporate Policies and Blogging
  • Blog Backfires
  • Moblogs & Vblogs
  • Wikis
  • Conclusion:Your Game Plan

via: Johnnie Moore’s Weblog

Technorati tags: blogging, corporate blogging

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Now, that’s entrepreneurship!

A teenager awaiting his A level results has become the latest entrant into the low cost airline arena. Daniel Reilly, 18, has leased a Boeing 737 with money from venture capitalists to set up Nexus Airlines.

Flights from Liverpool’s John Lennon Airport to Tenerife, Gran Canaria, Lanzarote and Fuerteventura are due to begin on November 1 with seats on sale from Friday. Prices are from £50 one-way.

“I’ve always been interested in aviation so I decided to do my A level business studies project on setting up an airline,” the BBC reported Reilly saying. “I called round a few airlines and asked how they had done it and I slowly realised it was quite achievable.”

via: Business Opportunities Weblog

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“Live” Billboards in Times Square

In the digital age, with new technology sprouting ever more elaborate media vehicles to challenge the traditional media mix, one of the oldest media, out-of-home, seems to be holding its own.

Today, Calvin Klein fragrances launch a living billboard in Times Square for ck cne. It’s a billboard where models will live and be visible to the public both day and night. About 40 models are living on the side of a building as part of New York City’s first-ever live billboard.

CK Live BillboardPedestrians are able to view the models as they live in the billboard throughout the day and night. Young models on the billboard have been instructed to create an illusion of a big party 24 hours a day. The billboard features music as well. The models will work through shifts through Wednesday night. They were reportedly told not to drink on the billboard or perform risque behavior.

It seems that CK wasn’t the first and is deffinetly not the last in this kind of advertising.

On July 27th, Target will stage a vertical fashion show on the side of a building at the Rockefeller Center. This fashion show will feature 15 acrobats who will walk 9 stories down the building

Yahoo created a living billboard in LA, featuring a dating single who lived in the Sunset Strip billboard for three days

Adidas staged a spectacular soccer game on the side of a building between two live players.

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The Past of Online Advertising

In order to finish (at least for now) the subject of online advertising I just found a report of doubleclick.com about the 1995-2004 Decade in Online Advertising (1MB, PDF file).

Online advertising has come a long way since those first ad banners on HotWired in 1994. The
many forms of marketing and advertising it enables—permission email, keywordtargeted search engine advertising, floating animated page takeovers, interactive onpage rich media ads, streaming audio and video, consumer-fueled “viral marketing”, to name a few—have excited early adopters and now mainstream marketers in ways that traditional advertising has not seen the likes of since the early days of color television.

The findings in this report can be summed up in three key conclusions:

  • A seller’s market is emerging in online advertising.
  • Marketers are demanding more accountability.
  • Consumers are demanding more control.
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The present of online advertising

Talking earlier about advertisers finding new ways for spending their dollars and about 57 percent of them thinking already about RSS as one of the new channels of online ads, it seems that Google jumped on the opportunity and begun testing the inclusion of text ads in Web content distributed through syndication technologies such as RSS or Atom.

Google’s program, an extension of its AdSense network, will include in the feeds text ads that are relevant to the content being distributed. When readers click on the ads, Google will split with the publishers the fees it charges to advertisers. You can apply here: http://www.google.com/adsenseforfeeds

Even more, it looks like the folks at USWeb.com, a leading Internet marketing firm, have taken the idea of shilling one step further and could very well be in violation of the Federal Trade Commission Act. Their offer sounds like this: Get paid for blogging… We will pay you to post to your blog. We pay $5 via PayPal per blog posting. To start earning cash, email me with your name and blog URL. We are looking for people to pay today. If you don’t have a PayPal account, we can also send you a gift certificate for iTunes if you like.

You can find more comments about the matter and its legallity here: Blogging for dollars

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The future of Online advertising

It seems that recent NYTimes.com decision to offer paid content to subscribers has created a lot of buzz around the blogsphere. And even though, from the freedom-of-information-point-of-view, I dislike their decision, I wonder if this will help their business in the long run.

Considering the latest Forrester Research study about online advertising they shouldn’t worry in the next couple of years, and here are some excerpts from this study:

  • 2005 growth in online advertising spending, represents a 23 percent increase from 2004, up to $14.7 billion and it’s estimated to $26 billion by 2010
  • This is not the return of “The Bubble“?. The growth is coming from marketers having to make tough decisions about allocating scarce advertising dollars – in many cases, funding online channels from traditional channels. Back in 1999/2000, spending often came from exuberant spending, fueled by venture money.
  • It’s more than just about search. Search is great, it’s growing, but it’s not the whole story. In fact, I anticipate that search will become much more integrated into traditional brand advertising
  • Marketers will shift channels away from traditional channels to fund online marketing

On the other hand the more and more popular Firefox and Opera browsers (and who knows, maybe IE7.0 will do it to) are giving the users the opportunity to block most of the ads in the webpages they are visiting (and I’m thinking here about the popular AdBlock Firefox extension as well as the powerfull Greasemonkey scripts, and why not Opera’s new features on this).

As such, for advertisers to keep the trend, they have to find new ways of spending their dollars, the same way they moved beyond pop-up’s as soon as most of the browsers gave the users the chance to get rid of them. And it seems they are already considering alternatives, according to the study mentioned before, new advertising channels will draw interest and spending from marketers. Sixty-four percent of respondents are interested in advertising on blogs, 57 percent through RSS and 52 percent on mobile devices, including phones and PDAs.

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New York Times to charge for content

The New York Times announced yesterday that it will begin charging for Op-Ed and news columns on NYTimes.com as part of a new online subscription called TimesSelect. For $49.95 a year or free for print subscribers, TimesSelect members will also get access to The Times archives, exclusive online multimedia (audio and photo essays, video and podcasts), a first look at some articles, and “TimesFile,” a new tool that helps readers tag and organize articles from The Times.

That seems to me to be against the wave as the trend seems to be quite different with latimes.com‘s recently deciding to end its subscription for calendarlive.com or CNN.com that will make its existing online video offerings available for free beginning June 20.

All these are happening with the statistics in mind, I suppose, as starting with January the number of NYTimes online visitors, 1.4 millions was for the first time bigger than its daily print circulation wich averaged 1,124,000 in 2004. The Times probably considered that the advertising revenues generated by the online trafic will decline less than they get from charging users.

Searchengineblog is giving an advice on this: Look, no one is going to link to summaries that you then have to pay to read further. Learn the lesson of Google – give it away! It’s the *traffic* you want. Once you have the traffic, then you can show them advertising, which in turn pays for the content.

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IBM starts blogging. Big time

Early next week IBM will introduce the largest ever corporate blogging initiative in a bid to encourage any of its 130,000 staff to become online evangelists for the company.

Employees will taught what blogging is, and they will be guided on what is appropriate blogging content. IBM has also set up a wiki, a simple technology that allows groups to collaborate on projects and share knowledge. Wikis are not as sophisticated as IBM’s Notes collaborative software, but they are making significant inroads within corporate departments where they sometimes displace the use of the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet.

The goal is to help improve IBM’s competitive position in key IT markets by having more of its tech gurus participating in online communities and discussions.

This type of evangelism through blogging can be extremely effective and potentially reduce advertising and marketing costs—a very large line item for most companies.

IBM’s blogging initiative includes the publication of interviews with staff who are already bloggers and are well recognized within their online communities.

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US Deficits May Hurt Others

If rates rise rise, and that’s what ultimately will happen if there’s no U.S. policy adjustment, then all developing countries will suffer.

Continued high U.S. budget and trade deficits could sharply cut economic growth in developing countries by driving up interest rates and weakening the dollar, the World Bank said today.

Even without the impact of U.S. deficits, average economic growth in China, Russia, India and other developing economies is expected to decline from a three-decade high of 6.6 percent in 2004 to 5.2 percent next year, the bank said in a report on the global economic outlook.

But it said that fall could be sharper if financial markets respond to continued heavy U.S. borrowing by pushing up interest rates.