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In hard times, businesses find freebies pay off - The Boston Globe
In hard times, businesses find freebies pay off
Efforts to lure cost-conscious consumers also winning loyalty
By Wayne Parry, Associated Press | June 10, 2009
LAKEWOOD, N.J. - Some businesses are finding that the best price they can charge is nothing at all.
From minor league baseball teams letting kids eat free to banks making a $100 deposit into new checking accounts, merchants are realizing that giving recession-battered consumers something for nothing can be a good way to get them to buy something else.
The Nardini family of Toms River, N.J., took their four children to a Lakewood BlueClaws minor league baseball game one recent night, drawn by the promise of free food for the kids.
Ellianna, 8; Gianna, 6; Gemi, 4; and Talianna, 1, each walked away from the concession stand with a hot dog, a bag of potato chips, and a soda, on the house. That would have set their parents back $21.
The free food was the main reason the Nardinis decided to go to the game.
"It makes it affordable for a large family like ours," said Albert Nardini, a business consultant. "We've become very cost-conscious this year. We're cutting corners and pinching pennies and being careful how we spend our money."
The free food benefited the team, too. The Nardinis paid $32 for tickets and parking - in addition to whatever Albert and his wife, Kirsten, spent on food and drinks for themselves, or souvenirs for the kids.
That's an example of smart, effective marketing, according to Jean-Pierre Dube, a professor of marketing at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business.
"You're essentially giving the person a deal, but not discounting the price of the main product," he said. "Very often the extra thing is less costly than the discount the firm would have had to make in order to get you to buy the original item."
It's not a new phenomenon. But it is being used to great effect during the current recession, he said.
"People tend to have a perception of 'free' that exceeds the true value of the product," he said. "The mere fact
Novelties - Building a Smarter Bar Code - NYTimes.com
LOOK closely at recent supermarket coupons, and you may see some new markings on them near the traditional bar code: sets of neat black bars stacked in two rows.
The new symbols, called GS1 DataBars, can store more data than traditional bar codes, promising new ways for stores to monitor inventory and for customers to save money.
One use of the symbols will be in sophisticated coupon offers that combine deals on multiple products, said Jackie Broberg, who leads coupon control management at General Mills in Minneapolis. A single coupon, for example, could offer discounts on three separate items like eggs, bacon and biscuits, all in one transaction.
Another use of the new symbols is already helping to streamline operations for a common speed bump in the checkout process: loose produce. During the past three years, for example, the Loblaw Companies, the big Canadian supermarket chain, has gradually switched to scannable, miniaturized DataBar labels pasted onto some fruits and vegetables. Instead of entering a 4- or 5-digit number to look up a price, cashiers scan the DataBars on the produce, said Eric Biddiscombe, senior director of planning in Cambridge, Ontario.
“It’s quicker and far more accurate,” Mr. Biddiscombe said. But the system is valuable not only for speeding checkout times and for keeping track of different varieties of bulk vegetables and fruits sold. It also prevents another checkout problem: cashiers mistaking organic vegetables for less expensive, conventionally grown ones, and ringing them up for the lower price.
“The price difference between organic and field tomatoes may be 40 cents a pound or more,” he said. “When they aren’t rung up as organic, that bites into our profit margins.”
Kelly Kirschner, senior marketing manager at Sinclair International, a company in Fresno, Calif., that makes labeling for produce, said DataBars were gradually becoming popular because of limitations of the standard bar code. The standard code, she said, “takes up too much space to be used on loose produce, plus
Ideas and Trends - Hollywood’s Blurb Search Reaches the Blogosphere - NYTimes.com
Hollywood’s Blurb Search Reaches the Blogosphere
By BROOKS BARNES
LOS ANGELES — As Hollywood’s blockbuster season kicks into overdrive, with big-budget pictures like “Transformers” and “G-Force” lumbering into multiplexes weekend after weekend, bet on one thing: regardless of the truth, it’s going to be a “Riveting! Explosive! Non! Stop! Thrill ride!”
The critic’s quote is perhaps the hoariest tool in the movie marketer’s arsenal. Studios have long used blurbs from reviews to sell films, sometimes taking comments out of context, punctuating them to within an inch of their lives and splashing them across newspaper and television ads.
Hollywood has become more careful in recent years in the way it wields these quotes. But the blurbing game is also evolving as newspaper film critics disappear and studios become more comfortable quoting Internet bloggers and movie Web sites in their ads, a practice that still leaves plenty of potential for filmgoers to be bamboozled. Luckily for consumers, there is a cavalry: blurb watchdog sites have sprung up and the number of Web sites that aggregate reviews by established critics is steadily climbing.
The Big Six studios like going to the Internet for advertising blurbs because there is such a huge array of sites from which to pluck the right word or phrase. Some sites, of course, are serious-minded. Others, including sites like Ain’t It Cool News, make no secret of their cheerleader approach to certain film genres. Citing an obscure Web site in a newspaper ad might also persuade older moviegoers into thinking that a movie they’ve never heard about is something hip that they should check out, studio marketers say.
Eager for the attention, a lot of Web sites don’t fuss as much over how their quotes are spliced together, according to three studio marketing chiefs. On the other hand, Manohla Dargis, a film critic for The New York Times, aggressively polices the blurbing of her work. “The studios and smaller companies usually ask my permission, and I always check the ads to make
Advertising - New Ad Campaigns Look Back at the 1930s - NYTimes.com
Campaigns Address Today’s Anxieties by Looking Back
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By STUART ELLIOTT
Published: May 28, 2009
ADVERTISING almost always wants to be upbeat, the better to jolly consumers into, well, consuming. So it is startling to see a spate of campaigns invoking some of the most downbeat times America has ever endured: the desperate decade that began when the stock market crashed in 1929 and continued through the Great Depression.
For instance, a campaign for Farmers insurance talks about how the company was started “a year before the crash.”
“Back then,” an announcer says in a television commercial, referring to the financial crisis of March 1933, “when others paid claims with i.o.u.’s, we paid cash.”
The clothing retailer Brooks Brothers is reprinting advertisements that appeared during dire years like 1934. Newspaper ads for the Gourmet Garage chain of food stores promote special sales called “new deals” — complete with drawings of a grinning Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Commercials for Allstate insurance discuss the company’s founding in 1931 as the spokesman Dennis Haysbert walks past period photographs that include depictions of the Dust Bowl. Print ads for Soyjoy bars, which also cite the Dust Bowl, describe how “the Great Depression turned the land of opportunity into a land of despair.”
And a catalog for the Postal Service, selling a new stamped envelope bearing an image of Seabiscuit, describes how the horse “raised the spirits of a beleaguered nation during the Great Depression.”
The look back at the 1930s is inspired by current financial conditions, which many economists have described as the worst since the Depression. Those comparisons are much on the minds of consumers, according to agency and marketing executives.
“A lot of people
Microsoft Unveils Bing, Its New Search Service - NYTimes.com
Microsoft’s Search for a Name Ends With a Bing
By MIGUEL HELFT
“Why don’t you Bing it?”
A year from now, if you hear someone say that — and actually understand what it means — Bill Gates will be a happy billionaire.
That is because it will be a sign that Microsoft is finally making progress in its quest to challenge Google in the Internet search business.
Bing, the name Microsoft gave to the new search service it unveiled Thursday, is its answer to Google — a noun that once meant little but has become part of the language as a verb that is a synonym for executing a Web search. After months of, uh, searching, Microsoft settled on Bing to replace the all-too-forgettable Live Search, which itself replaced MSN Search.
Microsoft invested billions of dollars in those services and failed to slow Google’s rise, so a new name certainly can’t hurt.
Microsoft’s marketing gurus hope that Bing will evoke neither a type of cherry nor a strip club on “The Sopranos” but rather a sound — the ringing of a bell that signals the “aha” moment when a search leads to an answer.
The name is meant to conjure “the sound of found” as Bing helps people with complex tasks like shopping for a camera, said Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of Microsoft’s online audience business group.
And if Bing turns into a verb like, say, Xerox, TiVo or, well, Google, that would be nice too. Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, said Thursday that he liked Bing’s potential to “verb up.” Plus, he said, “it works globally, and doesn’t have negative, unusual connotations.”
Some branding experts said choosing the name Bing was a good start, but also the easiest part of the challenge facing the company, since most people turn to Google without even thinking about it.
Michael Cronan, whose consulting firm helped come up with brands like TiVo and Amazon’s Kindle, said Bing’s sound, brevity and “ing” ending were all positives.
“It has a promise that you are going to find what you are looking for, and that’s great,” Mr. Cronan said. “But its s
Questions for Frank Luntz - The Wordsmith - Interview - NYTimes.com
The Wordsmith
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Interview by DEBORAH SOLOMON
Published: May 21, 2009
Your new 28-page memo, “The Language of Health Care,” was sent to Republicans in Congress and recommends that they speak about health care reform in ominous phrases. For instance, you suggest that they refer to “a Washington takeover.”
“Takeover” is a word that grabs attention.
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Is it a correct description of the president’s plans for reform?
We don’t know what he is proposing. We want to avoid “a Washington takeover.”
But that’s not at issue. What the Democrats want is for everyone to be able to choose between their old, private health-insurance plan and an all-new, public health-insurance option.
I’m not a policy person. I’m a language person.
If you write the words of the policy, shouldn’t you believe in the content of the policy?
That’s why I agreed to write this memo. I deeply believe in patient-centered health care. My whole family was in the dental profession. I grew up with medicine all around me.
Would you describe yourself as a Republican pollster?
I’m a pollster, but no one ever cites my polling. Ninety-five percent of my work is as a communications specialist. My mother used to tell people that I was an upholsterer. She would joke that she didn’t understand the difference between pollster and an upholsterer.
Who paid you to write the health care memo?
It’s not relevant.
A pharmaceutical company?
No pharmaceutical company was involved.
You have devised many phrases to help sell Republican policies to the public. Like “energy exploration” instead of “drilling for oil” in the Arctic. What are some of your other coin
A Recession Play - Big-Box Stores in Mini Form - NYTimes.com
Mini Versions of Big-Box Stores
By KRISTINA SHEVORY
BOTHELL, Wash. — During the current economic downturn, as many companies are closing stores and cutting costs, it might seem counterintuitive to be opening new stores.
Not here in Bothell, around 20 miles northeast of Seattle, where in January, OfficeMax opened one of its three new concept stores in the Seattle area that offer a pared-down selection of its most popular products. Each of the new stores, called Ink Paper Scissors, covers only 2,000 square feet — about a ninth the size of a typical OfficeMax — and offers basics like copy-making supplies and printer-cartridge refills.
Retailers like OfficeMax are opening scaled-down versions of their stores or inventing outlets entirely to test new concepts without a hefty investment. The stores are a relatively safe bet despite the recession because the space is cheaper and the stores require less inventory, fewer employees and smaller spaces.
OfficeMax is not the only retailer giving new concept stores a try. Most are significantly smaller than their typical stores and focus on one set of products. Last year, for example, Wal-Mart opened four specialty food stores in the Phoenix area, RadioShack unveiled three high-end wireless shops in Dallas, and Best Buy created 30 mobile phone stores.
“If you’ve got the wherewithal, everyone is thinking about smaller sizes,” said Lee Peterson, vice president for brand and creative services at WD Partners in Columbus, Ohio, which has helped retailers design these stores.
More small-format and new-concept stores are likely to be on the way as retailers try to lure customers back, according to a survey of retailers, manufacturers and consultants. Nearly 46 percent of the respondents said they expected the number of formats to increase in the next five years, according to a survey in February by Dechert-Hampe & Company, a marketplace management consultancy.
The stores are opening even as some companies are declaring bankruptcy, closing stores and reporting double-digit earn
How Much Should an E-Book Cost? - NYTimes.com
Steal This Book (for $9.99)
By MOTOKO RICH
Just how much is a good read worth?
David Baldacci, the best-selling thriller author, learned what some of his fans think when “First Family,” his latest novel, went on sale last month. Amazon initially charged a little over $15 for a version for its Kindle reading device, and readers revolted.
Several posted reviews objecting that the electronic edition of the book wasn’t selling for $9.99, the price Amazon has promoted as its target for the majority of e-books in the Kindle store. Hundreds more have joined an informal boycott of digital books priced at more than $9.99.
“I love Baldacci’s writing,” wrote one reader, who decided not to buy. “Sorry Mr. B — price comes down or you lose a lot or readers. I’ll skip your books and move on!”
It was a chilling sentiment for authors and publishers, who have grown used to an average cover price of $26 for a new hardcover. Now, in the evolving Kindle world, $9.99 is becoming the familiar price. But is that justified just because paper has been removed from the equation?
For many readers, this may sound like sufficient reason. Buying music, after all, is so much cheaper now that there aren’t discs and plastic cases. Shouldn’t the same logic apply to books? And if not, won’t the temptation to steal electronic copies online simply increase?
Publishers and authors say it is much more complicated than the cost of paper and shipping. The lower e-book price “is not sustainable,” said Mr. Baldacci, whose novels regularly rise to the top of hardcover best seller lists. If readers insist on cut-rate electronic books, he said, “unfortunately there won’t be anyone selling it anymore because you just can’t make any money.”
Publishers are caught between authors who want to be paid high advances and consumers who believe they should pay less for a digital edition, largely because the publishers save on printing and shipping costs. But publishers argue that those costs, which generally run about 12.5 percent of the average hardcover retai
Digital Domain - Just Browsing? A Web Store May Follow You Out the Door - NYTimes.com
Just Browsing? A Web Store May Follow You Out the Door
By RANDALL STROSS
IF you try on a sweater in a department store dressing room, but choose not to buy it, a persistent sales clerk won’t pursue you into the street yelling, “Hey, are you sure?” Nor will you receive a call at your home the next day to check again if you want to complete the purchase.
But in the online world, visitors to Web stores who touch the goods but leave without buying may be subjected instantaneously to “remarketing,” in the form of nagging e-mail messages or phone calls.
A new Web service, called Abandonment Tracker Pro, is in beta testing and scheduled for formal release next month. Developed by SeeWhy in Andover, Mass., the service will alert a subscribing Web store when a visitor places an item in a shopping cart or begins an application and does not complete the final step.
What distinguishes Abandonment Tracker Pro from other services is its enabling of remarketing “in real time,” SeeWhy says.
The idea that a visitor isn’t entitled to leave an online store empty-handed without being pestered sounds distasteful enough. But having that contact start immediately seems a new form of marketing brazenness.
Abandonment Tracker’s remarketing depends upon knowing the e-mail address of the wayward prospect; knowing the phone number will make follow-up phone calls possible, too. (And if you’ve signed in, a store would be able to find you with the e-mail address you provided when you registered.)
Charles Nicholls, SeeWhy’s founder, says he advises Web sites to have visitors “put their e-mail address in at the first step,” to increase the likelihood that it will be captured.
When asked about possibly alienating prospective customers with overzealous remarketing, Mr. Nicholls said: “Tone and manner are important. The message should be something like, ‘Oops, was there a problem? Can we help?,’ versus an out-and-out hard sell, which will just wind everyone up.”
Technically, as soon as an address is typed into a box on a Web page, it can b
How to Rebuild a Working Relationship With Difficult Clients - NYTimes.com
How to Rebuild a Working Relationship With Difficult Clients
By CELINE ROQUE, GigaOm
Many freelancers, especially at the beginning of their careers, find themselves working with very difficult clients. When this has happened to me, either I helped change the client’s working behavior or stopped working with them altogether. While I always aim for the former approach, sometimes the better option is to end the working relationship. Whenever this happens I hope that if I do work with the client again in the future, they’ll be more cooperative — but that’s not guaranteed.
When one of your more difficult clients contacts you for a new project, how do you work with them again, without repeating the problems you previously had?
Points to Consider
Before you sign up to work with a previously difficult client, there are some issues you need to address.
Refer to the paperwork. If your client is contacting you for support on a previous project, it helps to go over your signed contracts and documents to see whether the new request is within your area of responsibility.
Understand their position. Oftentimes, I’m the only go-to person that these difficult clients have worked with. This is usually because they’re not that tech-savvy or they have a hard time convincing other professionals to take on their projects. With their situation, they just want to get things done as fast as possible. Keep this in mind if they sound frustrated or in a rush when they’re contacting you.
If you’re going to help them out, know why. In my experience, guilt is never a good reason to stay with difficult clients. This is especially true if they are verbally abusive, need 24/7 hand-holding, and don’t value your work. If they’re immature enough, they might try to appeal to your guilt. Just remember not to give in.
Help out your difficult clients only if you believe in the project and if you’re confident that you can learn to foster a better, mutually beneficial working relationship.
Rebuild Your Relationship
Once you decide to work with a
How to Rebuild a Working Relationship With Difficult Clients
How to Rebuild a Working Relationship With Difficult Clients
May 16th, 2009 (6:00am) Celine Roque No Comments
Many freelancers, especially at the beginning of their careers, find themselves working with very difficult clients. When this has happened to me, either I helped change the client’s working behavior or stopped working with them altogether. While I always aim for the former approach, sometimes the better option is to end the working relationship. Whenever this happens I hope that if I do work with the client again in the future, they’ll be more cooperative — but that’s not guaranteed.
When one of your more difficult clients contacts you for a new project, how do you work with them again, without repeating the problems you previously had?
Points to Consider
338064_ml_t4Before you sign up to work with a previously difficult client, there are some issues you need to address.
Refer to the paperwork. If your client is contacting you for support on a previous project, it helps to go over your signed contracts and documents to see whether the new request is within your area of responsibility.
Understand their position. Oftentimes, I’m the only go-to person that these difficult clients have worked with. This is usually because they’re not that tech-savvy or they have a hard time convincing other professionals to take on their projects. With their situation, they just want to get things done as fast as possible. Keep this in mind if they sound frustrated or in a rush when they’re contacting you.
If you’re going to help them out, know why. In my experience, guilt is never a good reason to stay with difficult clients. This is especially true if they are verbally abusive, need 24/7 hand-holding, and don’t value your work. If they’re immature enough, they might try to appeal to your guilt. Just remember not to give in.
Help out your difficult clients only if you believe in the project and if you’re confident that you can learn to foster a better, mutually beneficial working relationship.
Rebuild Your Relation
Consumed - Big Cheese - NYTimes.com
Big Cheese
By ROB WALKER
CHEETOS GIANT
We think of ourselves as sophisticated creatures, and the many brilliant minds of the consumer-industrial complex often think of us that way, too. But sometimes what we want seems pretty simple. Sometimes, we just want something big.
A case in point, perhaps: giant Cheetos. Or, more properly, Cheetos Giant. Either way, this is a new variety of the familiar bagged snack food, officially introduced on April 1, but not a joke. Its point of differentiation from the classic Cheeto is relative size. Don’t worry, it’s not as big as the one on the front of the bag, which is about the size of a baby’s head — that image has been “enlarged to show detail.” The Cheetos inside the bag are, roughly, the size of golf balls. Still pretty big, Cheeto-wise. Is this something you have always wanted? Is it something, perhaps, that you would find particularly pleasing or fun or even comforting right now?
“We’re in a tough economic time, and during tough economic times, people need to lighten up and unstress,” Justin Lambeth, a vice president of marketing at Frito-Lay, asserts. “And you know, that’s what Cheetos does. It’s a natural extension of the brand’s personality. So, it’s a perfect time to introduce the product.” So why not, say, Ruffles the size of Frisbees? “Cheetos is about being playful, it’s about being silly,” Lambeth replies in a thoroughly unsilly tone. “It’s about tapping into the 12-year-old in all of us. It’s quirky. So this just seemed like a natural extension.” Pause. “For all those reasons.”
Well, O.K. The bag describes its contents as “Dangerously cheesy taste in a dangerously cheesy ball!” The phrase “dangerously cheesy” has a trademark next to it. To me, the contents do look dangerous. But then even my inner 12-year-old finds Cheetos a little frightening, with the product’s unnaturally glowing orange color, curious “dust” and hard-to-explain shape suggesting the byproduct of an industrial accident rather than a food stuff. So I’ll leave the reviews to others. Taquitos
Author Harwood solves mystery of finding readers - The Boston Globe
Solving mystery of finding readers
Author uses podcasts to tell his stories
By Joanna Weiss, Globe Staff | May 9, 2009
Once, Seth Harwood intended to get his novel published the old-fashioned way: Get the pedigree, write the manuscript, nab the agent, win the big contract.
But when the Newton North graduate couldn't attract an agent for his crime thriller, he decided to do something radical: Get an audience first - by reading his book aloud, episode by episode, online.
In short, he entered the nascent world of book podcasting, and it worked. So far, 40,000 listeners have downloaded Harwood's weekly podcasts of "Jack Wakes Up," his debut crime novel - and a year ago 500 of them "stormed Amazon," as Harwood puts it, to buy copies of the book online when it was released by a small New Hampshire press.
That was enough to make the book the top-selling crime novel of the day and get the attention of an agent and a publisher, at last. This week the book was rereleased - with a bona fide marketing campaign - by Three Rivers Press, a paperback imprint of Random House.
Philip Patrick, the publisher of Three Rivers Press, said publishers and agents are increasingly scouting for talent among podcasters and other self-publishers. "We're all paying attention to what is going on out in the world around us," Patrick said. "Sometimes it takes somebody to shine a light into a dark corner of the Internet that we haven't seen yet."
Harwood's road to publication was a long one - temporally and psychologically - for a writer who had started out by following the literary-fiction path. A decade ago, he was honing his craft by taking writing courses at Harvard Extension School and gaining admission to the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he focused on writing short stories. He graduated in 2002 and, with no agent or contract to publish his collection, returned to the Boston area to write and teach.
In 2005, still no contract in hand, Harwood moved to the San Francisco Bay area, where his wife was pursuing a graduate de
SeeWhy tracks why people abandon web sites - NYTimes.com
SeeWhy tracks why people abandon web sites
By CAMILLE RICKETTS, VentureBeat
SeeWhy, a company that tells web sites why people leave behind empty shopping carts, half-filled registration forms, etc., has launched a free service that tracks web site abandonment and promises to retain 30 percent of site visitors who may have otherwise left.
Competing with analytics companies like Omniture, Coremetrics and WebTrends, this new service — called Abandonment Tracker Free — allows web sites to follow up with page viewers who jumped ship in the form of personal emails or promotions. To do this, it records any contact information or shopping cart items supplied or selected by users before they left.
Based in Andover, Mass., SeeWhy also just raised $4.5 million from Scottish Equity Partners, Logispring and Pentech Ventures. It counts Amazon, eBay, Citibank and Mastercard among its users.
Advertising - No Actors, Just Patients in New Spots for Hospitals - NYTimes.com
No Actors, Just Patients in Unvarnished Spots for Hospitals
By ANDREW ADAM NEWMAN
A television commercial for the Akron Children’s Hospital in Ohio presents Austin, who is 14 and bald from chemotherapy, wearing a blue varsity jacket while seated in a rocking chair.
“I don’t really see like how this all happened — the whole cancer situation,” says Austin, over footage of his playing basketball in his school gym, and walking down a hallway in a hospital gown. “It just blows my mind that I end up getting it. I knew as soon as the doctor told me, I was like, ‘I’m going to beat it, no matter what. It’s just a disease.’ ”
It is emblematic of a new approach to advertising by hospitals — an industry that, despite the recession, is not slashing ad spending.
The campaign, by the Marcus Thomas agency in Cleveland and running on about 20 cable channels and network stations in Ohio, is entirely unscripted. Other spots feature more patients and their young siblings, who talk about how their families are coping.
Patients in ads usually are success stories, survivors crediting hospitals with saving their lives. But the Akron campaign features patients in the throes of crises, with no inkling of their outcomes (which, considering that the footage was shot within the last few months, may still be unknown).
“Hospitals are dramatic places, but every commercial that has an outcome — a typical testimonial spot — is a foregone conclusion,” said Jim Sollisch, a creative director at Marcus Thomas overseeing the campaign. “So we thought, let’s let the commercial reflect the inherent drama in the situation.”
Mr. Sollisch said the campaign, aimed at mothers ages 18 to 49, reflects the spirit of YouTube and Facebook, where nonactors are the stars, and spontaneity trumps scripted messages.
“Two or three years ago you could have had actors depicting patients, but the rules of engagement are changing,” Mr. Sollisch said. “We have to be more transparent.”
In the ads, though, the hospital is more than just transparent — it is practically
Boston's local TV viewing meters may make 'sweeps' overrated - The Boston Globe
Static over sweeps' stakes
It's that time again on the tube, but some say daily meters weaken punch of TV promotions
By Johnny Diaz, Globe Staff | May 2, 2009
Four times a year, local TV stations heavily promote their programming during the competitive "sweeps" period. The objective? Attract viewers, which in turn they hope will lure advertisers.
But as networks duke it out during the May sweeps, an off-camera debate has surfaced over whether the period makes a difference in programming or advertising in Boston. Unlike most markets, where Nielsen Co. compiles viewing habits about once a quarter, Boston has local people meters, set-top boxes that log what viewers watch everyday. Since that enables stations to get ratings daily, some TV executives say that the sweeps concept is outdated here.
"With the people meters, we don't feel the traditional sweeps are as important as they once were," said Chris Wayland, vice president and general manager of WHDH-TV (Channel 7) and sister station WLVI-TV (Channel 56). "We feel like it's a 52-week year business now."
Charles J. Kravetz, president of New England Cable News, agrees. "It appears to me that sweeps months are, to a large degree, a relic of the past. We produce the best quality work we can every day and we do not focus our efforts on particular ratings months," he said.
Others say the concept still works. Some executives at local stations say that during sweeps, the networks serve up new episodes of their popular primetime shows such as ABC's "Desperate Housewives," CBS's "CSI," and NBC's "The Office." For local stations, that fresh programming provides a promotional platform to plug their newscasts and possibly draw more people to watch.
"Our primary focus is always day-to-day excellence, but the four sweeps months do carry extra importance as they are the only measurement periods for every market in America," said Bill Fine, president and general manager of WCVB-TV (Channel 5) in an e-mail.
Those data can help advertisers and stations negotiate ad buys, s
Advertising - Never Mind What It Costs. Can I Get 70 % Off? - NYTimes.com
Never Mind What It Costs. Can I Get 70% Off?
By STUART ELLIOTT
AS the recession drags on, more retailers are finding they cannot get consumers to buy much of anything unless they offer huge sales, symbolized by significantly high double-digit percentage discounts.
The deals, signaled by “% off” designations in ads, appear to be winning out over descriptions of specific prices, like “was $39.99, now $19.90,” or promotions like “buy one, get one” half off or free, known to retailers as bogos.
For a while, 50 percent off seemed the norm. But since the Christmas holiday shopping season, when some high-end department stores unexpectedly discounted prices by much more than half off, hefty percentage discounts have become the standard.
Experts predict the trend will last for some time as shoppers cling to frugality.
A report released on Monday by Information Resources Inc., titled “Dissecting the Downturn Generation,” said that the recession was creating “a new niche of consumers” more likely to look through retailer ads for deals and stock up on sale items.
A one-day home sale on April 18 at the Bloomingdale’s division of Macy’s Inc. offered shoppers a chance to “save 25%-75% on the items you need and the labels you love.”
A few days earlier, a fur sale at Bloomingdale’s promised “60%-80% off” original prices “when you take an extra 15% off a selection of already-reduced” merchandise.
A newspaper ad for the HomeGoods retail chain, promoting “some of the biggest savings in HomeGoods history,” featured 18 percent-off deals, ranging from a minimum of 50 percent to a maximum of 80 percent.
Ads for the Filene’s Basement chain, which was sold last week to the Buxbaum Group, advertised “savings of 60-75%” on Italian fashion apparel and “savings of 40-85%” on sportswear from American designers.
Savings of up to 75 percent were promoted in ads for ABC Carpet & Home, while a Paragon Sports warehouse sale offered savings of 50 to 80 percent.
And ads for the “March essentials sale” at the Macy’s unit of Macy’s Inc. wooe
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IBP_overview
iBusinessPromoter (IBP) is ...
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