Advertising & PR

The guitar strums and a male voice intones: "I always tell myself, just a half hour. But six hours later I’m still on." The chorus kicks in: "MySpace is the place where I can go to be free. MySpace is the place where I can go to read about me . . . " The song is a satirical rock track written by a Los Angeles band called The Fresh which, like many others, uses the hugely popular social networking...

Next Monday night, Jack Bauer will wrap up the fifth season of the U.S. television show "24" by trying to bring down the president of the United States. A Richard Nixon look-alike named Charles Logan, the president has been working secretly with terrorists to secure a steady flow of oil to the United States and doing a lot of bad things in the process. Bauer, a government agent played by Kiefer...

If you work in the advertising industry, you may have come across the word concept used as a verb, as in, "He's the only creative person I ever met that had his ideas concepted, shot and edited the moment he presented it to you," from a recent issue of Adweek. If you're not in advertising–and even if you are–you may find this usage extremely unpleasant. Copywriter Ray Del Salvio is fond of it...

During the dot-com boom, more than a few Internet start-ups planned to support free Internet services--and theoretically turn a profit--by selling online advertisements. Needless to say, for many it didn't work. Now a new group of companies, ranging from tech giants to the tiniest of Silicon Alley start-ups, are banking on ad sales to support new Net services. Microsoft, for one, is pushing full...

Yahoo will on Monday unveil a long-promised overhaul of its online advertising system, setting the stage for a showdown with Google and Microsoft in the race to dominate the fast-growing search engine advertising industry. Like Microsoft, which formally launched its own online advertising platform last week, Yahoo also said its new technology had been designed to handle the next wave of targeted...

A lawsuit filed this week alleges that Yahoo is charging advertisers for "premium" ads that are displayed on illegal sites that show spyware pop-up ads and typosquatter sites that appear when a surfer misspells a Web address. Instead of the "highly targeted" sites the ads are supposed to appear on, the ads end up on low-quality sites that show random ads and little or no bona fide content...

CHANDIGARH: If an ISB passout earns the fattest pay package in the country, it ensures that the country is revolutionising the benchmarks of not only salaries but also integration of business education and industry. Perhaps this is quid pro quo for the industry that is currently facing a shortfall of nearly 80 per cent with only 46,000 workforce specialising in marketing and corporate...

For years, many newspapers have been running what the industry calls wrap-arounds, full-page ads that are wrapped around the actual paper. When the wrap-around is removed, you see the real front page, with news. Last week, The Daily News in New York ran full-page ads in some copies that were, in effect, the front page. On Wednesday, it ran front and back full-page ads for Mazda and on Friday for...

People like Steve Weber are Google's worst nightmare. Last November, Weber self-published a book about how to sell used books on the Internet. To promote it, Weber created a three-line text ad that ran on Google Inc.'s site as a sponsored link when people searched for any word, or phrase, in his book's index. Each time a consumer clicked his ad, Weber paid Google anywhere from 50 cents to 75 cents...

When her public relations firm collapsed last year, Julia Hobsbawm, doyenne of spin and former business partner of Chancellor Gordon Brown's wife, set up a new venture endeavouring to bring PRs and journalists closer together. The new company, Editorial Intelligence, launched at a glittering party in November 2005 attended by some of the leading lights of London's media scene, is facing its own PR...