Stories related to: marketing

Bindi Irwin isn't yet 10, but she's got her own TV show, an Emmy, and now, a doll in her image. An Ohio company is making 10-inch replicas of the young Australian star, the daughter of the late Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reports. Bindi inherited her dad's love of nature, and the doll says things like, "Crikey! Let's go help wildlife." More »

A commodity that's widely available practically free is also on sale for thousands of times the actual cost, repackaged as a luxury item. It's transported around the country and even across the world, generating untold volumes of CO2. It's water, of course. The Washington Post looks at a marketing effort that has Americans paying top dollar for repackaged tap water—and the emerging backlash. More »

When her doctor offered her a $100 discount to post her Lasek surgery on YouTube, Michelle Wilder was perplexed. “I was wondering, ‘Who wants to see my surgery?’” she says. But the money talked, and now you can see Wilder, and thousands of others, go under the knife online, the New York Times reports. More and more cosmetic surgeons are rewarding patients for such exhibitionism. More »

A new Google service will track web users’ activity to help companies target ads, raising concerns about conflict of interest, the Wall Street Journal reports. The free tool will use server data to track hits, a plan that threatens current industry giants comScore and Nielsen Online. Those paid services employ user panels and surveys, methods that can be ineffective. More »

Americans have gobbled up Spam for 71 years, despite Monty Python parodies and countless jokes about the spongy stuff. But Spam's sales have spiked 10% over the past 12 weeks, as the economy has gone sour and soaring gas prices have been gobbling up household income. In fact, it's no cheaper than real meat, dollars-per-ounce. But its one of those things, like ramen noodles, bus transit and lipstick, Advertising Age reports, that people associate with belt-tightening. More »

The days when a TV host would serve up a tasty bowl of Alpo or light up a Lucky Strike on-air and sing its praises are long gone, but in-show sponsorship may be making a comeback, the New York Times reports. Meow Mix will launch its own game show this summer, and Dos Equis beer plans to boost its brand with an upcoming reality show. More »

Microsoft's strategy of marketing Vista to consumers has turned off its other core constituency, the Wall Street Journal reports: business. Certainly, technical issues and a fat price tag have decimated the number of companies planning to install it: Just 26% of IT departments say they expect to install Vista by 2010, down from 68% last year. More »

YouTube videos showing three people popping corn with their cell phones have taken the Internet by storm, but apparently aren’t for real, Wired reports: A physics professor says the feat just isn’t possible. Instead, the videos look like a viral marketing campaign. The phones seem to be the same make and model, and two YouTube users posted French, Japanese and two American versions. More »

More and more smartphones are going into female hands and pocketbooks, the New York Times reports, as women catch up with their male counterparts in adopting not only iPhones but BlackBerrys, Treos, and other models. The number of American women toting smartphones more than doubled last year, to 10.4 million, as phones became cheaper, sleeker, and more user-friendly. Industries notice that kind of growth, and have begun marketing to women. More »

Often maligned as noxious-fume-spewing bad citizens, railroad companies are hopping the green train, the Wall Street Journal reports. Campaigns by Norfolk Southern and CSX tout clean-burning diesel engines that "can move a ton of freight 423 miles on a single gallon," and Union Pacific claims diverting 25% of truck freight to trains would prevent 800,000 tons of pollution by 2025. More »

Text-message advertisements are catching on with marketers, largely because consumers actually ask to receive them—or at least to receive content that ads are attached to, the Wall Street Journal reports. Coors Light, for example, added marketing blurbs to text alerts requested by fans during last month's NFL draft, of which it was a sponsor. More »

The Gap's balance sheet is back in the black, helped along by its decision to stop spending on TV ads, Advertising Age reports. The clothing retailer slashed marketing spending by nearly a fifth in the first quarter and saw profits leap 40%, even as sales slumped. The Gap has switched its focus to merchandising initiatives instead. More »

Indiana Jones has a new enemy. Pediatrician Rahul Parikh is irritated about Indy's marketing tie-ins to high-calorie foods like Burger King's "Indy Double Whopper" and Snicker's "Adventure Bar." Parikh has been enjoying the films of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg for decades, but he's also watching kids grow obese, thanks in part to fatty food marketing, he writes in Salon. More »

"Green" is in, and many new products being marketed as Earth-friendly are in reality only marginally less unfriendly. The Boston Globe points to hybrid SUVs that get barely better mileage than their standard brethren, water bottles that use less plastic but still require large amounts of energy to make and deliver, and "non-toxic" cleaners that have merely reduced amounts of the same toxins. "It's a marketing exercise rather than reality," says a consumer expert. More »

The battle for a larger share of TV customers has taken a nasty turn as companies like Time Warner, DirecTV, and Verizon hone ad campaigns highlighting rivals' shortcomings, the Wall Street Journal reports. It's not the first time operators have taken shots at each other, but it signals a ramping-up of marketing wars as the industry gets more crowded. More »

Forget blimps. A new kind of advertising sends company logos sky-bound in the form of clouds themselves—or almost. “Flogos” are flying, cloud-like shapes created from a soapy mixture pumped up with helium and other gases. The floating messages, sent up by repurposed snow machines, are completely safe, both for the environment and for passing airplanes, the inventor assures LiveScience . More »

John McCain is more than a candidate, he's a brand—and a successful one at that, the Washington Post reports. His image of independence, experience, and, of course, straight talk endures in the public eye and explains why he keeps rising in national polls despite his support for an unpopular war and an unpopular president. Two market research firms described him as a combination of Ford pickup, Wrangler jeans, and Timex. More »

A technology that lets European and Asian cellphone users point their phones at bar codes on everything from products to street signs to bring up more information isn’t ready for deployment in the US. At least that’s the indication so far of a trial at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, where students have been slow to adopt it, reports the New York Times . More »

"The American Experience" hasn't been the come-on Washington officials hoped, Portfolio reports, and DC's tourist board hopes to change that with a new campaign: “Create Your Own Power Trip." With a stumbling economy projected to eat into the US capital's 15 million in annual tourism, the city decided a rebranding was needed to keep up with the competition. More »

Players had spent days searching for clues to The Lost Ring, an Olympic-themed online mystery game, before uncovering the stunning identity of the game’s shadowy creator: McDonald’s. Golden arches and burgers are nowhere to be seen in the dark contest—instead it’s promoting the Olympics, while “strengthening our bond with the global youth culture,” said McDonald’s marketing chief. “You can’t put an R.O.I. on this.” More »