Want to get your brand name all over London during next summer’s Olympics without spending hundreds of millions to be an official sponsor of the event? Don’t feel like risking arrest with some stealth ambush marketing at the 2012 Summer Games?

Millions of visitors will be roaming the streets of London next summer during the Games of the XXX Olympiad, and they'll be needing a lift, which is why advertisers are looking to taxicab advertising to create a moving experience for their brands. Consider it a (literally) mobile marketing platform.Continue reading...

Super Bowl XLV wasn't just the highest-rated broadcast in U.S. television history. Its halo effect also extended to a rival game: The seventh annual Puppy Bowl (that's a glimpse at last year's starting lineup) on Animal Planet scored its highest ratings ever, too.

The broadcast on the Discovery-owned cable network says it scored its largest audience ever with 9.2 million unique viewers across its entire 12-hour marathon —up 60% from the previous year during the 3-5 PM ET/PT time slot.Continue reading...

New billboards along I-95 in Philadelphia, Route 30 in New Jersey and on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, urge motorists to go to VisitPhilly.com to submit a "love letter" to Philly. One lucky participant's message will end up on a highway-side billboard (and maybe on an ad resume!)

The Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corporation (GPTMC) is jacking up the "love" part of "city of brotherly love" as a new part of the “With Love, Philadelphia XOXO" campaign. It's just the latest attempt to cultivate and foster both a sense of civic pride and communicate that Philadelphia is more than many outsiders might think. And as with most crowd-sourced campaigns, the journey, not the publicized goal, is the goal. 

It's just the latest move from a municipal branding agency that demonstrates how a lot of creativity and a willingness to work outside the normal branding channels, can turn low-budget strategies into big awareness and real results.Continue reading...

A new digital turf war is being waged between traditional ad agencies and media companies.

Conde Nast is now offering its creative services unit, CND Studios, as an agency for Conde Nast clients and/or any client, no matter where the ad buy is being made. In fact, Conde recently created content for Kenneth Cole’s website, Facebook page and YouTube channel (such as the spot above).

Hearst Corp. is reportedly closing a deal to buy the digital marketing firm iCrossing, one of the last remaining independent agencies with search expertise.

The reason, reports AdAge: publishers are increasingly being asked by advertisers to build and tailor digital ads that don’t conform to traditional display ad standards. But do advertisers want one-stop shopping?Continue reading...

The life cycle of the successful business today, with "successful" defined by remaining on the S&P 500, is 18 years. That's less than two decades to launch, nurture and grow a company, compared with a lifespan of 30 years in 1983 and 57 years in 1958.

Those sobering stats come from Mark W. Johnson, whose new book is called "Seizing the White Space: Business Model Innovation for Growth and Renewal." Given that harsh reality, Johnson spells out why he believes the name of the game today is transformation: building a brand capable of shifting with the peripatetic tides of doing business in the 21st century. For Johnson, Amazon personifies the very model of that modern brand.

Since it launched with a splash in 1995, Amazon has grown to the largest online retailer in the world. From its roots as a Web-based bookstore, Amazon’s product line now includes movies, music, books (all digital or hard copies), plus computer software, video games, electronics, apparel, furniture, food, toys and a mind-boggling "much more." It operates standalone websites serving Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Japan, and China. But Bezos is not just after global domination.Continue reading...

Life is all about choices and Maine dairy farmers have decided consumers need another brand option in the organic milk market.Ten dairy farmers formed Maine's Own Organic Milk Co., MOOMilk for short, last year after their contracts weren't renewed by large milk distributor H.P. Hood LLC because of a slip in demand and a glut of organic milk in the market. Gluts are not uncommon for organic products, especially when price pressures are high and multiple farms come out of the three-year organic transition period simultaneously.

Regional player MOOMilk, competing with larger Dean Foods, Organic Valley, and Aurora Dairy, is an L3C, a controversial low-profit, limited-liability corporation that's eligible to receive grants and endowments the same way a cooperative or nonprofit can. The Maine Department of Agriculture helped set up the company, and Stonyfield Farm provided some start-up funding.Continue reading...

Sponsors flock to the Olympics because the games provide a worldwide platform for brand promotion. Implied in a sponsorship is a company's exclusivity in its brand category – and in the United States, that's something the US Olympic Committee vigorously defends.

Witness the current controversy surrounding the upcoming Winter Games. Television ads just released by Subway and Verizon Wireless feature references to the games – but neither advertiser is an official Olympic sponsor.Continue reading...

Though the steel industry endured a weak 2009, the Charlotte-based Nucor Corporation can boast that it has finally surpassed US Steel as the largest American steelmaker by sales – dealing the city of Pittsburgh, once synonymous with the steel industry, a devastating blow.

US Steel, as much an American institution as Ford or General Motors, saw its earnings sink as automakers descended into financial peril. However, Nucor’s latest earnings report proves that bad news can be good news if your competitor’s news is even worse.Continue reading...