A study released this week by the Advertising Specialty Institute says that advertising on promotional products beats out all forms of TV, radio and print advertising as the most cost-effective advertising medium available.

The study was done by interviewers who surveyed travelers in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Philadelphia. Respondents were asked if they had received any advertising specialties in the last 12 months and the majority were businesspeople over age 21.

Among key findings, results indicate that:

• 84% of people remember the advertiser on a product they receive.
• 42% have a more favorable impression of an advertiser after receiving an advertising specialty.
• Nearly one quarter, or 24%, indicate that they are more likely to do business with an advertiser on items they receive.
• Most respondents (62%) have done business with the advertiser on a product after receiving it.
• Writing instruments are the most commonly-owned advertising specialty, with 54% of respondents owning them, followed by shirts, caps and bags.
• The majority (81%) of promotional products were kept because they were considered useful.
• More than three-quarters of respondents have had their items for about seven months.
• Among wearables, bags were reported to be used most frequently, with respondents indicating that they use their bags on average nine times per month.
• Bags deliver the most impressions, with 1,038 impressions per month on average.
• The average cost-per-impression of an advertising specialty item is $0.004, making it less expensive per impression than nearly any other media. (According to Nielsen Media data, the CPI for a national magazine ad is $0.033; a newspaper ad is $0.0129; a prime time TV ad is $0.019; a cable TV ad is $0.007; a syndicated TV ad is $0.006; and a spot radio ad is $0.005)

Visit the Advertising Specialty Institute on the web at ASIcentral.com

In a recent BusinessWeek column, marketing editor Burt Helm describes how luxury brands have to tweak their message in a recession. Helm points out a recent Gallup survey where 49% of people making $90,000 or more a year rated economic conditions as “poor,” a 23-point increase since early September.

Luxury brands “tweaking their message” means high-end companies are being forced to point out the useful features and practical reasons to fork over $145 for eye cream or $3,500 for a washer-and-dryer set. Helm quotes Lexus’ North American marketing chief who describes the current economic climate as “a time to be more rational.”

Anyone can now reach audiences at MySpace using the social networking site’s new MyAds. MySpace describes their MyAds as being able to “HyperTarget” individuals based on interests and other demographic details noted in MySpace profiles, as well as analyzing users’ background themes and photos.

As Computerworld explains, “after an ad is created, MySpace reviews it to ensure that it meets the site’s terms of service and then launches the ad. After the ad goes live, MySpace also will provide a suite of analytic tools and key performance indicators noting the number of times an ad has been shown, the number of click-throughs and the running cost of a campaign, MySpace said. The advertiser is charged only when a user clicks on the ad, as opposed to when an ad is served to a user, according to MySpace.“

Read More:

MySpace MyAds: Target Ads to “Drinking” and “Partying”

MySpace, ‘My Ads’ Program Is Launched

My Ads adds something extra to MySpace

Advertising Age reports that “Magazine 300 (top 300 magazines in the U.S. by total gross revenue) ad pages in 2007 slid 1.3%, while circulation revenue fell 1.2%. But U.S. magazine employment last year edged up 0.7%.” However, publishers’ data show that digital ads nearly doubled. In 2006 the median percentage of magazine net revenue for digital ads was 5%, this grew to 9.75% in 2007. Tech magazines are leading the digital ad space, but consumer magazines are following suit.

Read full story

BusinessWeek ’s annual ranking of the 100 Best Global Brands

$3.75 and counting.

That’s a lot of money for a gallon of gas. For a lot of tourist destinations, it’s also a reason to target the home folks. A good reason.

The Maryland Tourism Office is one of a number of state offices that has decided to do something it hasn’t done in years: target the folks up the road in Philadelphia and just a handful of miles south in Washington, DC. It also turned its attention to residents of – Baltimore. As in Baltimore, Maryland.

Using the clever name Pretty.Close, Maryland is hyping everything from the glories of the Preakness to Baltimore’s spectacular harbor, aquarium and Ft. McHenry to, well, Marylanders. The working assumption is that the high price of gas won’t stop people from taking vacations it will just reign in their desire to go long distances.

The folks running Seattle’s Convention and Visitor’s Bureau are of the same mind as their Maryland counterparts. David Blandford, the Seattle director for the SCVB has taken the time to check the stats, finding that in previous summers like this one “we see more traffic in our own state.”

This is nothing more than the old adage about making lemonade when you find yourself stuck with a lemon. It’s also great PR sense as tourist bureaus in other locations from Las Vegas to Florida are concluding. In an interesting sign of the times, Palm Beach officials are zeroing in on Atlanta, a figurative hop, skip and a jump up the East Coast.

While the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corporation has gone as far as offering $50 gift cards to lure visitors from out of state if they book hotels through a local package, Massachusetts set its sights on community newspapers in close-at-hand New York, Connecticut and Rhode Island.

The world of PR even has a new term for these kind of holidays: “staycations.” The term is used increasingly by the media as it begins to zero in on stories about how the price of gas affects daily life in America, from the price of a gallon of milk to exactly what Americans are planning for their summer.

It’s actually a small PR bonanza of a sort for the tourist industry. But there will surely be questions. For starters, do the bleacher seats at Fenway Park in Boston come with sleeping bags and tents or can you just sleep inside the scoreboard? Now there’s a package deal for your average bear New Englander! Not bad PR for the home team either!

Baseball been berry, berry good to me.

So went the line from an old Saturday Night Live routine starring Garrett Morris as “Chico Escuela”, the lavishly paid immigrant ballplayer from some island country in the Caribbean.

Doubtless if you are handling the PR for an athlete summoned to testify before Congress on the use of steroids, you may shortly find out whether baseball will continue to be berry, berry good to your client – or not.

It helps, of course, if your client is telling the truth. The common assessment of those who saw the televised hearings with New York Yankee superstar Roger Clemens and Yankee trainer Brian MacNamee was that one of the two looked the assembled congressmen in the eye and, well, lied. Flat out.

Now what? Short of getting into some long form version of that classic sibling repartee when hauled up short by an angry Mom – “did so!” “did not!” – you have a real problem on your hands.

Our point here is not to pick sides. We have no idea who did what or didn’t. But the dilemma posed goes well beyond baseball. What do you do if your client suddenly finds they are in the middle of a very public moment – and they’re charged in some fashion with not telling the truth?

Obviously, telling the truth is not only the morally right thing to do, it’s critical for your client’s brand. Forbes.com has already suggested that whatever is the case with Clemens, his marketability has been destroyed by his involvement in the steroids controversy. While this episode comes sufficiently late in Clemens’ career that he presumably doesn’t need endorsements to feed his family, surely he is not pleased at the situation in which he finds himself.

Protecting the brand is the primary concern as firms represent clients to the public. Anything that takes the public’s attention from the fact that a client is in the business of selling the best burgers or beer or widgets is something that detracts. While there are surely cases that confirm the old wisdom about not caring what someone in the media says about a client as long as they spell the client’s name right, this is of little use if your client’s product is being fatally damaged.

The brand, the brand, the brand. Keeping your eye on that all important ball – first, last and always – can be berry, berry good for your client.

So you thought everybody in American PR, like everyone in America, was obsessed with the race for president? If you did, you would be wrong.

Obviously you never heard of the Michigan election. No, not THAT election in Michigan. I mean the election about the hottest thing going in Michigan – passing a state version of universal health care. You thought Florida was make or break for Giuliani? Maybe or maybe not, but it sure is just that for a proposal to roll back Florida property assessments. And don’t forget those hot button campaigns like the right to sell liquor in Colorado grocery stores, allow slots at the track in Maryland, and that perennial, changing term limits (again!) in California.

All of these efforts, and there are others, require as much organization and energy as any presidential campaign, if not more. Unlike a presidential campaign, where a candidate’s name recognition can blossom overnight (see: Mike Huckabee and Barack Obama) giving household name opponents the fits (see: Rudy Giuliani and Hillary Clinton), ballot issues like the ones above can have little or no recognition from the public. Particularly in the shadow of an attention-getting presidential campaign, trying to explain the pros and cons of an issue, generally an issue can be demanding.

Worse yet, this assumes that supporters have actually managed to get their favorite issue on the ballot at all. No issue just appears on an Election Day ballot. Like the candidates themselves, issues find their way onto the ballot because enthusiastic volunteers (OK, maybe some paid “volunteers” too) have spent endless hours rounding up signatures to put them there for your consideration. Press reports tell a story of heroic efforts by true believers. It is no small thing, for example, to garner 380,000 signatures for your favorite cause. Likewise, a simple press conference is not going to get your cause the kind of attention it needs when news directors are swamped with precious minutes for a newscast and stories pouring through the door on everything from Iraq to the presidential election to the latest freeway accident or house fire.

The Internet, as always, adds a whole other flavor to local issues. If you have a tax issue you are dealing with in your state, for example, there are groups both in Washington and around the country who may have both the shared interest and – even better – deeper pockets that can lend your cause a serious hand.

And you thought you only had to start an early campaign if you were running for the White House? Think again. Just as candidates start popping up in New Hampshire every four years – or even more – before the next presidential primary, so too must issue activists begin by understanding the election cycle of their own state or locality and get moving. The focus begins with the basics: what is the election date, what are the rules and how much time is there before you’re voters start streaming into the polls to give your side a yes or no answer?

So if you’ve got what you think is a hot issue that needs to be decided directly by the people in your state, that is if you’re lucky enough to live in one of the roughly 24 or less (check) states that permit ballot questions like these – well – what are you doing reading this? Time, as they say, is a’wasting.

Everyone in the PR business knows the drill, right? You have a client. They want a campaign. You spend some serious time with them and do the necessary research. Then you make your presentation, debate the finer points of difference and then get the campaign under way.

According to PR Week it seems the New York University Child Study Center, advised by Rubenstein Communications, went out with a campaign designed to bring attention to autism. The campaign featured “ransom notes”, with which the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network (ASAN) took immediate offense.

The implication that children had been “kidnapped” by autism was a source of controversy that managed to shut down the entire campaign barely into its intended four months run. It is surely a reminder when dealing with issues of public health that an acute sensitivity is demanded that is not necessarily needed when selling widgets. Rubenstein is a legendary first class firm with a list of premiere clients. Doubtless they will recover what surely was an inadvertent fumble and bring about a better understanding of autism to folks in the New York area.

But the question is: what’s the lesson here? While the story is somewhat unclear, it would appear that there was at a minimum a lack of coordination between NYU, Rubenstein and the autism community as represented by ASAN. The autism advocates, it seems, were either not in on the design of the campaign or had no input when it was taken to the runway and readied for take-off.

So if the lesson is to have the client on board when a campaign is designed, much less when it is launched into the public arena, when a glitch occurs – and what happened here certainly sounds like more than a glitch – how does a firm repair the damage? By continuing to work with a client to deliver ultimate satisfaction.

Launching a PR campaign is not unlike launching the space shuttle. There is always a checklist to be followed, with each item to be checked upon completion. If something basic is missed – and launching the autism campaign without the apparent support of ASAN would seem to be basic in this case – the campaign, like a launch rocket, can explode very much in public view.

It’s a risk a PR office can’t afford, even when they are as big, prestigious and clearly as competent as Rubenstein.

Absolut’s new advertising/marketing campaign is called “In an Absolut World,” developed by TBWA/Chiat/Day. “Absolut World’s” PR launch in New York City spanned a week beginning May 14. The launch was a series of daily promotional giveaways (such as coffee and muffins one day, round-trip MetroCards, and rickshaw rides) that were intended to make “New York a better place to live for a week.” Consumers then spoke with street teams about their idea of what an “Absolut World” was all about. The New York campaign was a great way to interact with all types of consumers – and I recognize our colleagues at Ketchum for developing this PR component to find out what consumers believe constitutes an “Absolut World.”

TIP: For smaller businesses, guerrilla tactics like this (like any PR/media event) can be expensive and extremely labor intensive. A less expensive alternative may have been to bag the daily promotional gifts, and go at various times to bars/taverns/restaurants and speak with adults about their vision of an “Absolut World.” Ultimately you want to target specific product users and not all the opinions out “on the street” may matter if they’re not the ones potentially buying the product. If freebies were necessary to yield responses, why not use rebate coupons to also help bump sales?

The April 27, 2007, New York Times reported that “On Planet Absolut, for instance, men can get pregnant, the Curse of the Billy Goat is lifted from the hapless Chicago Cubs and the garish billboards in Times Square are replaced by masterpiece paintings. Lying leaders are exposed by their Pinocchio noses, protesters and the police wage street fights with feather pillows, nice Manhattan apartments cost $300 a month and it takes only one exercise lap in a pool for a fatty to become a hottie.”

Here’s a glimpse of a couple of the new print ads.

This new ad campaign is a major risk for Absolut. Their previous distinctive “bottle” spots ran for over 25 years. While two and a half decades might seem like a longtime, the ads were undeniably recognized instantly – and arguably the essence of the Absolut brand. When your ads don’t even need the name of your company (just an outline of the bottle) you’ve achieved unparalleled brand awareness.

Absolut uses no graphics, drawings, animated characters, etc. on the bottle – only text. Surprisingly the symbol of their brand emerged as the bottle’s outline – and the advertising kept the brand alive. Now they’ve decided to give up that unmistakable graphic for text and odd, juxtaposed images.

Anyone think it’s a smart move?

John Lindsay.

Jane Byrne.

Marion Barry.

If you don’t remember these names here’s a brief reminder. They have in common two things: first, they were all mayors of their respective cities of New York, Chicago and Washington, DC. And second, their careers as mayor pivoted around snowstorms.

In the case of Lindsay and Barry, both were already mayor when, in different years, horrendous snow swirled through their cities. For Lindsay it was his very first year as mayor, for Barry it was well into his term. In the case of Jane Byrne, she was a decided underdog in a primary challenge to the incumbent Mayor Michael Bilandic when the snow hit.

In all three cases the inept response of those in charge abruptly changed the political dynamic. Lindsay, the glamorous fresh-faced new hope of the Republican Party, sat atop an almost paralyzed snow-cleaning operation that left the city’s outer boroughs buried. By the time Lindsay had realized what was happening the voters of Queens had resolved to dump the would-be future president like a ton of snow. While they failed to oust him, Lindsay was so damaged he lost his Republican primary to a little-known Staten Island State Senator and barely survived as a Liberal Party nominee. His once bright future in national politics melted away.

Barry, unheeding of weather reports, sauntered to warmer climes for the Super Bowl, his televised presence amidst the swaying palm trees infuriating DC residents trapped beneath feet of snow, the DC road crews completely useless. Piled on top of other problems involving a powdered substance, Barry was soon an ex-mayor.

The snow factor worked in reverse for Byrne. The blizzard struck Chicago Democrats were so irked that they did the unthinkable and dumped Mayor Bilandic for Byrne.

The lesson in all of this, of course, is that when the snow comes the guy in charge needs to be in charge. And seen to be in charge – one of the most vital lessons of communication.

Both Pennsylvania and its state capital of Harrisburg just had a terrific snow storm this last week. Only when a state trooper on his personal detail informed popular Governor Ed Rendell that angry drivers were besieging the Governor’s detail with tales of being stranded on Pennsylvania Interstates did he realize his administration had seriously fouled things up. With snow clogging the streets of Harrisburg, essentially shutting down the state capital, a TV news crew knocked on the door of the Mayor Steven Reed’s home – only to find he was out of town.

Oops.

A flurry of activity ensued.

Can you say snowjob?

Over the weekend a voter at a New Hampshire “town meeting” for Presidential aspirant Hillary Rodham Clinton asked THE question. THE question of course is a call for an explanation of Hillary’s vote in favor of the Resolution authorizing the use of military force against Iraq—the start of the Iraq War.

What’s interesting is not that THE question was asked, but who asked it. The question came from a citizen, a voter in New Hampshire’s first in the nation Presidential Primary. It didn’t come from the media.

We track the media and find it interesting that THE question hasn’t been asked much by the media, either national or local reporters covering the race for small town papers in Iowa, New Hampshire and other early decision states.

Undoubtedly part of the reason is that Senator Clinton’s handlers are keeping her away from rough and tumble give and take interviews and in ‘controlled environments” like the town hall meeting she hosted over the weekend.

But does anyone really doubt that there’s another reason? Isn’t the national media giving the junior Senator from New York a free pass on the compelling issue of the early campaign??

It’s not just the vote that needs some ‘splainin.’ Take a look at the remarks Hillary made on the floor of the Senate during debate on the Resolution (October, 2002) and the remarks she made earlier this month. Amazing. Even her husband would have a hard time parsing those words.

Does Hillary get a free pass?

The Adult Swim’s Aqua Teen Hunger Force promotional stunt that shut down bridges and highways in and around Boston was a bomb from the start. I mean, come on, guerilla marketing is one thing but thinking like a guerilla is another. In this post-9/11 era, this is about as close to shouting FIRE in a theater as you can come and not go to jail. (As of yet the apes who planted the ‘devices’ are still charged with a crime and Turner has ponied-up $2 million).

So, what does Turner Broadcasting do to fix bad marketing… they try for some good PR… to the tune of $1 million to the city and state and another $1 million in “goodwill funds”. For that money, they could have passed out $5.00 bills to everyone in Boston with a note that read, “Please watch Adult Swim”.