This Bloomberg story about how classic, long-lived toy lines like LEGO, Star Wars, My Little Pony and others are seeing sales fall has a lot of good reasons to explain what’s happening. Discussed in the report are things like price points, changing consumer preferences and more. The comes on the heels of retail toy giant … Continue reading The Other, Cultural Reasons Toy Sales Are Falling
Quick Takes: Content Marketing and Media News for 1/6/18
The Big Story The death of brick-and-mortar retail is coming about because fashion and culture are curated and discoverable on social media now, not exclusively by hitting the mall. And while the retail industry may be fine as a whole, stories are closing twice as fast as they open. That’s going to hit people who … Continue reading Quick Takes: Content Marketing and Media News for 1/6/18
Dollars
So if we finished all our Christmas shopping two weeks ago does that mean our spending won't be counted in the annual hand-wringing over retail sales figures? Probably not, but it should be. That's just one small reason why the news is broken, because all these breathless stories over the state of the economy don't … Continue reading Dollars
Marketing Madness in 60 Seconds: 5/29/09
Advertising The CW is launching a campaign for their new fall shows that will acknowledge the current variations on the idea of "talking about" a show. The ads will feature copy such as "TV to blog about" and "TV to text about" and more. If you ask me the campaign says more about The CW's … Continue reading Marketing Madness in 60 Seconds: 5/29/09
Marketing Madness in 60 Seconds: 5/1/09
Advertising/Marketing I have to love the story that ABC has some sort of super-secret metric for their advertising that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that those ads lead directly to sales for the advertisers. Unfortunately they can't prove it because advertisers are reluctant to share numbers on the resulting sales. Pretty sure I … Continue reading Marketing Madness in 60 Seconds: 5/1/09
Marketing Madness in 60 Seconds: 2/20/09
Media: A study of journalists shows that 60 percent of them now contribute to a blog or website, with a third of them just getting started in the last year. I'm assuming this means something beyond just having a column repurposed online. More talk about putting mainstream news content behind a pay wall, including news … Continue reading Marketing Madness in 60 Seconds: 2/20/09