Ad Age Video

NEW ORLEANS (AdAge.com) -- The downsized American Association of Advertising Agencies' annual media conference was an affair nearly as somber as it was small. Speakers did their best to pump up industry morale from the stage but the fear among attendees was palpable throughout the corridors and quiet gathering places of the event. In one of its more curious sessions, a series of consumer panelists raved about the value of various forms of media in their lives -- even as executives in the audience bemoaned their inability to sufficiently monetize many of those digital formats.

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Devastated by a massive consumer pull-back from peanut-containing foods, the country's peanut farmers are launching a crisis-management advertising campaign. The effort, which kicked off in Grand Central Terminal this week, follows the peanut-related salmonella outbreak believed to have killed nine, sickened more than 600 and triggered a recall of 3,000 different food products. The National Peanut Board will be using print, TV, outdoor and radio ads in an effort to rebuild consumer confidence in peanut butter and other products.

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Talk of restricting behavioral targeting practices is heavy in the air these days. But what if Generation Y -- the first demographic to grow up totally immersed in the digital life -- actually WANTS to be behaviorally targeted by marketers? Speaking at the recent OMMA Behavioral conference, Forrester Research's Emily Riley made a strong case for this idea. She even suggests the creation of a web portal that would enable Gen Y-ers to post their wants in an organized manner -- so appropriate marketers could more quickly and efficiently respond to them.

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- One of Time Inc.'s most successful digital features grew out of the discovery that online content related to hair drew more traffic than any other topic. Appearing at the recent AlwaysOn OnMedia NYC conference, Senior Vice President for Digital, Amanda Kanaga said the company is looking for creative technology firms that can help it create more consumer tools like the wildly popular "Hollywood Hair" app it developed with Facebook.

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Gargantuan promotional icons are nothing new to Times Square but few generate the curious mix of emotions triggered by a giant human colon. But there it was last week, a 20-foot long inflatable organ beckoning consumers to enter and explore its diseased insides. It was all part of a colorectal cancer awareness campaign conducted by the Prevent Cancer Foundation and pharmaceutical giant Sanofi-Aventis.

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Warner Music Group is incubating a non-profit royalty-collection agency called Choruss that assumes digital piracy will never be effectively controlled. Instead, Choruss hopes to convince universities and ISPs to collect a blanket music license fee from their network users. That revenue would then be funneled to music owners as royalties. The Choruss concept has drawn fire. Music industry pundits characterize it as a new form of taxation. Choruss president Jim Griffin jabbed BACK at those critics at this week's Digital Music Forum East in New York.

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- It's long been a frustration as well a revenue limitation for ad agencies that digital marketing is so dominated by direct sales pitches rather than broad-based brand-building strategies. And the Interactive Advertising Bureau is now making that issue a major action priority. At its annual conference in Orlando this week, CEO Randall Rothenberg called on marketers to fundamentally re-think their approach. At the same time, the IAB is launching a new advisory board and an online creativity bootcamp to show them exactly how it's done.

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Pepsico's Tropicana brand is junking the new orange juice package design it only just launched weeks ago. The beverage marketer is switching back to its old design whose centerpiece is an orange skewered by a drinking straw. In this video recorded at a press conference five weeks ago, Arnell Group CEO Peter Arnell vigorously defends his agency's carton design that has now been withdrawn from the market.

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Marc Cenedella is one of those rare marketers who's doing well as a result of the recession. He's CEO of The Ladders, an online job site that exclusively lists jobs that pay $100,000 or more. The company is awash in new business from the droves of top executives recently dumped by corporations coast to coast. In fact, The Ladders expects to grow its business by 60% during the next ten months. No wonder Cenedella smiles so much during this interview.

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Although his non-profit Wikipedia made him best known as the selfless guru of wisdom-of-the-crowd publishing, Jimmy Wales has a second site designed to make as much money as possible. Called Wikia.com, it has become a sprawling universe of thousands of wikis on nearly every imaginable subject. It now logs more than 500 million page views a month and has growing stable of blue-chip advertisers. Many marketers have begun to explore wikis as vehicles for product promotion. But, as Wales explains in this ten-minute interview with Ad Age digital editor Abbey Klaassen, several deeply-ingrained flaws in marketers' thinking often causes their wikis to fail.

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Declaring his company's intent to "democratize print publishing," Hewlett-Packard's CMO heavily hyped the new MagCloud.com site to the Interactive Advertising Bureau conference in Orlando. In a keynote that promoted several of HP's recently-launched offerings, Michael Mendenhall appeared to put special emphasis on the game-changing potential of MagCloud. The site enables anyone to produce a full-color, ad-supported print magazine and make it available -- via on-demand printing and an e-commerce system -- to anyone else.

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- The widgets and other applications that were little more than digital window dressing a few years ago have exploded into a vast new advertising venue. Many apps now draw millions of users each day at the same time they've become a broadly networked social medium in their own right. And, that, in turn, has given rise to a new sort of apps-only media-buying agency.

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Could Kindle-like devices put the KABOOM! on the comic book business? That's the fear of some publishers who see the hand-held digital book readers as a DIRECT THREAT to their viability. Sales of paper-based graphic novels are actually up 5% but at the recent Comic Con New York, industry analysts cast a wary eye at electronic reading devices. They agreed that comic book fans would be early adopters of the new technology but they explained why that could be devastating for the industry.

NEW YORK (AdAge) -- A panel of seasoned Ad Age newsroom coffee junkies surprised themselves Wednesday when they were unable to tell the difference between Starbucks' new instant coffee and the chain's in-store brew. The blind comparison taste test was conducted with some of the first samples of Via, the "soluble" powdered coffee Starbucks is launching this month. Watch the four-minute video of the test in progress.

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- We may be suffering through what is possibly the worst economic crisis in the modern history of the magazine industry, but Greg Sullivan is not deterred. He is plowing $10 million of his own money into the Fall launch of a new ad-supported travel magazine called "Afar." Making his project all the more interesting is the fact that he has no experience in publishing. He previously made a lot of money in the arcade game and car rental businesses.