Posted by truecreek on March 5, 2010 under More Dam News | 
By: Julia Boorstin
“Alice in Wonderland” opens in theaters today, accompanied by Disney’s most wide-ranging array of consumer products ever, chasing an unprecedented broad audience.
Tim Burton’s 3-D “Alice” follows the classic character years after her first visit to Wonderland, so it makes sense that Disney would go after an older audience.
So now Disney has adult women in its cross hairs: in addition to the usual range of kids toys, games and apparel, it’s licensing “Alice” for products for adults.
Disney’s going grown-up and high end.
For more on the potential Consumer Products Tea Party, check here.
Posted by truecreek on March 2, 2010 under More Dam News |
NEW YORK, NY – February 24, 2010 – U.S. ad spending declined nine percent in 2009, according to preliminary figures released today by The Nielsen Company. Spending fell an estimated $11.6 billion to a total of $117 billion last year. The figures continue a trend of at least six straight quarters of negative growth in the ad industry, but it’s a trend that shows evidence of slowing down. In the previous two quarters, Nielsen reported declines of 15.4% and 11.5%.
“Fourth quarter ad spending was down just two percent year-over-year, and that helped soften the full-year decline,” said Terrie Brennan, senior VP for new business development at The Nielsen Company. “In fact, most of the top advertisers showed increased spending late in the year. These are encouraging signs for an ad market that’s still trying to stop the bleeding.”
Ad spend declines are easing up even in print media, which have taken more than their share of lumps over the last few years. National Newspapers were down 13.7% last year, but it’s an improvement from the -21.6% pace that Nielsen reported through the first three quarters of 2009. Local Newspapers finished relatively strong in 2009, cutting its reported 14% decline in ad revenue through the third quarter to -10.4% by year’s end.
Spanish Language Cable TV (+32.2%) and Cable TV (+14.8%) stood out as the top-gaining media in 2009. Free-Standing Insert Coupon (+11.5) was the only other medium to show significant year-over-year growth. Internet (+0.1%) remained essentially flat.
African-American TV (a subset of network, cable, and syndicated) enjoyed a 13.8% increase in spending year-over-year. Spanish language TV (cable and network combined) fell 0.4%.
Posted by truecreek on March 1, 2010 under More Dam News |
Interesting Pew Study.
by Kristen Purcell, Lee Rainie, Amy Mitchell, Tom Rosenstiel, Kenny Olmstead.
The overwhelming majority of Americans (92%) use multiple platforms to get their daily news, according to a new survey conducted jointly by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project and Project for Excellence in Journalism.
The Internet is now the third most-popular news platform, behind local and national television news and ahead of national print newspapers, local print newspapers and radio. Getting news online fits into a broad pattern of news consumption by Americans; six in ten (59%) get news from a combination of online and offline sources on a typical day.
The internet and mobile technologies are at the center of the story of how people’s relationship to news is changing. In today’s new multi-platform media environment, news is becoming portable, personalized, and participatory:
* Portable: 33% of cell phone owners now access news on their cell phones.
* Personalized: 28% of Internet users have customized their home page to include news from sources and on topics that particularly interest them.
* Participatory: 37% of Internet users have contributed to the creation of news, commented about it, or disseminated it via postings on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter.
In addition, people use their social networks and social networking technology to filter, assess, and react to news. And they use traditional email and other tools to swap stories and comment on them. Among those who get news online, 75% get news forwarded through email or posts on social networking sites and 52% share links to news with others via those means.
Despite all of this online activity, the typical online news consumer routinely uses just a handful of news sites and does not have a particular favorite. And overall, Americans have mixed feelings about this “new” news environment. Over half (55%) say it is easier to keep up with news and information today than it was five years ago, but 70% feel the amount of news and information available from different sources is overwhelming.
Take a look at the study and download it here.
Posted by truecreek on February 24, 2010 under More Dam News |
By Brendan I. Koerner.
Your random tweets about Android apps and last night’s Glee are stifling the economic recovery. At least, that’s the buzz among efficiency mavens, who seem to spend all their time adding up microblogging’s fiscal toll. Last year, Nucleus Research warned that Facebook shaves 1.5 percent off total office productivity; a Morse survey estimated that on-the-job social networking costs British companies $2.2 billion a year.
But for knowledge workers charged with transforming ideas into products — whether gadgets, code, or even Wired articles — goofing off isn’t the enemy. In fact, regularly stepping back from the project at hand can be essential to success. And social networks are particularly well suited to stoking the creative mind.
Studies that accuse social networks of reducing productivity assume that time spent microblogging is time strictly wasted. But that betrays an ignorance of the creative process. Humans weren’t designed to maintain a constant focus on assigned tasks. We need periodic breaks to relieve our conscious minds of the pressure to perform — pressure that can lock us into a single mode of thinking. Musing about something else for a while can clear away the mental detritus, letting us see an issue through fresh eyes, a process that creativity researchers call incubation. “People are more successful if we force them to move away from a problem or distract them temporarily,” observe the authors of Creativity and the Mind, a landmark text in the psychology and neuroscience of creativity. They found that regular breaks enhance problem-solving skills significantly, in part by making it easier for workers to sift through their memories in search of relevant clues.
That doesn’t mean that employees should feel free to play Minesweeper at will, however. According to Don Ambrose, a Rider University professor who studies creative intelligence, incubation is most effective when it involves exposing the mind to entirely novel information rather than just relieving mental pressure. This encourages creative association, the mashing together of seemingly unrelated concepts — a key step in the creative process.
More about How Twitter and Facebook Make Us More Productive here.
