Advertising in Regional Parenting and Family Magazines

When it comes to advertising your products and services, regional parenting magazines may be one of the best kept secrets in town. They present the advertiser with an opportunity to speak directly to an attentive and targeted audience, while offering low-cost ad rates. No doubt, the perfect small business advertising alternative.

When you reach parents during their child rearing years, you are reaching a very motivated group of consumers who are at the highest acquisition stage of their lives. Large corporations are keenly aware of the purchasing power of this influential parenting market, which is why they place $90,000 display ads in the most popular mainstream parenting publications month-after-month.

However, they routinely ignore the regional parent and family magazines because these magazines don't have large enough circulation. This creates a wonderful opportunity for a small business with a limited advertising budget, who can use these regional family-oriented publications to reach out to passionate parents across the country. And the best part, is that the advertising rates for these local regional publications are infinitesimally lower than any mainstream parent magazine.

As consumers, parents and grandparents across the U.S. and Canada are demographically linked together by an imperative desire to do what's right for their families, and to buy the best services and products for their children. Parenting magazine readers actually read the ads in these magazines. In fact, surveys conducted across the country have shown that 74% of these readers say they read the advertisements in the parenting publications most of the time or all of the time, and most of these readers use these ads to make their buying decisions.

You don't need to be a marketing genius to figure out the potential here. The real question is, does your product or service fit this market? Let's examine some of the readers' characteristics and lifestyle. First of all, with the exception of some major magazines of nationwide distribution, regional parenting magazines are usually distributed for free to their readers. These readers make shopping decisions for their families and for themselves.

• 78% are women (52% of them work full-time)
• 75% are mothers, 20% are expecting mothers, and 33% are planning to have more children
• 78% have children under the age of 6
• 57% have children in grade school
• 38% have at least one preteen or teenager at home
• 32% have at least one parent who works at home
• Average household income is $68,000 (national average)

These are busy, time-starved parents who are 80% either college graduates or have some college background. The type of products and services they have purchased in the past and plan to purchase in the future includes everything from vacation packages, financial investments and services, to children books and clothing, children toys, home furnishings, work from home opportunities, health services, recorded music, electronics, and much more.

Circulation for these publications range anywhere from a few thousand to several hundred thousand per issue. You can target specific geographic regions of the U.S. and Canada, which is an ideal way to test your ads, or advertise at a nationwide level. And display advertising prices in some cases could start as low as $100, with many publications offering low-cost marketplace and classified ad sections.

In addition, most of these publications offer several theme-based supplemental editions throughout the year, giving the advertiser extra options to focus their message. Regional parenting and family magazines offer the small business a golden opportunity to reach a targeted market at affordable rates. It's time you explore how it could work for you.

http://www.adguides.com offers magazine advertising directories for niche demographic markets. For more information on the parenting market please visit: http://adguides.com/parenting-advertising.html.

Rory Sutherland: Life lessons from an advertising man

Advertising adds value to a product by changing our perception, rather than the product itself. Rory Sutherland, from TED Evil, makes the daring assertion that a change in perceived value can be just as satisfying as what we consider “real” value -- and his conclusion has interesting consequences for how we look at life. An absolute must see.

Varuna D Jani Fine Jewellery: Seeing is believing

Most newspapers in India have a low screen. Therefore they cannot reproduce the intricate designs of Varuna D Jani’s line of jewellery. The top line research threw an insight that when customers walked into Varuna D Jani’s store and saw the exquisite designs, they more often than not bought the product. The brief was therefore to encourage more walk ins through a series of posters.

Client: Varuna D Jani Fine Jewellery

Ad Agency: IBD Brands (Mumbai, India)

Art Director: Mandar Wadke

Copywriter: Sunil Shibad

How to make music with cornflakes, squeaky toys and nail clippers

The Spaghetti Western Orchestra are 5 Australian musicians that perform music from some of the films that made Clint Eastwood a star. Movies like The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, For A Few Dollars More and Once Upon a Time in The West were all scored by composer Ennio Morricone.

Their quirky set of instruments include asthma inhalers; rubber bands, tree branches, rubber gloves, cornflakes, squeaky toys, rubber-gloves, bicycle pumps, nail clippers and many more. Simply brilliant.

1. The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

2. Once Upon A Time In The West

3. Fistful Of Dollar Medley

4. Chi Mai

5. Medley

Is this the future of air travel?

Lynx, the male grooming brand sold by Unilever, is sold on the basis of sex appeal. Television viewers are being introduced by a new “sex appeal” stunt: the launch of a fictitious airline, Lynx Jet.

“Introducing the future of air travel. Lynx Jet”. Get on. Get off.”

How to dance without legs

David Toole of CandoCo Dance Company compels attention. Propped on his hands, head lowered between his powerful shoulders, his gaze has a burning intensity. He disappears below the waist, unburdened by legs: his arms are his means of locomotion and of dancing, with or without a wheelchair.

Physically, David Toole is half a person, yet he mesmerized me with his strength, skill and musicality. His dance has come on in leaps and bounds - except that he does not leap conventionally but on long, muscular arms.

No one watching would describe Toole as physically challenged. David succeeds in shattering our preconceptions about the handicapped and is truly an inspiration.

Invisible speakers

One company making some big buzz at the DEMO 2009 conference is Emo Labs, which revealed their “invisible speakers” to the applause of the audience. The concept: instead of sound emerging from giant speakers, they come from thin, clear membranes that could completely redefine how you watch TV or use a computer.

The technology they’ve developed is nothing short of impressive. Dubbed “Edge Motion,” (the long form of Emo), the technology makes sound with sideways forces on an invisible membrane. This vibration creates a full range sound that, from our vantage point, isn’t distinguishable from even the regular speaker.

Here Jason Carlson, the CEO of Emo Labs, to give us a video demo. Be sure to have your audio on for the full effect:

More for audiophiles:

Woody Norris shows off two of his inventions that treat sound in new ways, and talks about his untraditional approach to inventing and education. As he puts it: "Almost nothing has been invented yet." So -- what's next?

PhotoSketch: The greatest graphic program since PhotoShop

What if you could draw some stick figures on a screen and somehow magically create a beautiful image montage?

PhotoSketch: Internet Image Montage from tao chen on Vimeo.

Their abstract:

We present a system that composes a realistic picture from a simple freehand sketch annotated with text labels. The composed picture is generated by seamlessly stitching several photographs in agreement with the sketch and text labels; these are found by searching the Internet. Although online image search generates many inappropriate results, our system is able to automatically select suitable photographs to generate a high quality composition, using a filtering scheme to exclude undesirable images.

We also provide a novel image blending algorithm to allow seamless image composition. Each blending result is given a numeric score, allowing us to find an optimal combination of discovered images. Experimental results show the method is very successful; we also evaluate our system using the results from two user studies.

Here is a link to the source code for the project if you want to tinker with it.

Mind-blowing, right?

Swedish Armed Forces: What does it take to be a Swedish Army officer?

Do you have what it takes to be a Swedish Army officer? I wish I could do a series like these simple, intelligent and engaging TV commercials for the Indian Army.

Telephone:

Dog:

Dot:

Machine:

WMJX FM: Baby, Argument, Harvard Square and Home

These spots for WMJX, circa 1987, reinvented radio station advertising. Three other FM stations played the same genre of music.

Target market: Baby Boomers. Simple, yet powerful execution truly understood the human condition, and launched WMJX into the number 1 position overnight. And they've remained number 1 to this day. Job well done, Keith.

Baby:

Argument:

Harvard Square:

Home:

Client: WMJX 106.7 FM

Ad Agency: Keith Lane Creative

Creative Team: Keith Lane

Steve Jobs is Big Brother

Back in 1984, IBM was Big Brother—dominating one boring world of beige and mainframes—and Steve Jobs was the rebel. In 2009, Apple and Jobs are the Big Brother of media in a world of white earbuds.

At least, that's what DoubleTwist—a company that makes software to use iTunes with any media device—thinks. That's why they turned the famous "1984" SuperBowl commercial against Apple and Steve Jobs himself.

The original Apple "1984" ad was commissioned by Steve Jobs to agency Chiat/Day. The ad was written by Steve Hayden and art directed by Brent Thomas, with creative direction by Jobs' pal Lee Clow. The Apple board didn't want to air "1984", but at the end Jobs got it in the SuperBowl, becoming the most famous and cost-effective commercial in the history of TV advertising. It featured a nameless heroine sporting a t-shirt with the Macintosh Picasso icon, being chased by policemen who are unable to stop her as she throws a hammer against a screen that has a large number of people idiotized.

Of course, in the original ad, the man in the screen is a representation of IBM, and the Mac manages to break the Big Brother brain washing. In the DoubleTwist ad, however, the man in the screen is Steve Jobs. And, supposedly, this October 6 they will get all of the hypnotized fanboys out of the Kool-Aid loop. Good luck with that, people. [TechCrunch]

How to build Rome in a day

They came, they saw, they took pictures. And thanks to them -- about 150,000 Flickr users -- a team of computer scientists built Rome in a day.

Using nearly half a million Flickr photos of Rome, Venice, and the Croatian coastal city of Dubrovnik, a team of computer scientists at the University of Washington's Graphics and Imaging Laboratory assembled digital models of the three cities in 3-D.

Their work builds on the algorithms used in Microsoft's Photosynth, which were invented at the same lab, but it's like Photosynth on steroids.

A series of videos on the project Web site lets visitors fly through landmarks like St. Peter's Basilica, the Colosseum and Venice's San Marco Square. For much smaller Dubrovnik, you can see the whole city, including mountains in the distance.

Each video includes clusters of small diamond shapes, which represent each photographer and his or her vantage point.

The team built a new algorithm that proceeds in two steps -- first, by matching the photos by what they had in common, puzzle-style, and then by determining the scene and each photographer's pose. They also designed new software that can more quickly solve the type of large math problems that exist in 3-D reconstruction.

It took 500 computer processors 13 hours to match 150,000 photos for Rome's landmarks, and eight more hours to construct a 3-D image of them. Venice involved 250,000 images, which took 27 hours to match and 38 hours to reconstruct. By contrast, using the algorithms on which Photosynth is based, it would have taken 500 processors at least a year to match 250,000 photos.

Dubrovnik had fewer photos, so matching only took about five hours, but the reconstruction ate up almost 18 hours.

It stands to reason that more photos would take more time, but there were so many similarities among Rome's photos that it was simpler to put them all together into individual landmarks. The team found clumps of photos that went together, yielding fine detail of the front of the Trevi Fountain, for instance. The Colosseum had 2,000 images. For Dubrovnik, however, the team had just 4,600 photos corresponding to the entire "old city" portion, which comprises several narrow streets and tall buildings.

The top 50 websites of 2009

The recently released list of 2009's top websites from Time Magazine provides a peek into the diverse mix of educational, commerce, entertainment and practical tools that help web users stay organized, share information and quench their ever-increasing thirst for knowledge, information and immediacy, MarketingCharts reports.

While many of the top 20 sites on Time's "Top 50" list - chosen by Time editors - are useful tools that help web surfers stay ahead of clutter (popurls, Flickr, Metafilter, OpenTable, Kayak), many present formidable attempts to circumvent, supplant or complement traditional media.

Voice-over-IP provider Skype, for instance, helps users bypass traditional phone service, while Hulu enables its audience view favorite TV shows from days gone by.

A good number of sites on the list represent direct attempts to compete with category-leading websites. The Wolfram|Alpha search engine has its sights on Google, while ShopGoodwill.com and Craiglook - a Craigslist RSS feed aggregator - are aimed at those who seek no-frills alternatives to eBay.

Other sites, such as Academic Earth, provide a glimpse into the world of academia at a level previously off-limits to all but the elite, while CaliforniaCoastline gives geography buffs a no-frills look at a meticulously mapped section of the US.

The top 50 websites of 2009:

1. Flickr
2. California Coastline
3. Delicious
4. Metafilter
5. popurls
6. Twitter
7. Skype
8. Boing Boing
9. Academic Earth
10. OpenTable
11. Google
12. YouTube
13. Wolfram|Alpha
14. Hulu
15. Vimeo
16. Fora TV
17. Craiglook
18. Shop Goodwill
19. Amazon
20. Kayak
21. Netflix
22. Etsy
23. PropertyShark.com
24. Redfin
25. Wikipedia
26. Internet Archive
27. Kiva
28. ConsumerSearch
29. Metacritic
30. Pollster
31. Facebook
32. Pandora and Last.fm
33. Musicovery
34. Spotify
35. Supercook
36. Yelp
37. Visuwords
38. CouchSurfing
39. BabyNameWizard.com's NameVoyager
40. Mint
41. TripIt
42. Aardvark
43. drop.io
44. Issuu
45. Photosynth
46. OMGPOP
47. WorldWideTelescope
48. Fonolo
49. Get High Now
50. Know Your Meme

We do not serve woman

A funny poster for a pub.

How to dress an elephant

Maharaja: The Splendour of the India's Royal Courts'opens this autumn at the Victoria and Albert Museum. The exhibition features a life-size model of an elephant in procession.

To find out how to dress an elephant for a royal procession, V&A staff observed Ramu, a freelance elephant, being adorned with textiles, howdah and elephant jewelery belonging to the Maharana of Mewar.

With kind permission of the Maharana of Mewar Charitable Foundation.

How to Dress an Elephant from Victoria and Albert Museum on Vimeo.

Leo Burnett: When to take my name off the door

Leo Burnett Inc. is one of the most renowned agencies in the world. They earned their reputation serving one key philosophy: that nothing could replace the marketing firm’s charge of “being the spirit of the client’s brand.” Coupled with a firm understanding of what it took for each client to get and keep their customers, Leo Burnett was also known for the quality of their creative work and eventually earned the responsibility of brands like Kellogg’s and McDonalds.

Founder Leo Burnett recognized that the industry was in danger of selling its soul out long ago. One of his famous speeches, “When to Take My Name Off the Door”, delivered on December 1, 1967, was based on that very fear:

He knew where the industry was going. And sure enough, it’s there—probably worse than he thought it could be.

Tip of the hat to Fame Foundry.

Transcript: Leo Burnett: When to take my name off the door

"Somewhere along the line, after I’m finally off the premises, you – or your successors – may want to take my name off the premises, too.

You may want to call yourselves " Twain, Rogers, Sawyer and Finn, Inc."….. or "Ajax Advertising" or something.

That will certainly be OK with me – if it’s good for you.

But let me tell you when I might demand that you take my name off the door.

That will be the day when you spend more time trying to make money and less time making advertising – our kind of advertising.

When you forget that the sheer fun of ad making and the lift you get out of it – the creative climate of the place – should be as important as money to the very special breed of writers and artists and business professionals who compose this company of ours – and make it tick.

When you lose that restless feeling that nothing you do is ever quite good enough.

When you lose your itch to the job well for it’s sake – regardless of the client, or money, or the effort it takes.

When you lose your passion for thoroughness…you hatred of loose ends.

When you stop reaching the manner, the overtones, the marriage of words and pictures that produce the fresh, the memorable and the believable effect.

When you stop rededicating yourselves every day to the idea that better advertising is what the Leo Burnett Company is about.

When you are no longer what Thoreau called "a corporation with a conscience" – which means to me, a corporation of conscientious men and women.

When you begin to compromise your integrity – which has always been the heart’s blood – the very guts of this agency.

When you stoop to convenient expediency and rationalize yourselves into acts of opportunism – for the sake of a fast buck.

When you show the slightest sign of crudeness, inappropriateness or smart –aleckness – and you lose that subtle sense of the fitness of things.

When your main interest becomes a matter of size just to be big - rather that good, hard, wonderful work.

When your outlook narrows down to the number of windows – from zero to five – in the walls of your office.

When you lose your humility and become big-short wisenheimers…. a little bit too big for your boots.

When the apples come down to being just apples for eating (or for polishing) – no longer part of our tone or personality.

When you disprove of something, and start tearing the hell out of the man who did it rather than the work itself.

When you stop building on strong and vital ideas, and start a routine production line.

When you start believing that, in the interest of efficiency, a creative spirit and the urge to create can be delegated and administrated, and forget that they can only be nurtured, stimulated, and inspired.

When you start giving lip service to this being a "creative agency" and stop really being one.

Finally, when you lose your respect for the lonely man – the man at his typewriter or his drawing board or behind his camera or just scribbling notes with one of our big pencils – or working all night on a media plan. When you forget that the lonely man – and thank God for him – has made the agency we now have – possible. When you forget he’s the man who, because he is reaching harder, sometimes actually gets hold of for a moment - one of those hot, unreachable stars.

That, boys and girls, is when I shall insist you take my name off the door. And by golly, it will be taken off the door. Even if have to materialize long enough some night to rub it out myself - on every one of our floors. And before I de-materialize again, I will paint out that star-reaching symbol too. And burn all the stationary. Perhaps tear up a few ads in passing.

And throw every god-damned apple down the elevator shafts.

You just won’t know the place, the next morning. You’ll have to find another name."