Blitz Magazine

Radio’s new pitch line may be how its ads fit with everything else. Like a restaurant goer overwhelmed by too many items on the salad bar to make a well-balanced plate of ingredients that go well together, marketers are facing the same problem when it comes to their media diet. The third annual Cross-Channel Marketing Report, published by Econsultancy in association with Oracle Marketing Cloud, finds just two-in-five (43%) feel they understand their customers’ journey throughout their media day and that they’re putting campaign components together in the right way to reach them. That’s despite the fact that two-thirds say it’s a priority for all marketing to be integrated into a cohesive plan . The most common reason for missing that target is advertisers and ad agencies just don’t have the resources to achieve that goal . “Clearly, marketers can and should be doing more to drive precise orchestration of their marketing strategies,” Oracle’s Simon Robinson says. For radio, the su...

Canadian millennials are more active in sharing on social networks, and engage more with content shared on their networks than the average population, according to research by Olive Media. The Canadian Millennial Research Study showed that sharing activity reflects an engagement with brands, and a direct connection to purchase activity. The study tracked online data from 6.7 million IP addresses, or 95% of 18-to-34 year-old’s in Canada. Canadians millennials are three times more likely to share content with their social networks than the average, and they are more influenced by their peers since they are two times more likely to click back on content shared by others in their network, according to the study. Millennial sharing is also more diverse across platforms, with Facebook comprising 62%, Twitter 23% and Reddit 4%. That’s compared with the general population, where sharing largely takes place on on Facebook (81%). Millennials also share much more on-the-go, ...

Content group's new initiative will partner with advertisers on editorial content Chris Powell June 01, 2015 Rogers Media ’s publishing unit has introduced a content marketing offering that will include the names of advertisers on the cover and table of contents of both its English and French titles. Unilever Canada and Lexus/Toyota are among the program’s first advertisers, the latter partnering with Maclean’s, L’actualité, Sportsnet Magazine and Canadian Business on an editorial series that is still in development. Unilever, meanwhile, is partnering with Chatelaine on a program promoting the Hellmann’s “Real food movement” that will appear in the magazine’s July issue. Several other deals are currently “on the one-yard line” said Christopher Loudon , director of content solutions with the publishing unit. Loudon told Marketing that advertisers’ cover presence is restricted to text attached to a headline. There are no plans to incorporate advertiser-related i...

No definitive song but an edgier sound emerged at CHR this summer. CHR didn’t net a song that epitomized the summer of 2014 but it did give rise to a new crop of edgier, rhythmic acts that offer a hint of where the format is heading. Five of the top six most-played CHR songs of the summer were from debut releases, including Iggy Azalea, whose high-velocity rap put her own “Fancy” in the summer’s top five and helped propel Ariana’s Grande’s “Problem” into the top three. “Fancy” was inescapable this summer, shooting to No. 1 at CHR, rhythmic and urban. “This was her summer more than anybody’s,” Radio Animal Media Consulting president Dom Theodore says. It was a big summer for crossovers as the top five most-played songs all went to No. 1 at other formats. Even as EDM continued to dominate CHR, smashes from Azalea, Rude! and Sam Smith helped slow the format’s tempo down with lower-BPM sounds. In sharp contrast to 2012, when pure pop ruled, this summer saw CHR move away from the musi...

  June 10, 2014 Family and friends are still the number one influence on decision-making, according to a new study by Veritas Communications. The Veritas Canadian Influencer Study found that family (70%), friends (67%) and trusted experts (34%) have the greatest influence on female consumers’ decisions to try a new product or service. “When marketers think of tapping into influencers, they automatically think of media and social media, and that makes sense because they do have a lot of influence,” said Krista Webster , president and partner at MDC-owned Veritas Communications. “But marketers have forgotten the lost art of tapping into family and friends.” Webster added that there’s a big opportunity for smart brands to recognize the power of word of mouth. “It’s authentic, it takes time and you have to nurture it,” she said. “For many marketers, things have to happen immediately. But true staying power and true loyalty comes from allowing things happen in their o...

Like spring flowers, seasonal advertising is arriving later this year. How warm does it need to be in your market for someone to buy a pair of shorts? Or crave a Frappuccino at Starbucks? The answer varies in different parts of the country, and for a wide portion of the country a harsh winter led to a cool spring. The result is not unlike what’s going on with flowers in many gardens: spring advertising is tracking later than a year ago. “It varies, depending on what part of country you live in, but it does seem like we’re looking at a four-to-six week delay in some places,” says John Acello, a radio veteran who is now a vice president at Planalytics, a firm that works with marketers on fine-tuning their weather-related advertising strategies. “We help companies manage the weather and use it to their advantage when they can,” he explains. But there’s been a shortage of management necessary during the past year. While half the country learned what a polar vortex is, the other half ha...