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BurrellesLuce, the leader in media planning, monitoring and measurement, is proud to provide this daily news feed. Visit this page everyday to stay on top of trends shaping the practice of media and public relations. Topics include the impact of social media on marketing, emerging approaches to news and information distribution, and new methods for measuring and analyzing media coverage.

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Study: Reviews & Images Drive Clicks In Mobile
February 7, 2012: Last November Canadian digital agency Mediative (owned by Canada’s Yellow Pages Group) released an eye- and click-tracking study focused on Google Places and Google Maps on the PC. We wrote up the results when they were published. Mediative then followed up that study with a similar one focused on the Google Places app on the iPhone. For the iPhone-app study, just published yesterday, Mediative monitored eye- and click-tracking with 12 people in Canada. They ranged in age from 21 to 45. The participants were asked to find places to get a tattoo in each of several Canadian cities. Here’s the task as described by Mediative:

Debunking the "original" sin of online newspapers
February 7, 2012: Whenever newspaper executives get together to bemoan the fate of their industry, someone inevitably brings up the so-called “original sin” of the online news business — namely, a failure to charge for content when the web was new. One of the latest manifestations of this idea appears in an upcoming e-book called “Why American Newspapers Gave Away the Future, from former Wall Street Journal executive Richard Tofel, which looks at the failure of newspapers on a number of levels. But this theory that newspapers could have somehow won a war against the internet if they had just charged users for content misses the point — the point being that the media game is now being played according to different rules.

Univision and Disney in Talks for an English-Language News Channel
February 7, 2012: The Walt Disney Company may join Univision, the dominant Spanish-language broadcaster in the United States, in starting an English-language cable news channel this year, people with knowledge of the talks between the companies said on Monday. These people described the talks as advanced, though no announcement appeared to be imminent. The Wall Street Journal first reported the talks on Monday. The new channel could combine the resources of Disney’s ABC News and Univision’s news division to rival established news entities like Fox News Channel, MSNBC and CNN. It would be aimed at English-speaking Hispanics in the United States, whose numbers are growing.

Occupying the 'Wall Street Journal'
February 7, 2012: Scott Johnson had published only two issues of his Occupied Oakland Tribune when he received a cease and desist order from The Oakland Tribune's parent company, the Bay Area News Group. "The first thing I thought was, Is this real? The whole thing just kind of blew me away," he says. The Oakland Tribune contends that Johnson's use of their name, albeit "Occupied," and an altered Tribune tower logo are infringements on the company's trademark. In their letter and The Oakland Tribune's own subsequent coverage, the Bay Area News Group's lawyer Andrew Huntington states that Johnson must stop publication and hand over his occupiedoaktrib.org URL immediately or face a lawsuit. Huntington, who did not respond for comment, said that Occupied Oakland Tribune's name and logo were "a problem," though the Bay Area News Group was considering dissolving the Oakland Tribune until late 2011 amidst a round of heavy cutbacks. "As soon as I had any time to think about it, it became more and more clear that we can win this thing," says Johnson. "I never wanted to give in on it. I never wanted to roll over and give up." As one Twitter commenter quipped, after donating $100 to Johnson's Kickstarter campaign to fund the paper, "BANG is the sound you hear when you shoot yourself in the foot."

Five Commercial Actors You Should Know
February 7, 2012: For marketers, a good actor can be the difference between lackluster and through-the-roof numbers. Sharply drawn characters help graft meaning onto products by giving them a sense of back story and continuity, a familiarity that goes a long way toward cementing a connection. It’s similar to the way sitcom characters, in behaving in expected ways, create long-lasting relationships with viewers who revel in the comfort of repetition. Famous brand personalities, of course, stretch way back. Some of our old favorites are Cracker Jack’s Jack Gilford, Palmolive’s Jan Milner and Maytag’s Gordon Jump. Here are five contemporary actors whose personas give big boosts to the brands they embody.

How Brands Integrated Social, Mobile, Web Into Super Bowl Ads
February 7, 2012: Altimeter analyzed this year's Super Bowl ads and uncovered five cross channel integration trends among brands in this year's game. The trends include: 1) Brands Heavily Invested in Promoting Traditional Websites 2) Surprisingly, Many Did Not Promote a Call-To-Action 3) Only a Sixth of Ads Explicitly Promoted Social Media 4) Hashtag Marketing Emerged to Stimulate Continual Engagement 5) Cutting Edge Marketers Teased with New Marketing Tactics, including Shazam Altimeter found 57% (charts below) of Super Bowl ads linked to a website or a microsite but only 16% included social media links such as hashtags, Facebook or Twitter links. Eleven percent employed "emerging media technology" links such as Shazam, text messaging, mobile apps and QR codes. Conversely, 32% did not link to any online resource at all.

The Spot: Return of the Jedi
February 6, 2012: GENESIS: For months, Volkswagen and Deutsch debated whether—and then how—to do a sequel to "The Force," their runaway hit from the 2011 Super Bowl, for the 2012 game. "There's not a lot of great sequels. For every Godfather II, there's a Godfather III. For every Jaws, there's a Jaws 5," said Deutsch group creative director Michael Kadin. In the end, they felt they had to go back to the material. "To ignore it would have been glaringly obvious and strange," said Kadin's creative partner, Matt Ian. "It begged for a follow-up." After considering hundreds of scripts, they decided to do two spots—or rather, one plus an epilogue. The ad (which aired as a :60 during the game, with a :75 released online a few days before) begins with the story of a dog who wants to chase a Beetle, then segues to the Star Wars cantina, where the motley patrons discuss whether the new ad is better than the old one. To the agency, this was an elegant solution—giving life to an authentic stand-alone VW spot (that will now air on TV without the epilogue) while also nodding, in a postmodern way, at the juggernaut of the original.

5 Ways Applications Can Make Or Break Your Facebook Marketing
February 6, 2012: Advertising on Facebook continues to get more competitive and expensive as marketers tap into this audience. Facebook applications offer another method to promote your brand, but offer a different set of challenge. You have to create an app that creates value and interest for the Facebook community. If you can do that, your Facebook app can bring you several fantastic benefits. But what are these benefits? Here below are five advantages to a Facebook app. Social Growth It can be tiring marketing a website. It costs money, time, and effort. But if you can get social growth, you can get others to do your marketing for free. When you have a great app that people love and enjoy, which involves their friends, you are having social networking work for you. This can be a tremendous advantage to a Facebook app.

MyRecipes and Cooking Light Harness Pinterest’s ‘Mouth-Watering’ Power
February 6, 2012: Foodie magazines and sites have known for years that people love images of luscious dishes. Call it cooking porn, but recipe hunters and food aficionados will rifle through casserole slideshows looking for just the right one. And so it was inevitable that a social network grounded mainly in image sharing would gravitate towards recipe posts. When the crew at Time Inc. Lifestyle Group first got a look at the hot visual social network Pinterest, Tina Imm, General Manager says they were struck by a common thought, “why didn’t we think of this ourselves?” Pinterest has proven to be a natural match for the groups’ MyRecipes.com and CookingLight.com, where in both cases, “it is the number one social media referral source,” says Imm. In fact overall and from all sources, Pinterest is the third most important referral source for CookingLight.com and the fourth for MyRecipes, where it now it exceeds Yahoo. “The growth has been pretty phenomenal,” she says.

Grammy Awards partner with CBS for digital experience
February 6, 2012: In these heady two-or-three-screen days, the Grammy Awards has been a classic case study in how social media engagement can pay off ratings-wise. Viewership of the on-air broadcast have increased dramatically since 2009 in younger demographics, with no small amount of credit due to the increasingly elaborate digital campaigns implemented by the Recording Academy. This year, the main action can be found on Grammy Live, a three-day orgy of live-streaming and social media beginning this Friday and continuing through Sunday, February 12. The events covered will include host-anchored behind-the-scenes coverage (with talent including Alison Haislip and John Norris) and video of other events leading up to the awards, including the MusiCares Person of the Year Tribute honoring Paul McCartney.