Q&As

New York City is going country for tonight with the County Music Association Awards, backing the annual show in its first time outside of Nashville with $4.5 million worth of sponsorships. Fourteen leading brands are sponsoring the awards ceremony, …

Exhausted with the task of crafting scripts with embedded advertising, Hollywood writers and actors unions are urging studios to develop rules around product placement. Writers and actors alike argue they aren’t getting their fair share of product …

Maybelline is out with image branding films that it is showing in it flagship stores, mall kiosks and other outlets across the globe. The latest film features model Erin Wasson as a DJ in a New York City club. As the music plays, a variety of brand …

Cotton, Inc. and Real Simple Magazine will sponsor a cause-marketing blitz at 105 malls this holiday season. The Real Simple Festival of Giving will run in General Growth Properties’ malls this month and next, with tie-ins to local non-profits. …

Hey, online marketers, that magical day in December is almost upon us. Are you ready to grab your share of the lucre from…Dec. 12? According to marketing metrics firm Atlas, the 12th will be 2005’s biggest day for online sales

The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, with its huge TV viewership (50 million folks) and live attendance (3 million people regularly brave the weather to line Broadway) has become more than a mere parade. As John Friend, senior vice president, Cartoon Network Enterprises, puts it, “The parade is part of a fully aligned and integrated campaign.”

The author of “High Performance Marketing: Bringing Method to the Madness of Marketing” (Dearborn Trade Press: Chicago, 2005) explains why marketers need to restructure their organizations and processes in the face of new media, and why so few marketers “listen” to their audience.

Old brands can be resuscitated. It all comes down to creating a new audience and, whenever possible, leveraging technology, says Hasbro’s Mark Blecher.

The marketing community needs a new set of branding rules, says Simon Williams, chairman of New York-based branding consultancy Sterling Group. And he’s more than happy to supply them.

Pornography trade association Free Speech Coalition is set to sue the state of Utah over its so-called child protection e-mail address registry, Direct has learned.