"The Big Four Get Bigger"

Many industry experts have been talking about "the de-portalization of the internet" and "death of the portal" in regards to online advertising. However, research by eMarketer.com proves that this notion is a bit premature. The portals considered the "Big Four" are Google, Yahoo, AOL, and MSN. In 2006, these four represented 57.4% of the total revenues spent on online advertising. This trend seems to be increasing and eMarketer estimates, the top portals will all increase US net ad revenues in 2007, with nearly $13 billion going to just those four sites. In the changing landscape of online advertising, companies are looking for mass-marketed brands and portals that have already been established. Three of the four portals have been around for at least 10 years and even the youngest of the four, Google, is still an established brand. When the percent increase vs. the prior year is compared however, the numbers look slightly different. The percent increase in the top two portals is getting smaller every year, but is still significantly higher than other portals. The bottom two, AOL and MSN, are still seeing annual percent increases. Therefore, the "death of the portal" isn't here quite yet and it doesn't look like it's going to happen anytime in the near future.

McDonald's and DoCoMo to jointly promote e-Marketing based on Osaifu-Keitai

The plan that McDonalds and DoCoMo have is to create joint company to manage the e-marketing promotions for the new McDonalds membership club. This club will be able to use their cell-phones as credit cards in McDonalds stores. This new membership club of McDonalds is planned to become active in October of 2007 in McDonalds stores in Japan. It will be available to members of the current membership club and McDonalds hopes that this new club will help to promote customer loyalty and offer enhanced membership services. The company will launch services using both McDonalds 1.4 billion annual customer base and DoCoMo's 52 million mobile phone subscribers. The company will be established around July 2007 and will be built with 30% of DoCoMo capital and 70% of McDonalds capital amounting to 300 million yen.

This idea sounds like it could potentially become a huge thing in America. The only problem that I see in this new partnership is the potential for a huge increase in debt. McDonalds is primarily a market of impulse buys. The idea that now consumers can purchase McDonalds even when they don't have any cash on hand, this has the potential to lead to huge bills each month and large sums of debt for frequent visitors to McDonalds. If this trend keeps up and spreads to all other areas of purchasing, it could mean an even higher increase in debt. Other than that problem I think that it will make things much easier, and alot more convenient.

Anchorage Arts Group E-Venture into Success

I read the article mentioned above and spoke of the Anchorage Symphony Orchestra, and other Alaskan fine arts organizations that are using sites like Myspace.com and YouTube.com to market their upcoming shows to the public. Myspace.com is a fairly new, but very popular site for blogging and features the opportunity for fans to become “friends” with their favorite music artists and have access to everything about the band from pictures, to upcoming concert dates, to video links of behind-the-scenes footage. YouTube.com is an extremely popular site where users can upload videos and share them with everyone online. The Anchorage Symphony Orchestra decided to generate some extra attention for their show and set up a MySpace page, the marketing director for the symphony, Kristin Cosgrove, says that although the symphony doesn’t have very many friends yet, this idea has proven successful in the past and Kristin is convinced that this new way of marketing will lead to higher ticket sales in the future. Other shows that have proven this to be true is the “Frogz” touring theatre. This group started to post information about their show on Myspace and soon many people were watching the videos and talking about how excited they were about the show. The Symphony is also hoping that by advertising on sites like YouTube and Myspace they will be able to attract a younger demographic. It has been proven statistically that generations x and y show a high correlation between attendance at theatrical performances and education and income levels, but it also finds that attendance is also linked to social behavior. The symphony is hoping that by advertising on fun, young sites they will able to attract a greater number of young, social patrons.