version
Source: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=124023&nid=112103

“Kimberly-Clark’s Kleenex brand is offering an at-home version of a product that people take for granted in public restrooms: disposable hand towels. The new Kleenex Hand Towels are intended to address consumers’ growing concern with hand hygiene.
The product is on sale now with a retail price of about $3 for a box of 60 towels, per the company.
The Kleenex Hand Towels come in box packaging, with pop-up delivery. The product is intended to complement bathroom décor and space limitations — i.e., it can go on a towel bar or countertop.
Kleenex Hand Towels performed well in preliminary testing with consumers, the company says: Approximately two-thirds said they would use Kleenex Hand Towels as a substitute for cloth towels, and more than 90% reacted favorably to how the product and package design looked in their bathrooms.”
They used FOCUS GROUPS! And 2/3 said they would use! But think about it: $3 a box versus cloth towels I already have at home. At home, I don’t use disposable hand towels and at home I am not concerned about “hand hygiene” as I am in a public bathroom.
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Beer is yet another commodity and category that is being decimated by better quality alternatives. The means of production and distribution are no longer controlled by a very small number of big companies. Consumers find attractive alternatives in micro-brew beers or local beers. They have the means to access them (online) and have the product shipped directly to their homes. So no matter how much advertising the big companies do, if their product is just not that great, they will continue to lose customers to alternatives. The “lime” version of Bud Light was said to cannibalize sales of regular Bud Light. And rightly so, consumers are looking for a better product.
Source: http://adage.com/article?article_id=138141
Fourth of July Holiday: Bargain Brands Gain, but Big Spenders Bud, Miller Lite and Corona Tap Out
Despite a flurry of new and improved ad pushes for the country’s leading brews, the days leading up to Independence Day, usually the biggest-selling period of the year for the category, led to gruesome sales declines vs. the same period last year. Sales for Anheuser-Busch’s Bud Light and Budweiser plunged 7% and 14%, respectively, in grocery, convenience and drug stores during the two-week period ending July 5, according to scanner data from Information Resources Inc. Miller Lite suffered a 9% drop. The big importers were hurt badly too: Corona marketer Crown Imports watched sales decline 6% to 8%, while Heineken and Diageo each saw double-digit drops.

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Don’t design 2 or 3 websites. Design one, but make sure it is accessible by whatever medium or device the user chooses to use to access it.
You can start with a site that has:
1) javascript and AJAX
2) no script version
3) mobile version
When you design for mobile, think of what tidbit of information the user is really after. For example, Google Mobile is smart enough to return “27 – 17 with 3:14 left in the game” when I type a search for “dallas cowboys’ score.” Versus Google which returns a list of website search results when I access it via a browser on a broadband connection. Google detects what device I am using when I am searching and returns the exact thing that I was looking for based on the device and channel I am using.
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Why the Click Is the Wrong Metric for Online Ads
http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=134787
There is a whole ruckus around ad networks getting too little credit for helping to drive customers’ awareness and clicks for advertisers. In the past, ad networks wanted to claim credit for type-ins (people going to an advertiser’s site by typing the URL instead of clicking on an ad). They called this “view through” and the ad networks wanted these to be attributed to their showing the ad somewhere on their network.
Now they claim that getting credit for only the last-ad is not enough — the ad the user actually clicked on to get to the advertiser’s site, the one that can actually be tracked and properly attributed.
What’s at stake is the relatively large piece of “direct” or referrer-less traffic. Analytics packages can only assign these to type-ins or bookmarks since there was no referring site to attribute them to, let alone ad creative version, etc.
But while there is demonstrable lift in click rates when display ads and search ads are running at the same time — i.e. they reinforce and complement each other — it does not mean that ad networks can or should claim credit for the lift. After all, advertising running on another network COULD also cause a lift in results of ads running on another network if they are run simultaneously.
So the bottom line is if the click or the visit is not directly attributable, it should not be attributed.
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