Sears is partnering with Hearst in a non-traditional promotional campaign to invigorate people's perceptions about its offerings, and offset slumping sales among other hardships. According to the New York Times, the “Reimagine you” campaign will include TV, print, catalogs, signs and displays, e-mail messages, video clips, blogs, and other Web sites. Hearst will create a Web site (http://www.reimagineyourself.com/) and 30+ page booklet to be distributed with a variety of its publications. The booklet will consist of three sections: ReImaginged People, ReImagined Homes, and ReImagined Stuff, reports CNN. Hearst will promote the campaign across multiple online publications, and anti-up its editors to appear in TV ads.
The campaign reflects a growing necessity for companies to adhere to a broader media space, and, according to the Times, “speaks to the interest among media companies in customizing plans for major marketers, the better to capture a larger share of their dollars.”
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Walmart embraces comments and criticism on checkoutblog.com, its blog site launched during the holiday-shopping season. Its popularity and influence has bloomed since the relatively quiet launch. The site, deemed authentic and largely uncensored, has become a forum for “rants,” “raves,” and “advice” by little known buyers, rather than high-level execs, providing, for the first time, insights by a new kind of influencer, reports the Times. The story also explained that it was a Check Out blogger who first disclosed last month that Wal-Mart would stock only high-definition DVDs and players using the Blu-ray format, rather than the rival HD DVD system, and the decision was considered the death knell for HD DVD. Apparently, Walmart had launched blogs in the past, but when critics dismissed them as “thinly veiled extensions of Wal-Mart's P.R. department,” the retailer shut them down.
Paul Sevigny, one of the masterminds of the Beatrice Inn, looks to attract well-to-do hipsters to Atlantic City with a trendy boutique hotel project.
Business Week questions the effect of social network widgets for viral marketing.
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has dumped his girlfriend…on Wikipedia!
