The Audit Bureau of Circulations just released its numbers for the circulations of the top 25 newspapers in the U.S. Every paper except the Wall Street Journal had a decrease. The WSJ had a very minor increase, but that’s still significant compared to double-digit decreases of many of the others. Moreover, the WSJ’s increase combined with USA Today’s decrease moved the WSJ into the number 1 spot as the largest circulating newspaper in the country (2,024,269).

This has been reported in a number of places, but the one question not asked elsewhere is “why?” Why is the WSJ bucking the trend? From a marketing perspective, for an industry that is severely ill, this seems to be the critical question. Is it the respective biases in the different newspapers given today’s economic and political climate? Is it the editorial content? The price? Something else?

Whatever the reason, it behooves the other papers to take note and emulate some of the Wall Street Journal’s product, pricing, and/or distribution models. Time is running out for many in the industry.

Domus is a full-service marketing consulting agency based in Philadelphia. For more information, please visit our web site at http://www.domusinc.com.

Every time I see Cadillac’s commercial for their 2010 SRX crossover, I wince. They come so close with this one, but they still can’t seem to clearly stake out their brand position.

First, the commercial starts with a picture of the SRX – a nice car, but it’s a crossover. If Cadillac is trying to reclaim the luxury automobile market top brand position, it’s hard to do so with a car segment that evokes imagery of sport, utility, and fun. These are areas that fit more with Chevy’s brand position (or GMC’s) than Cadillac’s. (That’s not to say that a luxury brand can’t have a crossover – Lexus has one – but it’s easier when you’re at the top.)

Next, the music, imagery, and wording (re-envisioned, reorganized, reactivated, reignite) are all more evocative of upbeat fun and styling. This would seem to be a brand position that Buick should occupy.

Finally, the ad ends with the line, “The Cadillac of crossovers.” So, at the end of the ad, GM finally tries to position the car at the top of the luxury market. But by this point, it has spread its message across three brand positions.

GM has a great opportunity to turn itself around. It finally has an excellent line-up of cars. It just needs to solidify its brands in their correct positions in consumers’ minds.

Domus is a full-service marketing communications agency based in Philadelphia. For more, please visit our web site at http://www.domusinc.com.

Or rather, good, relentless attack ads work. Everyone has seen how effective attack ads are in political campaigns. In fact, they’re so effective that they are the dominant form of advertising during election cycles.

But even outside of the political realm, good attack ads that consistently hammer the opposition often succeed, as long as the attacking brand has a solid position, a valid attack angle, and a long-term plan. (Long term is essential because in the real world, even lies, if told often enough, forcefully enough, eventually become accepted as truths by many people.)

Note that we’re not categorizing comparison advertising as attack advertising. We’re referring here to full frontal assaults on a brand’s position, status, and even good name.

And also note that a successful attack advertising campaign works best if the ads do not present an easy opening for counter-attack and if the target company does not aggressively and effectively fight back. Following are two examples.

This first one from Audi was blatant in calling out BMW, but didn’t really have any meat behind it. Moreover, not only did it leave an opening for BMW, they responded aggressively and brilliantly. Look at billboard that BMW put up next to the original Audi billboard within days of Audi’s. One word destroyed Audi’s attack.

On the other hand, Apple has been relentless in its campaign, attacking vulnerable Microsoft positions. Moreover, Microsoft has chosen not to respond forcefully and relentlessly itself, thereby eroding its own position and leading to increasingly successful Apple sales and profits. Below is yet another in a series of Mac vs. PC Apple ads.

Domus is a full-service marketing communications agency based in Philadelphia. For more information about us, please visit our web site at http://www.domusinc.com.

Google Insights for Search is another great tool that can help marketers plan and refine their campaigns. It lets you compare search volume patterns by category and geography over time. You can explore seasonality, geographic, and product trends. As an example, by analyzing geographic trends over time of search patterns for your brand and your category, you might identify a high ROI metropolitan area to focus a concerted marketing effort.

I would be surprised if any brand manager who spent a half hour or so with this tool didn’t find at least one useful insight – about yourself or your competition. Or, at a minimum, it should raise some interesting questions.

Domus is a full-service marketing consulting agency based in Philadelphia. For more information, please visit our web site at http://www.domusinc.com.

There have been a number of studies that show that online display advertising has a multiplicative effect on conversion rates of sponsored search listings – as high as 22% improvement. (See Microsoft Advertising Institute.) But it’s still hard to tell exactly how much impact your specific display ads have on your specific search campaigns.

That should be changing soon, though. As Advertising Age is reporting, Google is beta-testing their Campaign Insights tool, which will give you an indication of how effective your campaign is. As they explain:

With Campaign Insights, Google takes data from the advertiser’s server logs to determine who was shown an ad and when. Then compares that to web searches and site visits culled from data from the millions of Google toolbars on computer desktops. Those results are compared to a comparable group that didn’t see the ad.

Then Google measures the difference between the number of brand searches and site visits between the two groups. To filter out the impact of other media or influences, such as a TV campaign, Google compares the data to the two groups’ behavior before the campaign began. The incremental difference is attributable to the display-ad campaign.

This should be a win-win for both Google and marketers. Marketers will be able to refine display advertising campaigns for better effectiveness and Google will gain more of the display advertising business (because they will be able to objectively show the ROI of campaigns).

Domus is a full-service advertising, PR, and social media marketing agency based in Philadelphia. Please visit us at http://www.domusinc.com.

Google just announced its quarterly financial information, and its profit hit its highest ever (Associated Press. Does this mean that the advertising industry is making a comeback? Maybe, but maybe not. Although Google’s numbers were all good, they were at much lower rates of increase than before. Moreover, given that they increased market share, some of their gains came at the expense of their competitors – not at the addition of more advertising into the market. Moreover, some of whatever new advertising did come into the market came from other online and offline advertising dollars – companies are still shifting budgets to shorter term strategies such as Search Marketing vs. old media advertising.

But optimism is good. This might be another of several recent signs that the worst of the recession is behind us. There are still some rough roads ahead for marketers, but hopefully we’ll continue to see positive signs.

Domus is a full service marketing communications agency based in Philadelphia. For more information, please visit our web site at http://www.domusinc.com.

How many people over 40 can still remember the great brand taglines, jingles, and slogans from their youth? On the other hand, how many current ones does anyone remember? The era of great jingles and mottos seems to have passed us; however, something has been lost in the process. The fact that so many of us remember so many of them shows how powerful they can be. They keep the brand front and center in our minds – when we’re thinking of the brand category and often when we’re not. Their impact lasts years and decades. It’s hard to calculate the ROI on that.

Domus is a full-service marketing communications agency based in Philadelphia. Please visit our web site at http://www.domusinc.com for more.

It’s amazing to me that in 2009 there are still so many large company web sites that have HTML or JavaScript errors on them. Most people don’t notice them, but if your browser’s configuration is set to show errors you will be bombarded with pop-ups complaining about many sites. Moreover, from my experience, it seems like it’s often the display ads placed on sites that cause the errors.

If an error-showing browser visits a web site with errors, that site can be more than confusing – it can be unusable because of all of the pop-ups. As such, people with those browser settings tend to avoid these sites, which costs marketers impressions and clicks. It doesn’t take much to verify that a site is clean, and the advantage of doing such can be the difference between achieving or not achieving a desired ROI.

Domus is a Philadelphia-based marketing communications agency with strong interactive capabilities. Part of our standard checklist when publishing new content is verifying the pages for errors, as well as viewing the pages in different browsers and at different resolutions. For more information, please visit our web site at http://www.domusinc.com.

Marketing research data shows that store brands have been making inroads against branded consumer packaged goods items. (E.g., see Progressive Grocer.) But statistics don’t always tell the whole story. One thing reports like this don’t show, though, is why consumers are switching. It would be interesting to find out how many consumers are deliberately choosing store brands vs. no longer having a choice.

From my own personal experiences, I’ve noticed that several of my preferred name brand items are harder or impossible to find at many supermarkets – their shelf space has been taken over by store brands. Therefore, although I might have preferred a name brand in some cases, I had little or no choice (barring shopping elsewhere).

This is a question name brand manufacturers might want to consider. Their future marketing strategies might need to be adjusted if they are losing sales because of consumer choices or because of retailer decisions.

Domus is a full-service advertising, public relations, and social media marketing agency based in Philadelphia. Please visit our web site at http://www.domusinc.com for more.

Google just recently introduced their new Google Toolbar-based Sidewiki feature. This allows anyone with the Google Toolbar installed (which is a large percentage of internet users) to add his own side comments to ANY web site on the internet. And those comments are then visible to any other Sidewiki users who later visit that site.

Prior to Google Sidewiki, marketers at least had a little control over their own web site, even if they had effectively lost control over references to them on social networking sites, blogs, etc. Now, however, even your home page is an accessible target for web surfers, whether or not their comments are accurate or even relevant. And you have little or not control over what is written, other than adding your own comments to the mix.

Moreover, as of right now, those comments are not visible outside of Sidewiki – they don’t show up in any search engine searches – so unless you have Sidewiki yourself, you’ll never know what people are writing about you on your own web site. Therefore, like it or not, as of today, marketers should have at least one machine on which they have installed Sidewiki, and should regularly visit their own site to see if any side notes are added by others.

Domus is a Philadelphia advertising, public relations, and internet marketing agency. We’re a dynamic agency, different than most you’ve probably experienced. In fact, maybe we should be called the “un-agency.” Please visit our web site at http://www.domusinc.com for more.