Friday
Apple and Pepsi to Give Away 100 Million Free Songs
Apple® and Pepsi-Cola North America today announced a historic promotion to legally give away 100 million free songs to Mac® and Windows PC users from Apple's iTunes® Music Store. Beginning February 1, 100 million winning codes will be randomly seeded in 20 ounce and 1 liter bottles of Pepsi, Diet Pepsi and Sierra Mist, and the winning codes will be redeemable for a free song from the iTunes Music Store. Winners will simply go to Apple's iTunes Music Store (www.iTunes.com), enter the code found under the bottle cap and choose any 99 cent song from the online store's vast catalog of over 400,000 songs. The Pepsi iTunes promotion will kick-off with a Super Bowl ad on February 1, 2004, and will run until March 31, 2004.
"iTunes has revolutionized the way we buy music," said Dawn Hudson, president of Pepsi-Cola North America. "iTunes provides music fans with a fast, reliable and easy way to get the music they want, when they want it. During the Pepsi iTunes promotion, they will be able to get more of their favorite music for free."
"This historic promotion to legally give away 100 million free songs will go down in history as igniting the legal download market," said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO. "Pepsi has marketed their products through music for generations, and this is going to be another one that is remembered for decades."
Apple's iTunes Music Store revolutionized the online music industry with its groundbreaking personal use rights and one-click download directly into iTunes, Apple's integrated digital jukebox software -- all for just 99 cents per song. Since its launch six months ago, music fans have purchased and downloaded more than 13 million songs from the iTunes Music Store, making it the number one download music service. Apple today launched its second generation iTunes Music Store for both Mac and Windows PC users. With music from all five major music companies and over 200 independent music labels, the iTunes Music Store is growing every day and will offer more than 400,000 songs.
The Pepsi iTunes promotion complements Pepsi's music initiatives. Pepsi has a long history of integrating music as a core platform in their marketing programs. From Michael Jackson and Madonna to Shakira and Beyonce, Pepsi has featured the biggest recording artists and a diverse range of chart-topping music in marketing campaigns for decades. PEPSI SMASH, a one-hour wall-to-wall music television show that debuted last summer on the WB TV network and featured live musical performances, is one of Pepsi's ongoing music initiatives.
Purchase, N.Y.-based Pepsi-Cola North America (www.pepsi.com) is the $4 billion refreshment beverage unit of PepsiCo Inc. in the United States and Canada. Its U.S. brands include Pepsi, Diet Pepsi, Pepsi ONE, Wild Cherry Pepsi, Pepsi Twist, Pepsi Blue, Pepsi Vanilla, Mountain Dew, Mountain Dew Code Red, Mountain Dew LiveWire, Sierra Mist, Mug, Slice, Aquafina, FruitWorks, Dole single-serve juices and SoBe. The company also makes and markets North America's best-selling ready-to-drink iced teas and coffees, respectively, via joint ventures with Lipton and Starbucks.
Apple ignited the personal computer revolution in the 1970s with the Apple II and reinvented the personal computer in the 1980s with the Macintosh. Apple is committed to bringing the best personal computing experience to students, educators, creative professionals and consumers around the world through its innovative hardware, software and Internet offerings
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"iTunes has revolutionized the way we buy music," said Dawn Hudson, president of Pepsi-Cola North America. "iTunes provides music fans with a fast, reliable and easy way to get the music they want, when they want it. During the Pepsi iTunes promotion, they will be able to get more of their favorite music for free."
"This historic promotion to legally give away 100 million free songs will go down in history as igniting the legal download market," said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO. "Pepsi has marketed their products through music for generations, and this is going to be another one that is remembered for decades."
Apple's iTunes Music Store revolutionized the online music industry with its groundbreaking personal use rights and one-click download directly into iTunes, Apple's integrated digital jukebox software -- all for just 99 cents per song. Since its launch six months ago, music fans have purchased and downloaded more than 13 million songs from the iTunes Music Store, making it the number one download music service. Apple today launched its second generation iTunes Music Store for both Mac and Windows PC users. With music from all five major music companies and over 200 independent music labels, the iTunes Music Store is growing every day and will offer more than 400,000 songs.
The Pepsi iTunes promotion complements Pepsi's music initiatives. Pepsi has a long history of integrating music as a core platform in their marketing programs. From Michael Jackson and Madonna to Shakira and Beyonce, Pepsi has featured the biggest recording artists and a diverse range of chart-topping music in marketing campaigns for decades. PEPSI SMASH, a one-hour wall-to-wall music television show that debuted last summer on the WB TV network and featured live musical performances, is one of Pepsi's ongoing music initiatives.
Purchase, N.Y.-based Pepsi-Cola North America (www.pepsi.com) is the $4 billion refreshment beverage unit of PepsiCo Inc. in the United States and Canada. Its U.S. brands include Pepsi, Diet Pepsi, Pepsi ONE, Wild Cherry Pepsi, Pepsi Twist, Pepsi Blue, Pepsi Vanilla, Mountain Dew, Mountain Dew Code Red, Mountain Dew LiveWire, Sierra Mist, Mug, Slice, Aquafina, FruitWorks, Dole single-serve juices and SoBe. The company also makes and markets North America's best-selling ready-to-drink iced teas and coffees, respectively, via joint ventures with Lipton and Starbucks.
Apple ignited the personal computer revolution in the 1970s with the Apple II and reinvented the personal computer in the 1980s with the Macintosh. Apple is committed to bringing the best personal computing experience to students, educators, creative professionals and consumers around the world through its innovative hardware, software and Internet offerings
Tuesday
Online Retail Sales Build, Poised For Record Holiday Season
Online retail sales continued to climb in the third quarter, setting up for a potential record-breaking holiday season and finish to the year.
There were $13.29 billion in online retail sales in the three months ending Sept. 30, up 27 percent from the same period in 2002. Every three months, the U.S. Department of Commerce releases a measure of online retail sales, which includes goods and services where a retail order but not necessarily a payment is placed over the Internet. But the Commerce Department’s data doesn’t include travel, a major category in online transactions, nor financial services.
The $13.29 billion represented 1.5 percent of total retail sales, compared to the third quarter of 2002 when it was 1.3 percent ($10.46 billion). Total retail sales in the third quarter were estimated at $872.5 billion, up 6.1 percent from the same period a year ago.
Independent analysts had predicted growth between 20 percent and 30 percent.
Ross Rubin, senior analyst at eMarketer, said Friday afternoon that there’s been pretty healthy double-digit year-over-year growth in online retail sales. It’s dominated by a lot of traditional retailers, who are becoming adept in sales and returns not only in the traditional brick-and-mortar stores but also online. An exception would be Amazon.com, which recently passed the $100 million mark in online sales, but it’s also become a more generalized retailer and not just the books and CDs that it started offering back in the 1990s.
Rubin and other analysts think there’s plenty of room for growth but he doesn’t think that online will ever replace traditional retail sales. There are several large retail categories, such as groceries, that will never be sold well online.
“The percentage [of retail sales] is relatively low but I think most retailers these days are not looking at the online channel strictly as a standalone business,” Rubin said. “They’re looking at it partly as a tool that can drive in-store traffic. They’ve been developing better integration between those two channels with in-store pickup and in-store returns.”
Rubin said traditional retailers have been working hard to build integrated systems that make it easier for them to return products offline if they don’t like them. He said that customers are driven by price but that’s not the whole story.
“They’re also very driven by convenience. The notion that you’re going to have to ship something back if it’s unsatisfactory could be a big barrier,” Rubin said. He said that a couple of years ago, it was rare to find stores that accepted in-store returns of items purchased online. Today, it’s hard to find stores that don’t, including Sears, Wal-Mart, the Sharper Image, Staples, Bed, Bath and Beyond and others.
“You want to be where your customer is,” Rubin said.
Doug Schwegman, director of customer and market intelligence of CyberSource Corp., said there’s a chance that online retail sales could see year-over-year growth of 30 percent between 2002 and 2003.
“It is still a small percentage of total retail sales at 1.5 percent, so there is plenty of room for continued strong growth in online sales over the next few years as consumers get more comfortable with shopping online and as merchants get better at online selling,” Schwegman said.
There were $13.29 billion in online retail sales in the three months ending Sept. 30, up 27 percent from the same period in 2002. Every three months, the U.S. Department of Commerce releases a measure of online retail sales, which includes goods and services where a retail order but not necessarily a payment is placed over the Internet. But the Commerce Department’s data doesn’t include travel, a major category in online transactions, nor financial services.
The $13.29 billion represented 1.5 percent of total retail sales, compared to the third quarter of 2002 when it was 1.3 percent ($10.46 billion). Total retail sales in the third quarter were estimated at $872.5 billion, up 6.1 percent from the same period a year ago.
Independent analysts had predicted growth between 20 percent and 30 percent.
Ross Rubin, senior analyst at eMarketer, said Friday afternoon that there’s been pretty healthy double-digit year-over-year growth in online retail sales. It’s dominated by a lot of traditional retailers, who are becoming adept in sales and returns not only in the traditional brick-and-mortar stores but also online. An exception would be Amazon.com, which recently passed the $100 million mark in online sales, but it’s also become a more generalized retailer and not just the books and CDs that it started offering back in the 1990s.
Rubin and other analysts think there’s plenty of room for growth but he doesn’t think that online will ever replace traditional retail sales. There are several large retail categories, such as groceries, that will never be sold well online.
“The percentage [of retail sales] is relatively low but I think most retailers these days are not looking at the online channel strictly as a standalone business,” Rubin said. “They’re looking at it partly as a tool that can drive in-store traffic. They’ve been developing better integration between those two channels with in-store pickup and in-store returns.”
Rubin said traditional retailers have been working hard to build integrated systems that make it easier for them to return products offline if they don’t like them. He said that customers are driven by price but that’s not the whole story.
“They’re also very driven by convenience. The notion that you’re going to have to ship something back if it’s unsatisfactory could be a big barrier,” Rubin said. He said that a couple of years ago, it was rare to find stores that accepted in-store returns of items purchased online. Today, it’s hard to find stores that don’t, including Sears, Wal-Mart, the Sharper Image, Staples, Bed, Bath and Beyond and others.
“You want to be where your customer is,” Rubin said.
Doug Schwegman, director of customer and market intelligence of CyberSource Corp., said there’s a chance that online retail sales could see year-over-year growth of 30 percent between 2002 and 2003.
“It is still a small percentage of total retail sales at 1.5 percent, so there is plenty of room for continued strong growth in online sales over the next few years as consumers get more comfortable with shopping online and as merchants get better at online selling,” Schwegman said.
WEB ACCESS A CENTRAL UTILITY OF DAILY AMERICAN LIFE
Study Finds Even Pets Gravitate to Home Computer MonitorThe Internet has become such an integral part of American consumers' daily lives that families now routinely treat their home computer monitors as they once treated their TV sets -- as the central fixtures of their lives, according to a new study released by the Online Publishers Association.
Multi-computer households
"People are bringing the Web into their lives," said media researcher John Carey of Greystone Communications, one of three organizations involved in the survey. He said consumers are networking computers in multi-computer households, decorating monitors with photographs much the same way TVs in the 1950s were treated as living room mantels, and that even pets routinely gravitate to computers, whether they're in the kitchen, bedroom or basement.
Mr. Carey said the household life portion of the overall study, conducted with the OPA and Frank N. Magid Associates, was an ethnographic project that looked at 23 households with a total of 44 people ranging in age from 14 to their late 50s. Roughly half of the households had broadband Internet access. Ethnography is the branch of anthropology that scientifically analyzes the common daily habits of a human culture.
Not a fringe medium
Mr. Carey said the findings indicate that the Web is no longer a fringe medium and that multitasking is common in households with broadband service.
A second portion of the project surveyed more than 25,852 people ages 18 to 54 about their use of the Web and their attitudes toward related online and offline brands.
That quantitative research was conducted online over a seven-day period on 41 individual Web sites via branded pop-up boxes. For example, readers on New York Times Co.'s NYTimes.com saw a pop-up box that invited them to participate in the survey. The 41 participating Web publications fell into two content categories -- national and local news. Participants included CondeNet's Epicurious.com; Walt Disney Co.'s ESPN.com; Microsoft Corp. and NBC's MSNBC.com; and Washington Post Co.'s WashingtonPost.com.
Among the findings:
* 12% of consumers surveyed said they use a brand name media site as their home page.
* 64% of those surveyed frequently use the offline counterpart of an online brand.
* 60% frequently visit TV brand Web sites; 28% for newspaper sites and 29% for magazine sites.
* 36% of people surveyed said they rarely or never use a Web media brand's offline complement or sibling, indicating fairly strong loyalty to stand-alone Web brands.
* 44% of those surveyed said they frequently visited national news out of habit, while 23% said they visit just for fun and relaxation.
* 35% of those surveyed said they occasionally go to national news Web sites out of habit and 41% said they go occasionally just for fun and relaxation.
* 38% of respondents said their visits to local news Web sites are a frequent habit, and 38% also said it was an occasional habit, while 41% said they occasionally went to local news sites just for fun.
'Trusted sources'
The research found that a lot of people are relating Web sites to their offline brands. "They're looking for trusted sources," Mr. Carey said.
The finding suggests that offline and online sibling properties could do a better job of cross-promoting their properties and links, and that advertisers could efficiently seize on the opportunity to create relevant cross-media messages.
Multi-computer households
"People are bringing the Web into their lives," said media researcher John Carey of Greystone Communications, one of three organizations involved in the survey. He said consumers are networking computers in multi-computer households, decorating monitors with photographs much the same way TVs in the 1950s were treated as living room mantels, and that even pets routinely gravitate to computers, whether they're in the kitchen, bedroom or basement.
Mr. Carey said the household life portion of the overall study, conducted with the OPA and Frank N. Magid Associates, was an ethnographic project that looked at 23 households with a total of 44 people ranging in age from 14 to their late 50s. Roughly half of the households had broadband Internet access. Ethnography is the branch of anthropology that scientifically analyzes the common daily habits of a human culture.
Not a fringe medium
Mr. Carey said the findings indicate that the Web is no longer a fringe medium and that multitasking is common in households with broadband service.
A second portion of the project surveyed more than 25,852 people ages 18 to 54 about their use of the Web and their attitudes toward related online and offline brands.
That quantitative research was conducted online over a seven-day period on 41 individual Web sites via branded pop-up boxes. For example, readers on New York Times Co.'s NYTimes.com saw a pop-up box that invited them to participate in the survey. The 41 participating Web publications fell into two content categories -- national and local news. Participants included CondeNet's Epicurious.com; Walt Disney Co.'s ESPN.com; Microsoft Corp. and NBC's MSNBC.com; and Washington Post Co.'s WashingtonPost.com.
Among the findings:
* 12% of consumers surveyed said they use a brand name media site as their home page.
* 64% of those surveyed frequently use the offline counterpart of an online brand.
* 60% frequently visit TV brand Web sites; 28% for newspaper sites and 29% for magazine sites.
* 36% of people surveyed said they rarely or never use a Web media brand's offline complement or sibling, indicating fairly strong loyalty to stand-alone Web brands.
* 44% of those surveyed said they frequently visited national news out of habit, while 23% said they visit just for fun and relaxation.
* 35% of those surveyed said they occasionally go to national news Web sites out of habit and 41% said they go occasionally just for fun and relaxation.
* 38% of respondents said their visits to local news Web sites are a frequent habit, and 38% also said it was an occasional habit, while 41% said they occasionally went to local news sites just for fun.
'Trusted sources'
The research found that a lot of people are relating Web sites to their offline brands. "They're looking for trusted sources," Mr. Carey said.
The finding suggests that offline and online sibling properties could do a better job of cross-promoting their properties and links, and that advertisers could efficiently seize on the opportunity to create relevant cross-media messages.
Monday
Online Content Spend to Grow 10.4 Percent
By 2005, one-fifth of US Internet users will be content buyers. The growth rate is one-quarter of that seen in 2002 (43.4%). This year marks the first time since eMarketer began tracking such revenues that online advertising spending, with 14.8% year-over-year growth, is outpacing online content spending.
Nonetheless, eMarketer forecasts the percentage of online content buyers in the US will continue to rise steadily through 2005, reaching 35.8 million that year.
"eMarketer has identified three catalysts for the emergence of the online paid content market in the US," says eMarketer Senior Analyst Ben Macklin. "The dot-com bubble bursting reduced the number of free alternatives available. This was accompanied by online advertising revenues drying up in 2001 and 2002, forcing sites to look for other revenue streams. Lastly, despite the economic downturn, Internet users grew in both numbers and experience, and a critical mass of Internet users became comfortable transacting online."
The report also points to the growth in broadband adoption in the US -- the always-on connection, in combination with extra bandwidth, opens up greater possibilities for live and multimedia content
.
Nonetheless, eMarketer forecasts the percentage of online content buyers in the US will continue to rise steadily through 2005, reaching 35.8 million that year.
"eMarketer has identified three catalysts for the emergence of the online paid content market in the US," says eMarketer Senior Analyst Ben Macklin. "The dot-com bubble bursting reduced the number of free alternatives available. This was accompanied by online advertising revenues drying up in 2001 and 2002, forcing sites to look for other revenue streams. Lastly, despite the economic downturn, Internet users grew in both numbers and experience, and a critical mass of Internet users became comfortable transacting online."
The report also points to the growth in broadband adoption in the US -- the always-on connection, in combination with extra bandwidth, opens up greater possibilities for live and multimedia content
Sunday
Web Publishers' Ad Dollars Soar
Third-quarter ad revenue for Web publishers grew an average of 46 percent over the year-ago period, according to a recent poll conducted by the Online Publishers Association.
The poll, which surveyed 26 OPA member companies including CBS MarketWatch, CondeNet and The Wall Street Journal Online, found that year-to-date ad revenue among the group was up 38 percent over the same time last year.
Total revenue for the group increased an average of 44 percent in Q3 versus the year-earlier period, while total revenue for the first three quarters of 2003 rose 35 percent.
Recently, two OPA member companies posted Q3 revenue numbers. The New York Times Digital, which includes NYTimes.com and Boston.com, reported that third-quarter revenue grew nearly 20 percent to $21.8 million from the same time a year ago. Meanwhile, Knight Ridder Digital, which develops and manages newspaper Web sites including the Akron Beacon Journal's Ohio.com and the Lexington Herald-Leader's Kentucky.com, recorded Q3 revenue of $21.5 million, up 51 percent from the year-earlier period
The poll, which surveyed 26 OPA member companies including CBS MarketWatch, CondeNet and The Wall Street Journal Online, found that year-to-date ad revenue among the group was up 38 percent over the same time last year.
Total revenue for the group increased an average of 44 percent in Q3 versus the year-earlier period, while total revenue for the first three quarters of 2003 rose 35 percent.
Recently, two OPA member companies posted Q3 revenue numbers. The New York Times Digital, which includes NYTimes.com and Boston.com, reported that third-quarter revenue grew nearly 20 percent to $21.8 million from the same time a year ago. Meanwhile, Knight Ridder Digital, which develops and manages newspaper Web sites including the Akron Beacon Journal's Ohio.com and the Lexington Herald-Leader's Kentucky.com, recorded Q3 revenue of $21.5 million, up 51 percent from the year-earlier period
