Media Cos. Battle Web Portals on Ads

By ANICK JESDANUN – 19 hours ago

NEW YORK (AP) — Traditional media companies trying to stem the flow of advertising dollars to Google and other large Internet companies are increasingly building ad networks of their own, anchored by their brands.

The latest, Forbes Inc., is expected to announce Monday that it will start selling ads this spring for about 400 financial blogs. In recent months, Conde Nast, Viacom Inc., CBS Corp. and other major media companies also have unveiled topic-specific ad networks to lure advertisers that want to buy more ads than any single site can sell.

If newspapers, magazines and broadcasters cannot expand online ad inventory, they are "under threat of becoming less and less relevant to the advertiser," said Russ Fradin, chief executive of Adify Corp., whose technology runs ad networks for Forbes and others.

But these media networks — some linking fewer than a dozen hand-picked Web sites — may have a tough time competing with the larger networks of thousands assembled by Google Inc., Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Time Warner Inc.'s AOL.

Those companies have been expanding, too, spending at least $11 billion collectively to buy smaller ad networks and technologies — and in Microsoft's case, also bidding more than $40 billion for Yahoo.

"As our technology has continued to advance, we've gotten better and better," said Lynda Clarizio, president of AOL's emerging Platform A advertising unit. "We can handle a lot of demand from advertisers."

To read this entire article, please visit: http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jnhxKeH7mqm8kbwIa45cJvPQd9DQD8VJANEO0

When Bad Resumes Happen to Good IT People

FROM EWEEK


By Deborah Perelman
December 26, 2007
Even one error can keep you from getting your foot in the door, but stupid mistakes find their way onto the smartest resumes.

If you're like a lot of workers out there, the top of a new year seems as ideal a time as any to launch the hunt for a new job—if you're lucky, you've just received your year-end bonus and your next one is far away. If you haven't, you're likely hoping to get one next year, even if you have to go elsewhere to get it.

Yet even where bonuses are not a concern, once the mood for new year's resolutions strikes a less-than-perfect employment situation is ripe for the picking, or picking on.

But before even finding a job worth applying for, one needs a resume that is worth a recruiter looking at twice, and for most people, this hasn't been updated in the two, four or eight years. And those that work with lines of code and computers all day have not likely tuned up their writing skills in years.

"Recruiters often have hundreds of resumes to review and will make split second judgments about you based on your resume. Think of it as the sales brochure for you—it has to demonstrate a successful track record that makes them want to talk to you. Attention to detail is critical," said Lynne Sarikas, director of the MBA career center at the College of Business Administration at Northeastern University.

Below are five of the easiest mistakes to make, and ones that could lead to a painful missed opportunity.

If you'd like to see the five easiest mistakes, and read the whole article, please visit: http://www.paradigmshiftpr.com/whengood.htm

American dreams built on a shaky foundation of subprime loans

FROM THE KANSAS CITY STAR

Wall Street connection

Soaring subprime profits quickly attracted Wall Street investors.

As fast as brokers sold more teaser-rate loans, they quickly bundled them into packages and sold them like securities to investors, who pumped even more money into the subprime market.
The Compliance Technologies study showed that more than half of the subprime loans made in Kansas City’s 5th District were securitized and sold off to investors.

“Originators were making loans based on quantity rather than quality,” said Kurt Eggert, a law professor at Chapman University in Orange, Calif., who served on the Federal Reserve’s consumer advisory counsel. “They made loans even when they didn’t make sense from an underwriting standpoint.”

If you'd like to read this entire story, please visit: http://www.paradigmshiftpr.com/americandreams.htm

Adidas Brand in the Hand

Northeastern University’s College of Business Administration started a new MBA program last fall. This new program placed an emphasis on MBA students working closely with the business community. The issue that marketing departments of today’s companies is to try to come up with new ways of getting their product in front of consumers. Fareena Sultan, marketing professor and head of the marketing track at the College of Business Administration at Northeastern University, wrote a case study entitled, “The Brand In The Hand: Mobile Marketing at Adidas,” where she provides a current example of how Adidas went beyond the traditional marketing medium and what obstacles they had to overcome to do it.

The study explores the development of telecommunications technology with cell phones which led up to the possibility of mobile marketing. Initially, Adidas’ marketing firm, Global Media Group presented this new mobile marketing for the company. “The Global Group had been arguing that mobile marketing was the surest, and perhaps only, way for Adidas to break free from the advertising clutter and fragmentation of traditional media.” The biggest challenge was to place this message out there without forcing it on consumers and so Adidas decided to allow the consumer the option of receiving the message. “Adidas opted an ‘opt-in’ policy for all Internet and mobile advertising.”

Below is Professor Sultan’s bio:

Professor Sultan is the Robert Morrison Fellow, and the MBA Marketing Career Track Chair at the College of Business Administration, Northeastern University, Boston. Professor Sultan holds a PhD from Columbia University, an MS from MIT, and BS and MS degrees from the University of Karachi. Prior to joining the CBA faculty, she served as assistant professor at Harvard University, associate professor at Golden Gate University, and visiting associate professor at the University of California - Berkeley, where she received the Earl F. Chiet Teaching Excellence Award. She has consulted and taught in executive education programs in the U.S. and overseas. Professor Sultan has research interest in Adoption and Diffusion of Innovations, Global E-Business, Mobile Marketing, Digital Marketing, Media Multitasking and the Role of IT in New Product Development. Professor Sultan has published in such journals as the Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Sloan Management Review, Journal of Business Research, Marketing Management, Journal of Retailing, Journal of Interactive Marketing, IEEE Transactions, Marketing Letters, Journal of Business and Industrial Marketing, Journal of Strategic Information Systems, and Journal of Economic Psychology among others. She is the author of Harvard Business School and Ivey cases. Professor Sultan is the recipient of the 1995 O'Dell Award from the American Marketing Association for her research. In 2006, she received the College of Business Administration’s Robert Morrison Fellowship.

If you would like to speak to Professor Sultan or would like a copy of this study, please let me know.

Luxury Sunglasses Fashion Expert

If anyone is working on stories about luxury sunglasses, I thought you might want to talk with Christina Stewart, a luxury industry analysis from LuxeMont (http://www.justluxe.com/ and http://www.luxevegas.com/) very familiar with the sunglasses industry. She is available for an interview; here are samples of her work.

http://www.justluxe.com/fine-living/fashion/feature-201733.php

http://www.justluxe.com/fine-living/fashion/article-212440.php

http://www.justluxe.com/lifestyle/jewelry/article-200235.php

In past, states were permitted to set own pollution rules

FROM THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

Bob Egelko, Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, December 21, 2007

But conservative scholar John Eastman, dean of Chapman University School of Law in Orange County, said a federal agency's views are entitled to respect from the courts even if they represent a change of course.

"Administrations are part of the political process," Eastman said.

He argued that the EPA is entitled to interpret the law differently for local and global problems.

When an agency's view of the law is reasonable, regardless of previous interpretations, he said, "courts are obligated to give the same level of deference."

To read the entire story, please visit: http://www.paradigmshiftpr.com/inpast.htm

Financial forecasters predict decreased holiday sales

FROM HOUSTON COMMUNITY NEWSPAPERS

By Valerie L. Clifton
12/13/2007

From rising gas costs to wary consumers steering clear of toys that may be recalled, it's not looking good for retailers this season.

But College of Business Administration at Northeastern University Professor Tony Gao said that reports of increased Web spending shouldn't boost consumer confidence in the economy.

Conservative forces are influencing holiday spending behaviors, he said, driving consumers to comparison shop, a task that can be easily accomplished from behind the monitor.

"Most people are doing this from their home via high speed Internet," Gao said. "I suspect that households with high speed connections tend to have higher income."

Lower income families tend to do more shopping in store, he said. Gao said in addition to the rising price of gas and oil the economy is taking hits because of the depreciation of the US dollar which is causing a loss of confidence in overseas investors.

"Foreign investors aren't as confident as before in the US economy," Gao said. "This realization might lead them to take their investments away from the US market."

To read this entire article, please visit: http://www.paradigmshiftpr.com/financialforecasters.htm