Someone’s watching you — and who you are determines what they’ll show you.

In malls, health clubs, gas stations and even grocery stores, small cameras are being embedded in the screen or hidden around it to track the viewer’s gender, approximate age range and, in some cases, ethnicity – and can change the ads it displays to those ads that are aimed at that demographic.

That could mean hardware ads for men, cosmetics ads for women and video-game ads for teens. Crazy, huh?

And even if the ads don’t change to match the viewer’s demo, the technology’s ability to determine and record this info in general market terms is important for advertisers who want to know how effectively they’re reaching their target audience at any given location.

While the technology remains in limited use, advertising people say it is finally beginning to live up to its promise. The manufacturers say their systems can accurately determine gender 85 to 90 percent of the time, while accuracy for the other measures continues to be refined. With hair styles on today’s youth, the system is probably more accurate than I would be.

Demographics, but no individual information

Remember “Minority Report”? Tom Cruise’s character enters a mall where a retinal scanner identify him and greet him by name. Well, it’s a little like that, but people are not identified by name. They’re just categorized by how they look.

Using this technology, a screen might show a truck ad for a group of men but switch to a minivan ad when women and children are spotted in the frame by the hidden cameras.

Anyone concerned with privacy?

Because face tracking might scare people (think “big brother”), manufacturers are hurrying to offer reassurances. When the systems capture an image of a person watching the screen, a computer instantly analyzes it for specified variables. The systems’ manufacturers say that nothing is ever stored and no identifying information is ever associated with the pictures, thus making the system less intrusive than a surveillance camera that records what it sees right now. At least that’s the manufacturer’s take.

How does it work?

In general, a sensor or camera in or near the screen identifies viewers’ faces by analyzing shapes, colors and the movement. The concept is similar to the way consumer cameras now can automatically make sure faces are in focus. Yes, those little boxes that make pictures so good are now coming back to haunt us.

When the system focuses in on a face, it compares shapes and patterns to those that are already identified in a database as male or female, thus allowing the system predict the person’s gender almost immediately.

“The most important features seem to be cheekbones, fullness of lips and the gap between the eyebrows,” said Paolo Prandoni, chief scientific officer of Quividi, a French company that is also developing the technology. Others include Studio IMC Inc. in New York.

The companies say their systems have become very good at determining a viewer’s gender, but age is not so simple. Currently, the software can group age in only the broadest terms – teens, younger to middle-aged adults and seniors. The companies developing this technology acknowledge that determining a person’s ethnicity is more challenging than figuring out his or her gender and age range.

Is It Accurate?

It may never be more accurate than it is now, but we should never say “never”. And anyway, even 70% accuracy is better than what is out there now. Think about it: If you’re advertising housing to empty-nesters, you can choose to have your ad seen in a mall by everyone who passes, or take a shot at targeting the ad to those in your demo. Even if you miss 50%, the other 50% will see your message — and only they will see it.

You have to love the creativity of advertisers. We’re always finding ways to push products, and this new world of technology is only making it more fun — for us.

But as we’re able to target more and more work, consumers are realizing that they’re being taken advantage of in ways that they can’t even follow.

Facebook is a great one.

Did you know that if you are a fan of some company, or belong to a group or cause, those firms can create and place ads on Facebook that will appear to YOUR friends? The kicker is, YOUR picture will be in their ad, as if you’re endorsing them.

Sneaky, eh? I agree.

So here’s how to get yourself out of that jam. It’s seven steps, but they are really easy:

Step 1. Log in to your Facebook Account.
Step 2. Go to Settings in the top right navigation bar.
Step 3. Choose “Privacy Settings” from the pull down menu.
Step 4. Click on “manage” in the Privacy setting choice in the list.
Step 5. Select the “News Feed and Wall”.
Step 6. Pick the “Social Ads” tab at the top.
Step 7. From the drop down menu, choose “no one”.

That’s it. You’re out.

Now we’ll see what tomorrow brings.

According to an article by Stephanie Clifford in the New York Times, “The New York City transit system is adding a new site for advertisements: the interior of subway tunnels.

Starting next spring with the 42nd Street-Times Square shuttle, passengers will see advertising outside the windows as the train travels between stations. The messages will look rather like jumpy 15-second TV ads.

The tunnel advertising is part of an ambitious Metropolitan Transportation Authority plan to convert much of its real estate into advertising space. In addition to the tunnel ads, it will sell space on turnstiles, digital screens inside stations, projections against subway station walls, and panels on the outside of subway cars.

Advertisers are eager for any new way to capture consumers’ attention. The History Channel, which started to advertise on subway panels this month, wanted to get “buzz not only with viewers and consumers of our content, but buzz within the advertising community and buzz with key business partner influentials in this market,” said Chris Moseley, senior vice president for marketing at the channel.

And the authority wants revenue to help it cover its projected $900 million budget shortfall next year.

“In light of the fiscal difficulties that the M.T.A.’s facing, we have set out to basically look under every rock for ways that we can cut costs and raise revenue,” said Jeremy Soffin, a spokesman for the authority.

But some groups say the extension of advertising space is troubling.

“The subways are not a wholly noncommercial site already,” said Robert Weissman, managing director of Commercial Alert, a nonprofit advocacy group in Washington. “But there’s a big difference between signage and traditional billboards, and the new digital media and turnstile wraps and other innovations.”

Mr. Weissman added, “It just contributes to the overwhelming assault on people and their everyday lives that makes it increasingly challenging to escape commercial messaging.”

While the authority has long sold panels in the trains and billboards at the stations to advertisers, it began converting other parts of stations into advertising space only about a decade ago.

CBS Outdoor, which handles ad space in the stations, began selling entire stations to advertisers about 10 years ago, letting them wrap poles and put graphics on the floors.

More recently, it has offered stairs and the full interior of trains to advertisers for a technique known as a “wrap.”

And this year, it is getting even more creative.

“Advertisers, especially in this environment, are looking to do something different and be noticed,” said Jodi Senese, the executive vice president for marketing for CBS Outdoor. “When something is new, clearly there’s an opportunity to make a big splash,” she said.

This week, the company began testing advertising on a large display, almost the size of a movie screen, mounted above a passageway by the 7 train in Times Square.

Because the New York subway runs 24 hours a day, it is difficult to put ads on the far side of subway tracks. Consequently, CBS is considering projecting images across the track. They will be similar to ads that are projected onto station walls, which CBS began about two years ago. There is a projection ad for Asics in Union Square, in the passageway between the N, Q, R and W lines and the Lexington Avenue line, and one for the Navy at Grand Central, in the corridor to the shuttle.

Both the arms of turnstiles and the entire turnstile structures are available to advertisers.

And starting in 2009, CBS will sell advertisers exterior panels — thinner versions of the horizontal advertisements that buses carry — on the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and shuttle trains. These panels are already in place on some 1, 3, 4, 7 and shuttle trains, where the History Channel is the first advertiser to use them. It is promoting its “Cities of the Underworld” series.

The History Channel, owned by A&E Television Networks, also covered the exterior of the Times Square shuttle with advertising, which the transportation authority is considering allowing for other advertisers.

The channel’s media agency, Horizon Media, worked with CBS to persuade the transportation authority to allow the panels and exterior wrap, even creating a miniature model of the shuttle to show authority officials how it would look.

“We’re not just marketing the show in a traditional way, we’re creating an immersive kind of experience,” Ms. Moseley said. The tunnel ads are scheduled to be installed by spring 2009, and will be handled by SideTrack Technologies, a company in Winnipeg, Manitoba. It lines subway tunnels with strips of light-emitting diodes that are window height.

“We have a way of projecting multiple images on the side of a tunnel wall as a train moves from one station to the next station,” said Rob Walker, the president of SideTrack. The company shows about 360 images over a 15-second period and times the display of the images to the speed of a given train.

Mr. Walker compared it to a children’s flip book, where static images in rapid succession give the impression of movement.

“It’s just basic animation, but we can manipulate the images, we can change the ads, so every train that goes by can see a different ad,” he said.

The windows light up as if there were a television screen outside the window. SideTrack installed the system in the Los Angeles and London subways this year, and retailers including Target, Microsoft and Warner Brothers have used it.

An earlier version of the system, which uses printed panels instead of L.E.D. projections, is being used in Boston and San Francisco. Those require that workers go into the tunnels to put up the panels, which makes the ads difficult to install and change.

It will probably cost around $95,000 for a full month of ads in a tunnel, Mr. Walker said, but said that advertisers could book the system for short-term projects.

Mr. Koenigsberg of Horizon said that a prime outdoor billboard usually costs six figures, “so that kind of number doesn’t sound out of whack.”

He said he was interested in the tunnel advertising technology, but would want to ensure that subway riders wanted to see moving ads during their rides.

“The last thing you want to do is have inefficient waste in putting a message in front of someone where they’re not receptive to it,” he said.”

Published October 16, 2008

This is very well done and uses viral marketing techniques to really get this word out. Watch it, then read below.

Meghan Keane writes about J.C. Penney’s now widely watched “doghouse” video in her Wired blog:

If men are from Mars and women are from Venus, J.C. Penney must be pretty glad it picked the right planet to mock for its viral ad campaign this holiday season.

The discount retailer released an ad called The Doghouse three weeks ago that fictionalizes the plight of men who buy the wrong gifts for their significant others. In the ad, a well-intentioned man buys his wife a new dual bag vacuum for Christmas, only to find himself dropped into the doghouse, an underworld prison where men go when they purchase bad presents for the women in their lives.

People love it. The ad has been viewed over 1.7 million times since J.C. Penney uploaded it to BewareOfTheDoghouse.com and YouTube three weeks ago, according to Visible Measures, a video analytics firm. Since then, the 4-1/2 minute video has received 56 placements across 9 different video sites. Over 90 percent of those have been community driven.

“The response has definitely exceeded our expectations,” says Quinton Crenshaw, a spokesperson for J.C. Penney’s. “It’s taken on a life of its own.”

The retailer has focused the majority of this campaign online, with the devoted website, a facebook page and some good old fashioned male mockery. Unlike many traditional ads, the company’s brand does not factor in until the very end of the long video, when it suggests men get out of the doghouse by purchasing diamonds from J.C. Penney.

But with just a slight misjudgment in tone, an online ad can go completely awry.

That’s what happened with a Motrin ad that Johnson and Johnson pulled earlier this month. The drug giant created a short video ad on its website, aimed at mothers who get back pain while carrying their babies. But the ad struck a nerve with a vocal demographic, mommy bloggers, who found the ad condescending and demanded the ad get pulled. They succeeded in short order, with Johnson and Johnson pulling the ad within hours of the criticism.

It’s hard to say why the reactions were different. The Motrin pitch was seen as patronizing, however unwittingly, while the Penney campaign purposelessly tapped into a meme — cluelessness — that many men proudly embrace (or at least acknowledge to the opposite sex), as well as the quick and easy recoveries they make to stay in the game.

“It’s aimed at men looking to purchase jewelry,” says Dave Howlett, senior director of consumer insights for J.D. Power and Associates, “but it actually markets to women, making men the butt of the joke.”

And that strategy appears to have worked.

“I like the J.C. Penney ad because it takes a universal situation — what to get someone you care about — and makes it a joke,” Ochman tells Wired.com. “It could just as easily have been women who bought men ties, or socks for an important occasion instead of a piece of jewelry, which is a gift that signifies a relationship is at a level with a degree of permanence.”

Howlett doesn’t think that it would have worked the same way if it mocked women:

“I come at this from a bit of a sexist approach. I would like to think that men are more self-deprecating than women, but I don’t think it would be as successful if it were making fun of women buying bad gifts.”

The J.C. Penney campaign is not without its detractors. The Doghouse has a smaller, but vocal set of critics. Allison Linn, a blogger for MSNBC, writes:

“We’re not sure who should be more offended by this campaign: Men, who are painted as sexist, clueless dolts, or women, who are shown as mean-spirited and materialistic, willing to mete out menial punishment but swayed by glittery things.”

But as much as some people are complaining about the video’s content, others are forwarding it to their friends. B.L. Ochman wrote in AdAge last week:

The Doghouse came to me from women friends, it came in a direct message on Twitter and more than one male friend sent it with the note, “I know you’ll love this.” And that, in a nutshell, is what makes a viral. One friend saying to another: “I know you’ll get a kick out of this, relate to this, etc.”

“The worst thing that can happen to a viral video is that no one can talk about it,” says Matt Cutler, vice president of marketing and analytics at Visible Measures. “If you look at the history of commercially driven viral videos, there is always some degree of controversy associated with them.”

And, it seems the campaign has officially influenced at least one man for the better. Says Cutler: “For the record, I’m now reconsidering a few of my planned (ahem!) holiday gifts.”

Most people are visual.

Seeing helps explain things in ways text or stock photos can never do. On top of that, some products are inherently difficult to visualize. Most people think of digital renderings when they think of new construction projects like homes, condos, public buildings or hospitals. But they also also work well for any product that is difficult for someone to picture being used — like the cash-dispensing machines in our example below — or even an abstract concept. And the best part is if they are done right, they can also save money.

When you’re selling something that is not only a product, but an experience, there is nothing like video to help a potential customer understand the full picture. In this video for a New York condominium development glass and steel fall from the sky to form an enormous Jenga-like tower. The camera pans around the building as the pieces fall into place with precision around silhouettes of people. The viewer not only sees what the building itself will look like, but the views the residents will have. After you watch this video, scroll down to see an example of how we helped a client better show and explain another rather unique product.

We’ve solved problems like this before.

For example, we created the picture above from scratch. One of our clients made rather large cash dispensing machines for use in banks. We designed and digitally rendered about a half dozen counters and desks around the machines. In some images we even took photographs of real people acting as tellers and customers interacting over the digital desks. The surprising part isn’t that we were able to create something out of nothing (we do that every day) but that the work we did saved our client thousands of dollars over other alternative methods.

comScore recently reported that YouTube is the second largest search engine. YouTube, which is owned by Google, recently launched search-triggered sponsored video ad buys, meaning you can upload videos and purchase relevant terms so your video comes up in the search. If someone clicks on it, you pay. No clicks, no pay.

But before you jump in, you need to know how YouTube search ads work. Here’s a quick explanation from David Berkowitz of Search Insider:

First, you need to promote a video that’s on YouTube. This is designed to drive video views, not traffic to your site right off the bat. You must have uploaded the video through your YouTube account.

Next, you can target videos for words and phrases, and they’re supposed to be relevant to the video, though many ads are running on completely irrelevant terms. Presumably Google is focusing on driving up inventory for now rather than fine-tuning relevance.

Last, ads run on a cost-per-click basis, meaning you only pay when someone clicks on your video.

This is all very different from search advertising. With a typical search engine marketing campaign, not only are direct response metrics critical, but you get penalized for branding messaging. With sponsored videos, you have some flexibility to include branding, and you’re promoting content.

Taking a step back, the consumer mindset is very different on Google and YouTube. On Google, a consumer might be looking to buy a new car. On YouTube, a consumer might be looking for a cool car commercial. Viewing that commercial might improve various branding metrics, but there will be a large percentage of people who just want to watch the commercial that everyone’s talking about.

Google and YouTube also differ in terms of the marketers they attract. Google AdWords opened up to everyone. It got to the point where marketers stopped asking if they should advertise on Google and instead asked how much they could spend there while still reaping a return on ad spending. Google’s not the most important platform for every marketer, but every marketer needs to consider it, and just about everyone can get at least some value out of it.

YouTube Sponsored Video is something else entirely. Yes, more marketers are uploading videos to YouTube, but how many of those videos will benefit from paid promotion? Some marketers can quantify it. Movie studios want to get people to watch their trailers, and they understand the value of it. Bands can use music videos to try to fill up a venue. Marketers can also pay to promote their responses to major issues and crises, such as when JetBlue founder and then CEO David Neeleman published a video apology for a string of lengthy delays. At the time, that segment might have benefited from Sponsored Video. Today, that apology comes up first when I searched for “JetBlue” on YouTube, so JetBlue might want to run an ad to direct searchers to something a little more upbeat.

While more marketers will find ways to use Sponsored Video, it won’t be for everyone. Not everyone’s in the brand-building business online, and not everyone who is will have video assets that are good enough to merit promotion on YouTube. Marketers who try to promote subpar content may find themselves with negative reviews and ratings, so it’s important to be selective.

On the flipside, video ratings are included in the Sponsored Video ad, so great videos will attract even more viewers with their four- and five-star ratings. I searched for James Bond on YouTube the Monday after the latest movie premiere and an ad from Activision appeared promoting a trailer for the video game based on the movie. The game trailer is rated five stars, and clicking the video shows it received 19 ratings, so YouTube’s community validates Activision several times throughout the experience. That’s unique to YouTube, and the advertiser benefits even without a click (in some ways, the advertiser benefits more without clicks since impressions are free).

The first step, as Activision learned, is uploading good content. There’s no official Quality Score, but don’t get lulled into a false sense of complacency. While Google won’t judge you here, your potential customers will.

So what can marketers do? Upload your videos and get people to rate them high (by the way, that’s one of the components of our web marketing program). Videos can be medical procedures, virtual or real video tours of properties, tv spots, construction updates, etc.

Don’t forget to include a trackable web address (preferably to a blog or something that invites a relationship) in the video so people can step further into your world and begin a relationship with you. Remember, branding messages do not need to drive people to sites, although it would be nice. Branding is about getting the message out there so people are more aware of you.

According to new research from Enid Burns at The ClickZ Network, blogs can have more impact on purchase decisions than social networks. Blogs create a conversation and trusted resource that influences purchase decision.

The study, “Harnessing the Power of Blogs,” sponsored research by BuzzLogic and conducted by JupiterResearch, a Forrester Research company, looks at the evolving influence from the reader’s perspective. “What we wanted to do was look at the reader’s side of the coin, look at reader patterns and how people are reading blogs…and drill down into the content impacting other media platforms,” said Valerie Combs, VP of corporate communications at BuzzLogic.

Readership of blogs is on the rise. JupiterResearch noted a 300 percent growth in monthly blog readership in the past four years. Readers look to links and multiple blog sources to extend the conversation: 49 percent of blog readers, defined as someone who reads at least one blog a month, and 71 percent of frequent readers all read more than one blog per session. Multiple blog sources offer more opportunities for consumers to see blog ads. A quarter of readers say they trust ads on a blog, compared to 19 percent who trust ads on social networking sites.

Advertisements on blogs are an opportunity for marketers to reach consumers. The findings said 40 percent of people reading blogs have taken action as a result of viewing an ad on a blog; and 50 percent of frequent blog readers say they have taken action. Of those actions: 17 percent have read product reviews online; 16 percent have sought out more information on a product or service; and 16 percent have visited a manufacturer or retailer Web site.

“More and more publishers are become extremely savvy understanding the game and becoming better at monetizing, which is great for the advertiser as well,” said Combs.

The survey also finds consumers are influenced by blogs at the moment of purchase decision. The channel plays a greater role than social networks, likely because bloggers establish themselves as an authority on a topic, particularly in niche areas, and create a relationship with the consumer.

“One of the things that’s so great about them is the personal, specific information,” said Combs. “Thorough, useful, honest creation, create a level of trust with the reader.”

We at Demi & Cooper just love blogs for our clients (heck, you’re reading our own blog now!). In healthcare, websites simply cannot be written for discussion purposes — they are reference tools designed to get the viewer the information he or she seeks quickly and easily, such as where are you located, how do I find a doctor, what services do you offer, etc. In homebuilding, websites show what the builder offers, where it’s at, and what it cost, plus a whole bunch of other biased info.

But blogs can go deeper into each subject, explaining medical procedures (even using video), new facilities and procedures, etc. in health care. In home building, testimonials go in blogs, as do local events, new hires, new techniques in building, etc.

But the most valuable thing you can do with a blog is tag it (digg, delicious, etc.) and link it so that the topic of the blog will come up in searches. We even Twitter our clients’ blogs and feed it to Facebook, getting the social community behind our work.

So just blog it. It won’t hurt and the results will be very impressive.

At the SHSMD Conference in San Francisco Thursday, September 18, one of the featured speakers was Andrew Keen, a self-described Silicon Valley insider and pundit who sought to expose the “grave consequences of today’s new participatory Web 2.0″ world. According to Mr. Keen, “in today’s self-broadcasting culture, where amateurism is celebrated and anyone with an opinion, however ill-informed, can publish a blog, post a video on YouTube, or change an entry on Wikipedia, the distinction between trained expert and uninformed amateur becomes dangerously blurred.”

Not surprisingly, many in the audience took offense. Nobody argued that misinformation is bad. Rather, the point was that information on the internet should not be limited to only those contributors who are deemed to be “experts”.

Indeed, the internet is a surfeit of information, of which not all is honest, accurate or fair. But the same charges of inaccuracy can also be applied to all our sources of information over the past few centuries. Truth is, information only has as much credibility as the reader is willing to give it.

Now I agree that there are people out there who intentionally write posts or blogs full of misinformation in an attempt to harm a person or organization. That’s too bad. But any reader who accepts just one opinion is looking for trouble — or simply looking for information, no matter how bad, to support a position. Fortunately, in most cases the internet is full of information about virtually every subject. So getting “the other side of the story” is almost always a click away.

Speaking of getting out “the other side of the story”, it is this exact idea that leads me to disagree so strongly with Mr. Keen. While I believe the benefits of these “amateur” blogs and posts very much outweigh the negatives (for instance, when trying to learn more about Alzheimer’s Disease, I found the posts and blogs authored by relatives of the patients to be far more emotionally educational than the clincial information I found that was written by the “experts”. In healthcare, “experts” have to be careful about what they say for fear of lawsuits, whereas amateurs write it as they see it), I also know that the negatives can create many problems for my clients; therefore, we monitor information about our clients and react to it with our own posts and blogs. In essence, we’re presenting the other side of the story whenever we see a negative one inititated. We are our clients’ “online brand manager” and our job is to make sure their names and information are everywhere they need to be.

What’s more, we think that the internet’s role as an information source can be used to our advantage for our clients by allowing us to put up an incredible amount of positive information covering any topic we want. By uploading videos, podcasts and photos, and generating blogs and posts, we can literally dominate a topic for our client’s benefit.

Are we harming the world as Mr. Keen sees it? Hardly. The participatory information game is on, and it’s been active now for nearly a decade. All we’re doing is playing the game to our client’s advantage using the same messages we run for them in other traditional media.

And I can tell you this: our clients are winning.

A study released on September 3, 2008 by SeeSaw Networks, conducted by OTX, to better understand how digital out-of-home media can be used to reach mobile consumers, shows that digital signage advertising engages people, has high awareness, and is a compelling media that advertisers can use to effectively reach people with their message.

Importantly, says the report, digital signage advertising has stopping power. Sixty-three percent of adults say that it catches their attention, which is the highest level reported across all media surveyed, including TV, the Internet, billboards, magazines, newspapers, radio, and mobile phone advertising.

The study explores various U.S. consumer segments, both male and female, between the ages of 13 and 55, representing the segment life patterns of Affluents, Alpha Moms, Avid Movie Goers, Business Professionals, College Students, Families On-the-Go, Hispanic Families, Mobile Millennials, Nightlifers, Older Affluents, Teens, and Young Urban Professionals, to see how their life patterns intersect with digital signage touchpoints. Key findings include important metrics such as these:

On average, the general population recalled having seen digital signage in six different types of locations during the previous week. College-age people (18- to 24- year-olds) reported seeing it even more frequently in eight different types of locations in a week.

Forty-four percent of adults said that they paid some or a lot of attention to digital signage advertising, which places this media ahead of billboards, Internet, and mobile phones.

Among those who have seen advertisements on different kinds of media over the past 12 months, people found digital signage advertising to be the most unique.

Survey respondents who had seen advertisements over the past year found those on digital signage to be the most interesting.

Digital advertising can also be entertaining and engaging, says the report. People say that digital signage rates nearly as high as TV in entertainment value.

The report posits that it’s an optimal situation when people are entertained and interested in advertisements, but also find them to be believable.

While all advertising seeks to increase demand for a product or service, informative advertising provides people with information that influences their decisions.

People report that they find digital signage advertising less annoying than nearly all other media. Acceptance is a critical component of effective media, concludes the report.

The study report concludes that “…no matter what a person is doing… they notice digital signage advertising.”

Everyone is feeling the crunch the economic slowdown these days. But as with everything, there’s always two sides to the story. An economic crunch for some is a boom for others. You might expect places like Big Lots (which posted an 11% increase in profits on Tuesday) and Dollar Tree (which posted a 15% profit yesterday) to do well. But there are all kinds of examples of companies that are taking advantage of a slow economy. Take J.M. Smucker for example, which had a 27% rise in first quarter sales due to more people brown bagging PB&J. Hormel also exceeded expectations with sales rising 8% in the first quarter of this year to $1.62 billion, partly driven by a rise in Spam sales. But were those increases due only to rising food and fuel costs? Or could it be something else? Hormel and Smuckers both realized they have something to offer in a slowing economy. That is why they both increased their ad expenditures — which played a key role in boosting their profits.

Okay, but I make _________, not canned ham or PB&J
It isn’t just the discount brands that are making profits. Last month Volkswagen, Audi, Honda, Toyota, Fiat and Peugeot Citroën, Europe’s second-largest carmaker all posted profits. Buckingham Research Group analyst Barbara Wyckoff raised her profit per share estimate for the second quarter for Tiffany & Co. by 6 cents to 54 cents, expecting strong sales at U.S. locations from tourists. Consumers are spending, they are just being more careful with their money.

The key is to keep communicating with your customers and potential customers. Yesterday, the Oconaluftee Indian Village in Cherokee North Carolina posted a sales increase of 5.9%. Revenues are up across the board due to the fact that Cherokee recognized that this was an important time to not cut back on advertising. “Our growth is due in part to the trend toward more localized travel, combined with successful summer sales promotions and effective advertising,” said Mary Jane Ferguson with the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. Finding ways to market your products within the current economic environment may be the key to helping your company thrive. The point is, you can’t just sit there and wait for it to get better. Find a way to differentiate yourself, then advertise it to the market.