Chief Marketer Staff

• Digital

  Trademark Keyword Suit against Google Dismissed

  A federal judge late Thursday dismissed a suit brought by a company that claimed Google was violating the law by selling its trademarked name as a keyword used to deliver competitors’ pay-per-click ads in search results.

• Digital

  Search Users Choosing the Local Option: comScore

  Use of local online search in the U.S. increased about 43% from July 2005 to the same month this year, according to a survey by comScore Media Metrix.

• Agencies

  Six Indicted for E-Greeting Phishing Scams

  Six men have been charged with participation in an Internet phishing scam that used e-mail and phony Internet greeting cards to steal credit card numbers, bank account numbers and other personal information from AOL users, the U.S. Department of Justice announced last week.

• Agencies

  Evolving Loyalty: How to Stay Current

  Best Buy’s recent announcement to drop its $9.99 loyalty program membership fee, one of the worst-kept secrets in the industry for the past six months, is a timely example of a key element of loyalty program management:

• Jingle Bells, the Holidays Sell: PR Opportunities for the Upcoming Holiday Season

  Starting in July and continuing through January is the “holiday season” in public relations and promotions. With many religions observing some major holiday in the winter months–and of course the whacky world of advertising hammering home that consumers have to buy, buy, buy

• The Benefits of Making the List

  If applying to be on a list of companies compiled by a respected print or online publication isn’t in your marketing plan, it should be

• Agencies

  Customer Capacity: Understanding the Upside

  Broadly defined, customer capacity is the total amount of a category that a customer consumes. In both business-to-business and business-to-consumer it includes how much a customer buys from us and from our competitors

• Digital

  A Canvas Is a Canvas

  Lately I have been putting a lot of thought toward the next great marketing canvas. Sometime after my third Diet Coke I figured out that no matter what the next great canvas is, it will tragically become a commodity

• Agencies

  Loose Cannon: What Comes Between Me and My Calvins? Data Security!

  During the past two years, data aggregators, credit card processors and consumer-facing firms have lost, compromised or sold to no-goodniks roughly 98 million private records, according to The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse.

  Direct marketers, the means to data security are in your sales files. I propose a new system that will bring direct response marketing front-and-center to the national information security discourse

• Agencies

  Putting Kids to the Test

  This summer OfficeMax used reality television, teen-idol charisma and online video to connect with kids and in the process boost Web traffic and in-store