Chief Marketer Staff

• Office Depot SVP Says “Start Your Engines”

  “You can’t win today’s race with yesterday’s car.” Formula One racing great Emerson Fittapaldi said it, and Monica Luechtefeld, executive vice president for strategy and development at Office Depot, repeated it in her keynote speech at the Chicago Association of Direct Marketing’s DM Days & Expo 2005.

• Agencies

  The Marriage of Sales and Marketing

  What is a lead? The only people in b-to-b marketing who know that answer may be salespeople. At least that’s the way it seems to John Coe, of the Sales & Marketing Institute.

• Embattled Broadcast Medium Seeks a Savior

  Elvis Costello once sang, “Radio is our sound salvation.” Now it turns out his ironic tone may have hit just the right note: The question today is, Who will save radio?

• Cable Network Addresses Asian Americans

  Backed by the powerful Comcast Corp., a new cable network aimed at Asian American viewers will try to tap into what the U.S. Census estimates is $363 billion in spending power.

• Recognizing Reader Engagement

  I always look for “Adweek'”s Hot List of Magazines, but the March 14 lead really caught my attention. After all these years of wanting to measure reader engagement — i.e, getting beyond PIB ad pages and total audience — and wishing for a magazine-to-magazine ranking,

• Auto Marketer Says, “Clean Up Your Clutter”

  Clutter is bad enough in closets, but it could be downright destructive for automobile marketers who are buying ads on local television stations, where car spots tend to stack up in the last two weeks of the month, according to a top Toyota sales executive.

• Nielsen Outlines ’05 Monitoring Plans

  Talk may be cheap, but building a device that can give more-accurate information on just who is watching their television by detecting people’s voices would be worth a lot to marketers.

• Promoting “Passion Categories”

  Victoria Lowell believes that selling lipstick is a lot like promoting television shows about dogs, diseases, or dieting.

• USPS Rate Proposal Is ‘Good News’ to Mailers

  Mailer groups welcomed the relatively small proposed postage increase recommended by the U.S. Postal Service but are girding for higher rates in as little as two years if Congress doesn’t enact postal reform legislation this year.

• USPS Files for 5.4% Rate Hike

  The current postal rate case calling for a 5.4% across the board rate increase will likely be settled, predicted Gene Del Polito, president of the Association for Postal Commerce.