Linktopia

Linktopia time (with the help of Judge Page) includes stops at Brandweek.com to get a look at book advertising, and then over to Adage.com for a review of some interesting numbers assembled by the ARF, and finally a stop at culture-buzz.com on how McDonald’s continues to succeed with creating  fun. 

Book marketing and advertising and how it can get better. That’s really what we spend a good portion of time being concerned with at BB&H. Brandweek has an interesting article that might help provide some perspective as you try to figure out your place in this crazy world.  

...About $3.5 million was spent advertising Koontz’s various properties over the last two years, per  the Nielsen Co.

 About $6.1 million was spent advertising Pattersons books in the last two years. But where Bantam funds the Koontz promotions, much of the money behind Patterson is the author's, not Hachette Book Group's. Patterson spends between $500,000 and north of $1 million per book, said Steve Bowen, president of James Patterson Entertainment in New York and Patterson's longtime business partner. “This is his money. He's writing these checks at his kitchen table.”

The split in duties came because publishers are better at publishing than they are marketing, Cohen says, especially in Patterson’s case.

Similarly, Harlequin's Brenda Jackson, who writes African-American romances, now makes a video for each book she writes. She's written 56 books, and each one sells about 100,000 copies, Jackson says.

So far, book publishing advertising is a small slice—just $144 million—of the entertainment and amusement category, whose ad outlay Nielsen pegged at $11.7 billion in 2008...

Continue reading here.

Good article at Ad Age on some of the things we think we know that just might not be so right after all.

Store redesigns and other factors that make it easier and faster to shop actually increase purchases, contrary to the old strategy that making things hard to find boosts sales by making people spend more time in the store.

Keep reading for other things that should seem obvious here.

 Finally, in London McDonald’s shows how to have some fun with billboards.  See just what they are up to here.