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Obama's sales pitch is coming - and you're paying for it. The Obama administration has inked an $8 million public relations contract to promote the health insurance exchange, which Sen. Max Baucus calls "the single most important provision of the ACA." According to an HHS official, PR firm Weber Shandwick will use "a range of communications tactics, with a emphasis on paid media and digital outreach" to raise public awareness of the exchanges. Politico says they'll be targeting "the young and healthy" for enrollment. HHS spent even more last year. In 2012, HHS signed a $3.1 million contract with the...

'Mad Men' premiere: Mr. Leggs: 'It's nice to have a girl around the house.' A picture says 1,000 words, right? Well, these ads tell us everything we need to know about "Mad Men"-era sexism. In this ad for Mr. Leggs dress pants, a woman's head is attached to a tiger-skin rug. (Tiger lady, get it?) A man, dressed as though he works for Don Draper himself, triumphantly places his shoe on the woman's head. The headline? "It's nice to have a girl around the house." Oh, and the copy? Oh my: "Though she was a tiger lady, our hero didn’t...

Crowdfunding for NASA – in a round about way. Unknown to most people, NASA is barred from purchasing advertising. Recently a campaign on Indiegogo was launched to purchase a trailer to run prior to the next Star Trek film which will soon be in theaters across the country. As quoted from the campaign; "When the Space Shuttle landed for the last time, many Americans thought NASA was closed for good. Nothing could be further from the truth. Right now, men and women from the space program are designing and building next generation space vehicles to go to new destinations in...

First, if you follow the link, you'll find that this does not appear to be an April Fools prank. Nuance on Monday launched Voice Ads, a voice enabled ad platform that allows a consumer to talk to brands. Companies get a new monetization vehicle and consumers presumably will get a say in brand advertising delivery. snip"Nuance, which is using its voice technology in mobile, health and auto applications, is obviously hoping to get on the ad gravy train. Voice Ads promise to give marketers an avenue "to deepen the relationship with their consumers." The theory is that you'll chat with...

CNN on Sunday aggressively covered the breaking news of the verdict in the Steubenville rape case. Star football players Trent Mays, 17, and Ma’lik Richmond, 16, were found guilty of raping a 16-year-old girl. Propelled by social media and mainstream media, the Steubenville case has long held a high profile. The scrutiny that comes with its profile descended on CNN. In repeated segments yesterday, CNN featured reports from reporter Poppy Harlow, who was in Ohio for the verdict. Here’s the transcript of some of the coverage at the 11 a.m. hour: snip POPPY HARLOW, CNN CORRESPONDENT: "I’ve never experienced anything...

Mozilla has a long running interest in fostering greater transparency, trust and accountability related to privacy and the many cookie-based practices we see today. fx nightly v22.0a1 privacy tabOn Friday, Mozilla released a Firefox patch into its “Nightly” channel that changes how cookies from third party companies function. Users of this build of Firefox must directly interact with a site or company for a cookie to be installed on their machine. The patch also provides an additional control setting under the “Privacy” tab in Firefox’s Preferences menu (see image). Many years of observing Safari’s approach to third party cookies, a...

The New York Times Company, owners of the Boston Globe newspaper, is once again trying to find someone to take the struggling Massachusetts newspaper off its hands. The Times previously tried to sell the Globe in 2009 but canceled the sale process after it received concessions from is unions (love the irony there). More from Reuters: The sale is expected to come at a big loss. Ken Doctor, an analyst with Outsell Research, estimated that the Globe could fetch about $150 million. The New York Times paid $1.1 billion for the newspaper in 1993. The New York Times is putting...

SNL Sketch About 'The One Black Guy In Every Commercial' Is Uncomfortably Close To The Truth Jim EdwardsFeb. 12, 2013, 9:25 AMThis weekend, Saturday Night Live regular Kenan Thompson did a Weekend Update bit as "Corey," "the one black guy in every commercial." Corey's life consists playing drums at Venice Beach, DJing, and partying with "Hispanic girls with bangs and thrift-store outfits, and white guys who dance while wearing fedoras!" He also notes, "This year I was in 14 commercials and I was also the one black guy in a college brochure!" Jamison Reeves / YouTube Jamison Reeves If any...

Time Warner's Time Inc. will lay off up to 700 staffers out of just under 8,000 total as the publisher's new chief struggles to transform famous titles and massive market share into a digital profit center. The staff cuts will come sometime in the first quarter, said a person familiar with the company's plans, and will be across the board -- not just focused on editorial, where staffing has already been hard hit. [Snip] Time Inc. revenue fell 6% for the nine months ended in September to $2.5 billion. Profit dropped 14% to $220 million. During that period, it dominated...

WASHINGTON — The surprise sweep for marriage equality efforts at the polls in 2012 came after a dramatic shift in the television ads their backers ran — a change that came about after a year-long research effort to crack the code of previously successful ads run by marriage equality opponents that focused on "gay marriage" being taught in schools.Among the key changes: A shift away from talk of "rights" to a focus on committed relationships; a decision to address "values" directly as being learned at home; and an attempt to give voters "permission" to change their minds, according to...

... Yet despite the onslaught, Obama has retained an overall advertising advantage over Romney and Republican groups. Under federal law, television stations must offer presidential campaigns a discounted price — it's known as the lowest unit rate — to run their spots in the two months leading up to Election Day. Independent political groups aren't eligible for the discount, so their ads cost as much to run as do commercials for products like Pepsi or Tide. The Obama team has taken full advantage of the lower ad rates available to them, having booked their fall advertising last July and August...

Two recent ads illustrate the great cultural divide in this nation and which parties and presidential candidates represent these competing worldviews. In the handling of the economy and national security, President Obama has shown he's not capable of being the adult in the room. After four years of perpetual campaigning and cheerleading for his pet projects, he still isn't prepared to deal soberly with the consequences of his ideological indulgences. His community organizing fantasy has been to remake America in his more socialistic image, and in the process, he's taken the nation dangerously close to financial ruin. Yet like the...

In an off the record conversation with the Des Moines Register that made it on to the record, Barack Obama stated that, “Should I win a second term, a big reason I will win a second term is because the Republican nominee and the Republican Party have so alienated the fastest-growing demographic group in the country, the Latino community.” Obama, did not mention, however, what he and the Democrats will offer to the Hispanic community. To see what he thinks will animate this demographic, it is worth looking at his Spanish language ads. In September he released an ad featuring...

OK, I don't watch a lot of regular network programming. Here's what I watch: Major Legue Baseball College and NFL Football FoxNews Occasional reruns of Frasier, which appear on the Hallmark Channel I believe. My wife, however, watches various things on Bravo like those insipid Real Housewife shows, Top Chef, etc. (Yes, I know...) and Lifetime Channel. Neither of us have seen a SINGLE Romney ad in weeks. Not one. I have seen dozens of Obama ads, and they appear to be generating new ones all the time. The most recent, today, was a rebuttal to the debate featuring Andrea...

When you log off your computer or smartphone then get into your car and drive or walk down the street, you will no longer be "off" of the Internet. It will follow you (thanks to LED technology)... There are several companies that will benefit from this quantum leap in an old industry. I own a position in the one with the low market cap of $300+ million, global leader in what is projected to be an $80 Billion industry. Daktronics (DAKT) With special dividends, it has been yielding approx 6%. LAMR & CCO are also beneficiaries.

Below, via Mark J. Perry and Bill Gross, is a chart we've run before. It shows inflation-adjusted newspaper advertising revenue over the past 60 years. Thanks to the precipitous decline in the last ~7 years, the industry is now back to where we it was in 1950. And it's only slightly better off when you factor in online revenue. Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/newspaper-advertising-collapse-2012-9#ixzz26jSCZVzI

So much for silence from telemarketers at the cherished dinner hour, or any other hour of the day. Complaints to the government are up sharply about unwanted phone solicitations, raising questions about how well the federal "do-not-call" registry is working. The biggest category of complaint: those annoying prerecorded pitches called robocalls that hawk everything from lower credit card interest rates to new windows for your home. Robert Madison, 43, of Shawnee, Kan., says he gets automated calls almost daily from "Ann, with credit services," offering to lower his interest rates. "I am completely fed up," Madison said in an interview....

A seemingly harmless ad campaign has landed the popular soft drink in hot water with Christian fundamentalists who don't believe we came from apes The image: Dr Pepper found itself in the midst of a theological debate this week, when it posted an ad called "Evolution of Flavor" on its Facebook page (see the offending graphic below). The ad, which depicts an ape completing its evolution into man upon discovering a can of Dr Pepper, has angered Christians who don't believe in the theory posited by Charles Darwin 150 years ago

The New York Times Company, which has been shedding assets and focusing on its core newspaper and Web site, is preparing to sell another of its properties. The company has a letter of intent to sell the About Group, the unit that includes the About.com online resource guide, to Answers.com, a question-and-answer site, for $270 million, a person familiar with the deal said on Wednesday. It is not clear when the deal will close because financing has not yet been secured. When the Times Company originally purchased About.com in 2005 for just over $400 million, analysts questioned how compatible About.com...

Advertising revenue continues to sink at the New York Times Company, which reported a second-quarter net loss of $88.1 million today. But a glimmer of hope can be seen in circulation revenue, which has actually gone up through print subscription price increases and the online paywall. At the company's big three papers — the Times, International Herald Tribune, and Boston Globe — print and digital ad dollars dipped 6.6 percent to $220 million, while circulation revenue was up 8.3 percent to $233 million. The historical rebalancing, which occurred at the News Media Group for the first time in Q1, may...