The Coming Death of Audio Cassette

"The cassette may have hissed, been prone to wow and flutter, and often ended its life chewed in a tape deck, but it ruled for four decades before MP3s and downloads.
However, the cassette's reign now seems to be over."
-- BBC

Earlier:
The End Of Analog Audio Reels
Who's Killing Whom

Rethinking TV Design

"Gone forever is the complacent view that consumers should have to accept mass produced gray boxes in the center of their living rooms, bedrooms and offices. We believe this landmark launch will change the TV market in the United States forever," says a VP if sales at Hannspree, a company that just had launched a line of TV sets that look like anything but TV sets.
-- DesignTechnica

Alien Crop Circles Advertising

Become an alien and spread your ads all over the unspecting farmers' fields. Pictured above is a production by the CircleMakers for Nike in Italy. Here's another circle maker called Mount Baldy, and an oldish article in Wired.

Cell Phones Switch To Affect Media Consumption

"The number of people who use cell phones as their exclusive or primary telecommunications device is growing rapidly, and this raises important questions about their media consumption patterns--especially for mobile media such as radio, implies the new Arbitron study. The findings are important, because many believe that cell phone-only individuals are growing rapidly--and their behavior is beginning to influence how they use other media, as well as how marketing and media researchers measure them. Among other things, federal law prohibits market researchers from utilizing so-called random digit dialing phone survey techniques for mobile phones, a popular method of marketing research."
-- Media Post

"Face Off" Chat Bot

More robotic goodness fit for advertising; this doll (left, I guess) has a screen for face that displays any likeness you care to upload into it. Has a built-in projector, a DVD drive, and was developed in Japan under the name "Chatty".
-- Yahoo via BoingBoing

More Advertising Robots
Advertising Robots, Part III
Advertising Robots, Part II
Advertising Robots

Yahoo Tests Behaviour-Targeted Text Ads

"Yahoo has begun testing a program to show text listings on Web pages based on user behavior. In a pilot program with Revenue Science, a Bellevue, Wash., behavioral-targeting company, Yahoo's cost-per-click text ads are shown on Web pages using data collected by Revenue Science. The test comes weeks before Yahoo is expected to release its own AdSense-like contextual advertising network."
-- AdWeek

Ads On Sand

Her love for Snapple may be written in sand, but its impact is no less stronger. Beach 'n' Billboard has upgraded the municipal beach cleaning machines to print what can be world's largest billboards without a single drop of ink.

Teaching Old TV New Tricks

From the advertising festival in Cannes, USA Today writes about the recognition given to the new uses of the old media. "Renault Nissan Deutschland took the Grand Prix in Direct Marketing with two German TV ads — one happy, one sad — that ran at the same time on two different channels. Viewers were asked to click back and forth with their remotes, then were directed to a Web site to the story's ending. Clorox won a Media Lion for an ad stunt in Colombia that involved temporarily zapping the color from a TV show. When the color reappeared, a bottle of Clorox Bleach for Colors flashed. "All of a sudden, the passive medium of TV becomes interactive," says Joel Sobelson, chief creative officer of ad's agency, Wunderman, New York.

Wired Writes on Neuromarketing

Wired writes on emerging mind control ad technology that lots of people are dismissing as bogus science (a recent conference on neuromarketing had to be canceled due to lack of interest): "Scientists are scanning brain activity in the hopes of catching sight of the physical mechanisms that determine whether you prefer Coke over Pepsi. The nascent research, known as "neuromarketing," could one day lead to new advertising strategies that directly stimulate hard-wired mental reflexes rather than appealing to fuzzy consumer attitudes." It's interesting that CalTech is already in the game.

Study Predicts Rise Of Out-Of-Home Media

"In less than five years, consumers will be spending $60 billion annually on DVR-like devices, satellite radio, iPods and mobile technology driving personalized media outside of the home. One-fifth of all consumer spending will be on new content access and distribution technologies now in their early stages of growth, according to Bernstein Research."
-- Hollywood Reporter