IAR Bits and Bytes

Dow Jones Launches Ad Push for Web News Service


Dow Jones said on Wednesday it would roll out a print and interactive ad campaign in support of its NewsPlus service, a new Web version of its Dow Jones News Service.


The campaign is aimed at the publisher’s core customers: busy financial industry professionals. Dow Jones is rolling out NewsPlus as a Web-based companion version of its News Service, which carries real-time financial news. The News Service is carried by a variety of market data services, including Reuters, Bloomberg and Thomson Financial.

The Web version is designed to make life easier for its 280,000 subscribers by bringing them information and news in a convenient, navigable format using XML. On the non-Web News Service, stories are categorized by the codes assigned to them by editors, a system which makes it necessary for users to remember a vast number of codes to retrieve the information they need.


“Our customers like our news, but they tell us they need help managing information overload,” said Paul Ingrassia, Dow Jones Newswires’ president.


The print ads, designed by Baltimore-based agency Trahan, Burden and Charles, show a computer screen with sticky notes carrying ID codes plastered all over it. The ad includes the tagline, “Forget the Codes. Get the News. Focus on Your Clients.” The ads include the URL for Dow Jones’ showcase site for NewsPlus, getdjnewsplus.com. The ads will run in Dow Jones print publications, including Barron’s and The Wall Street Journal.


The interactive portion of the campaign running on the site includes a Flash tour of NewsPlus’ features. Dow Jones will send out an e-mail version of the tour to customers and prospects. Edgewater, N.J.-based agency Multimedia Solutions designed the e-mail portion of the campaign.



Register.com Offers Paid Inclusion Service


Register.com announced on Wednesday a partnership with Position Technologies to offer customers a suite of search submission services.


With the Direct Submit service, Register.com customers can submit paid inclusion subscriptions to Inktomi, FAST and Ask Jeeves. Through those three paid inclusion engines distribution partners, submitted Web pages can appear on a number of search engines, including MSN. In paid inclusion, customers pay to have their site pages crawled by a search engine.


The move is the registrar’s latest to diversify its business from site registration into marketing services, hoping to tap into the hot search sector with Position’s offering of multiple paid inclusion subscriptions.


Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.


Direct Submit is another add-on service for Register.com, which in January announced it would offer e-mail marketing services through a partnership with Roving Software. In the past year, as the market for domains has slowed, Register.com has offered a broader array of add-on services, including Web site building tools and e-mail services.



Coke Continues SMS Ad Push in China


Following up on a successful short messaging service (SMS) campaign this summer, Coca-Cola said its latest wireless promotion in China was a resounding success.


The SMS contest ran in Shanghai, China’s second-largest city after Beijing. Customers were invited to interact with Coke’s television advertisement for the launch of its new lemon-flavored Coke Light. The TV spot included a scroll line that asked viewers to type “CL” and send it to 8558 through SMS for a chance to win a mobile phone. Contestants were then asked five questions about the TV spot, such as the number of girls in the commercial and whether Coke Light comes in bottles and cans.


“The campaign indicated that over 80 percent of consumers who attempted to answer the five questions actually completed all five questions, thus showing a high degree of brand involvement and interaction,” said Syed Mahmood, Coke’s regional marketing director.


Mobile2Win, which ran the SMS campaign, said it generated 200,000 messages over its 30 days. The agency ran a similar contest the beverage giant ran across China over the summer. In that promotion, “Coke Cool Summer,” consumers were invited to guess the daily high temperature in Beijing via SMS. Coke said 4 million messages were exchanged during that contest’s 35 days.


Coke also ran a leaflet campaign for the contest using a different SMS code, allowing it to later compare each campaign’s effectiveness.

Get the Free Newsletter!

Subscribe to our newsletter.

Subscribe to Daily Tech Insider for top news, trends & analysis

News Around the Web